I've noticed a precipitous drop in traffic lately in ALL the forums I read regularly--not just technical forums, but also forums on all the other topics I'm interested in.
One possibility is that the drop is related to the holidays. But that aside, i think long-term we are seeing big changes in the way people use the Internet. It seems like stand-alone, single-topic forums in general are losing popularity, as more and more forums move to places like Facebook--where a person can join a lot f different communities with a lot of different subjects in one place using one logon.
So I suspect that what we're experiencing right now is something like what old dial-up BBS systems started experiencing in the early 1990s...changes in the way people use their computers left most of those systems behind.
What does that mean to FTM? It means that if we're still going to be around five years from now, we're going to have to change. How we change, though, is something I'm not sure of.
