In my opinion Facebook, and other social media services, have been the death of forums.

I never visit other forums unless I'm doing a search and the results take me there. Even then I don't log in and never post on the forum. I'm just there for the information and then gone once I have that information. Often I find the information I need is incomplete or wrong, so the nature is to quickly move along until I do find the answer. I know I'm part of the problem.

To stop xjtalk.com from being used in this manner I turned off access to anyone that wasn't logged in. Doesn't mean their going to post, probably won't, but still it makes me feel better.

With A.I. getting better and better we were getting scores of new users on the site only to have posts for either nefarious posts to infect or to improve the SEO of another site. Blame Google formulas for this. So then I turned off the ability for people to create an account. Now they have to send the webmaster an email, and receive information on how to fill out a form. Once the form is filled out I manually create the account and send them the information.

As you can imagine we don't get a lot of requests due to the inconvenience.

I do think that forums could have survived and competed with social media if the folks that programmed the forum software had embraced the social media trend years ago, and modified their software to fit better what people wanted.

Ever try to search social media for information? You can't that's why people still go to forums for information, but they post fixes on facebook, or do a youtube video for it. Hell youtube will even pay you.