Minecraft Forums

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i recently played my longest playthrough yet in a friend's server >:) i made high quality pixel arts (in survival!!) as well.



also other things. because we're silly. (btw, this is post #7000?? what a neat milestone that will be forgotten almost instantly.)

imagine not using windows

you can still own up to the 3 hardcore dark moon mod fans by making a gooigi skin.

happy to announce zammy has won the thread in my own timezone and her own as well!



nobody was supposed to win in the first place but life comes at u fast

guys i heard microsoft bought minecraft, is this game gonna die now?

i loved playing the multiplayer classic servers on minecraft.net in 2012 when those were still a thing lmao
current versions are cool too, it's way more accessible to kids n stuff now

Quote from Kurohakas3»

https://discord.gg/GHhdVY

yall need to get on appleeater's discord server

Also the bug that let you follow yourself still exists.

I first came across it in 2015.

nice invalid invite lol

man it's still so weird to me that this place is getting archived after a couple days

forum boomer time

public alpha server where we communicate with signs

Boku no kanojo wa Girisha shinwa no ikimono!?

My girlfriend is a creature from Greek mythology!?

This is a far broader and probably difficult thing to answer than it might seem.

Discord is likely far from the key reason these forums aren't as active. Rather, it's a symptom of a broader cause, but not the cause itself.

Some history rambling for some context:

I was around on the web pretty actively in the 2000s, probably when forums where at their height. That was the age of Windows XP, Myspace, forums, and messenger clients (and maybe the final days of stuff like geocities and "personal websites"). Youtube was still a mere concept, and video streaming for movies and shows was a decade off or more. Anyone else who around on the internet back then will be able to attest that both tech and the web was different. Forums were one of the best ways to centralize back then (and even going back further, they were with "BBS"). "Social media" as we know it today wasn't yet in place. You didn't make Discord servers back then. You went to Invisionfree or phpBB, or maybe later MyBB, or something like that and made your own free forum. Or you searched the web for one on a subject you liked and joined one of those communities (maybe it was art and it had a whole website like in the case of devaiantart, or maybe it was a forum and you joined that). And then you loaded up your messenger client of choice and it ran in your tray/as a sidebar and you chatted with people on your friend list. AOL, Yahoo, or MSN/Windows Messenger. But for centralizing on a larger scale, forums were the big way to go. Like most things, that didn't last forever. I noticed even by the late 2000s or early 2010s (well before this forum or even Minecraft existed), that many forums (some of them large ones, even) were losing their steam, but through the 2010s it really became apparent.

There's a few key things that happened in this time. The web population blew up (no longer was it only well off middle class in first world nations or better that had PCs and internet access, as the barrier of entry became lower), and importantly with that, a shift occurred where the majority of it was trending towards mobile users, not PC users (which similarly had trended away from desktop users and more towards laptop users). Back in the early/mid 2000s, you'd most likely get online at a stationary desktop using dial up, or early cable/DSL if you were lucky. Now a mobile computer and the web was in the palm of your hand with wireless access and could be taken with you with ease. I hope I don't have to explain the obvious here, but the way people compute and use the web differs greatly in those two scenarios.

I cannot overstate that last point; the mobile shift was a major thing that had huge impacts on how the web changed, and how people used it. Now, people would check the web maybe more frequently, but in shorter, less concentrated sessions. Typing up lengthy posts on a forum you needed yet another unique account for wasn't an attractive idea for most of these mobile users (things like "sign in with your Google/Facebook/other account" grew big in this time). Starting to see why Discord rose, even though it's basically just just the chat rooms of old with new features? It works perfect for a large part of the modern web population. It wasn't Discord ITSELF that did anything. It was a larger cause (that cause being the tech/mobile/web shift), and Discord was a symptom OF that larger cause rather.

Forums still have a place, but they're not the big thing they used to be.

Let's keep in mind, Minecraft is also a bit over a decade old (I presume the forums are too), and not all things grow continually. Games that get updated that long, and other "live service" games are still (relatively) new, at least outside the MMO sphere. Another very big game in this space in coincidentally the same time span as Minecraft, League of Legends, closed its old forums, and then it's "new forums" (the boards) as well, many years ago now. It puts into perspective both how "well" these forums have done, but also how much it takes to keep a forum active in the modern web age. It wasn't going to grow forever. In strict terms, something is either growing, or dying. There's these harsh reality things in life called "saturation points" and these forums probably long ago reached theirs. Obviously, Minecraft sales have continued well, but those long ago shifted towards console, mobile, and bedrock versions, not the original Java version. And while this is only speculation, I'd make a wager that the majority of the community these days is more casual and less willing to interact at a high level on a forum in 2023, versus the more "hardcore" or "dedicated" or "PC enthused" or whatever you'd call it community from back then. What spurred the forums back then was the dedicated part of it during its huge blow up phase. That sort of projection was NEVER going to last indefinitely.

It's probably not helping that the old official Mojang and/or Minecraft website used to have a link here (I think?), as did the game client I believe, and that's not the case anymore as far as I'm aware. I've administered a forum that had a link to it from the website main page, and when it lost that, it was rather disastrous for new member growth.

As for why there's a lot of new users registered, but not much activity? Honestly, that part would stump me. I can only speculate, but I have very little in the way of guesses. A lot of the traffic is likely web crawlers (search engine bots), spam bots, or people finding a result through a general web search. I imagine fewer people probably come here from the onset with the intention of looking to engage with a Minecraft community, but rather are looking something up related to Minecraft, and since there's a decade and more of archives to pull from, this place will come up for a lot of them. There's the whole "1%" rule or whatever it's called, where like 99% of your users will be lurkers and 1% will be content creators (it might even be 99% lurk, 1% joins, and 1% of THAT 1% [so .0001% overall] are active content generators, I forget which).

These are just some speculative considerations on my part. I certainly don't know the history of these particular forums too well, but I am more than aware of the changes in the area of tech/devices/web in the last decade or two, and I can tell you it's not even a question that forums as a whole have just been long displaced in the limelight, so it's probably not one major thing this forum did (or didn't do), nor one particular other website or application, that led to it's loss of activity.

i win

moment of appreciation for the squid, who put up with a decade of this bu...ndle of joy

actually sad to see him go, hope his next job pays well lolol

its hilarious how people are coming up with these conspiracy theories like the forum is 10 years old does the idea that it just fizzled out really surprise you

Hey y'all, me here. This is probably going to be my last post ever on the minecraft forums since i'm heading to England for the first time for 18 years in a couple of hours and i don't think I'll be able to post anything on here while I'm there for 2 weeks.

Thanks so much everyone, I had a great-ish time growing up here with all of you. I'll TRY to be active in Apple's discord server once i get back, but for now cy'all.

So long and thanks for the memories.

Quote from Mancu32»

Yes, but we knew that the forum will be archived in some time.

Honestly, I really love the fact that it'll be archived rather than straight up deleted. This may sound cheesy, but there's just something magical about this place that I cant quite explain, I feel.