The forum and chat room duality of online discussion websites

I tend to associate forums (aka message boards) and chat rooms with the early days of the internet (i.e. late 1990s and early 2000s) but they still exist in some form today! Meanwhile, social media, a hybrid, has largely taken over the internet but might revert to one of the two older forms of online discussion: I've noticed a cycling between "forum" and "chat room" in online discussion ecosystems, depending on the direction of its user base!

Forum

Online, a forum (in the abstract) refers to a website (or part of website) that:

• lets users post "topics" (also known as "threads")
  • other users, including the "original poster" can then respond to the topic
  • forum users frown upon someone going "off topic"
  • discussions usually follow a very structured style
    • lively topics appear at the top of a board ("last updated" topic)
    • dead topics slowly sink to the bottom because they have no new replies
• a place where discussions can die instantly (no replies), last a little while (on the order of days) or persist for several years
  • discussions within a topic can happen so fast that they resemble a chat room
  • a lack of "enforcement" of rules can make the thread (and forum) devolve into an environment similar to a chat room

Chat room

So, as we might all know, a chat room refers to a website (or part of website) that:

• lets users post short messages, often a few words
  • the messages appear in an unstructured format
  • other users usually reply to a message by "mentioning" the user
  • users can post about anything they want in a message - randomness encouraged
  • discussions mutate instantly
• can become forums with neatly defined threads
  • personalities begin to enforce reply styles however they can
  • chat rooms with small memberships might have a mutually-agreed upon structure to keep conversations organized

Social media

Social media somehow falls in between the two; a confused blend between a forum (a post that has replies) and a chat room (a constant stream of everyone all talking at once)!

Reddit, for example, looks like a forum but some sections ("subreddits") can resemble "chat rooms but with threaded replies"! Threads in subreddits can sink to the bottom very quickly if users continue making new topics...

On another note, X (formerly Twitter) can look like a chat room, with its feed of posts made by those to whom we have subscribed (i.e. the "Following" feed) resembling a forum:

• each post can act like a topic
  • topics might even have full-fledged multi-paragraph replies
  • discussions within the post can last weeks and even months

So...

Most forums will remain forums; most chat rooms will remain chat rooms! Some forums can devolve into chat rooms, while chat rooms can become forums ... it all depends on the clientele!

• a community in which its members:
  • crave structure will become a forum
  • despise structure will devolve into a chat room

The takeaway: we often use words to describe phenomena that correspond more closely to amorphous spectra than discrete well-defined objects 😎