The State of the Forum — 2026 | Data Analysis

[Banana ★ 🍌]

Introduction​

Having been a member of the forum for over 6 years now, I’ve seen many users and eras come and go.
During this time, the forum has transformed from an obscure niche community into a massive, mainstream community. Naturally, that has led to endless discussions throughout, where users will argue that:

“The forum used to be better in year X”
“The forum used to be shit, it’s better now”
“The forum peaked in year Y”

Recent discussion surrounding the forum’s historical trajectory, particularly threads by @Daddy's Home on changing forum quality and @Jason Voorhees on forum history/lore inspired a broader look into the forum’s development through actual longitudinal data.

So, instead of arguing from nostalgia or recency bias, I decided to look at the actual data, the numbers behind it all.
In this thread, I aim to provide a data-driven look at growth, activity, culture, and the forum's long-term health.

The goal is not to pick sides or argue that the forum used to be better. In many ways, the forum is objectively thriving.

What I am more interested in are two questions:

• How does a forum change as it scales?
• What actually makes a forum survive in the long term?

---

Part 1 — The scale explosion​

Question answered:
How much has the forum actually grown?

Figure 1 — Forum growth (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096928
Forum userbase growth from 2021 to 2026, including both active accounts and total accounts (including deleted users).

Interpretation​

Over the past five years, the forum has grown from roughly 8.5k members in 2021 to ~170k members today.

Still, this only paints half the picture regarding the historical footprint of this forum.
When accounting for deleted accounts (a feature introduced in February of 2021), the total user base rises from roughly 13k accounts in 2021 (April/May snapshot) to ~438k accounts in the present day.

Before 2023, growth remained relatively modest, but from roughly 2023 onward, the curve began bending upward sharply.
Unsurprisingly, and as many of you will know, this coincided with the forum being exposed to a much broader audience.
Key events here include:

---

Part 2 — The hidden cost of scale​

Question answered:
Does bigger automatically mean stronger?

Figure 2 — Posts per active user (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096932
Average number of posts per active user over time.

Interpretation​

At first glance, as evident in Figure 1, forum growth looks overwhelmingly positive: the forum transitioned from a period of modest early growth into a phase of accelerated, near-exponential scaling, particularly from 2023 onward, after the now infamous TikTok invasion.

However, scale comes with tradeoffs. This is particularly evident in posts per active user.
Back in 2021, the average user created roughly ~640 posts.
Now, in 2026, this figure had declined to roughly ~165 posts.

However, this should not automatically be interpreted as a decline. After all, smaller niche communities are naturally denser than larger, mainstream communities, which the forum has turned into.
As the forum scaled from late 2023 onward, the dynamic naturally shifted: more passive users, more lurkers, less overlap between familiar faces, and shorter engagement cycles overall.

Figure 3 — Threads per active user (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096936
Average number of threads created per active user over time.

Interpretation​

In addition to posts per active user declining substantially, thread creation per user has also dropped significantly.
Peaking in 2022, with roughly ~44 threads per user, this figure has declined to roughly ~12 as of the present day, 2026.

Nowadays, the average user contributes significantly less than before, both in participation and initiative, suggesting lower contribution density.
Altogether, proportionally fewer users are starting discussions, despite more threads getting churned out than ever before.

The forum did not necessarily become weaker. Instead, it simply transitioned into a broader organism.
However, broader communities also tend to feel thinner, which is why you’ll constantly see users claiming that “the forum is dead” (more on this later).

---

Part 3 — Are discussions still deep?​

Question answered:
Has discussion quality collapsed?

Figure 4 — Posts per thread (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096940
Average number of posts generated per thread over time.

Interpretation​

Even though both posts per user and threads per user have declined significantly, interestingly enough, this is not necessarily the case for discussion quality.

Evidently, the change here is not as dramatic.
In 2021, the average thread generated roughly ~16.7 posts per thread.
In 2026, this figure has dropped to roughly ~13.6 posts per thread.

Compared to the considerable decline in both posts and threads per user, as shown earlier, this decrease is relatively conservative.
Altogether, this suggests that threads are still generating discussion, which is clear for everyone to see who uses the forum actively.

While the forum may feel different, discussions themselves appear more resilient than the broader discourse sometimes suggests.

---

Part 4 — Who actually carries a forum?​

Question answered:
Does growth also create long-term contributors?

Before studying the data, it is worth defining what actually sustains a long-term community, like this forum.
Every long-lasting forum gradually develops a relatively small clique of core users who disproportionately shape its culture over time.

On .org, these are usually the users who:

• are considered forum chads
• OGs who have sustained consistent activity over the years
• have provided valuable insights/information/guides
• postmaxxers (or shitposters) who brute-forced exposure through sheer output

For simplicity, I will refer to these users as long-term contributors

Below are a few examples of recognisable long-term contributors from earlier forum cohorts:
View attachment 5136323

While contributors can be evaluated along various axes, we need a practical proxy for measurement.
And ultimately, the most important metric here is sustained output, since without output, there can be no visibility or long-term presence.

For this reason, post count thresholds will be used as a measurable indicator of long-term contribution, divided into three separate categories:
1k+ posts → committed contributor
5k+ posts → highly invested contributor
10k+ posts → core contributor

Figure 5A — Long-term contributor formation by join cohort
View attachment 5096943
Users reaching 1k+, 5k+, and 10k+ posts by join year.

Interpretation​

Initially, it would be common to assume that more growth automatically translates into more long-term contributors. However, the data paints a more nuanced picture.

At first glance, the number of users reaching 1k+ posts continues to rise sharply, meaning that the forum is still churning out committed users.
However, when looking at 5k+ and 10k+ contributors, a different pattern starts to emerge, with both cohorts plateauing.
So even though the forum is still attracting users who become engaged, proportionally fewer transition into long-term, deeply invested contributors.

This, too, is significant since we already established that every long-lasting community ultimately depends on a group of relatively small and highly invested users who sustain continuity over time.

At this point, another question naturally emerges: once users become committed, how likely are they to deepen into long-term contributors?

Figure 5B — Deep investment conversion by join cohort
View attachment 5096946
Percentage of 1k+ contributors progressing into 5k+ and 10k+ contributors.

Interpretation​

While the forum continues to produce committed users, the likelihood of those users progressing to deep, long-term investment appears to decline across newer cohorts.
This may also help explain why newer eras of the forum can sometimes feel less familiar to older users.
Recognisable long-term contributors still emerge, but proportionally fewer deepen into highly invested contributors over time.

Earlier cohorts converted into 5k+ and 10k+ contributors at substantially higher rates, especially in the 2020 cohort (indeed a great year to join .org ).
It is also worth noting that from 2021 onward, accounts now have the option to delete, and deleted accounts, while still counted in these figures, cease posting entirely, which may modestly suppress conversion rates in more recent cohorts.

To conclude, the forum still succeeds at creating active users, but at the same time, core depth is not accelerating at the same pace as growth.
This may ultimately be one of the most important long-term challenges for a rapidly scaling forum.

Figure 5C — BOTB contributor formation by join cohort
View attachment 5126735
Number of unique users from each join cohort who made it into the forum's Best of the Best (BOTB) section.

Interpretation​

The distribution of BOTB contributors by join cohort reinforces earlier findings regarding contributor depth, with the 2019–2020 cohorts once again standing out as the dominant cohorts, together accounting for nearly half of all BOTB representation by join year.
Since BOTB functions as a staff-curated archive of high-quality content, independent of raw activity/post count, this serves as an additional qualitative indicator of contributor impact, and one that cannot simply be accumulated through sheer posting volume.

While later cohorts still produced several BOTB contributors, their lower representation is likely structural.
After all, earlier cohorts had the luxury of establishing many areas of discussion that were still relatively underexplored, making foundational breakthroughs and key contributions easier to establish. As the forum evolves, the threshold for genuinely novel, standout content rises accordingly, not necessarily as a sign of decline, but as a natural consequence of a maturing organism building on its own foundations.

---

Part 5 — Moderation​

Question answered:
What does growth cost operationally?

Before moving on, I thought it would be interesting to briefly share a side of the forum most users never really get to see.

Having moderated this forum since late 2020, the change in forum growth isn't just visible in the numbers, it's felt operationally. Growth doesn't only produce more users, posts, and activity. It changes the entire reality required to keep a large system functioning.
Below is one such measure: estimated moderation actions processed per year (simply put, how much work us staff have to put in to keep the forum operational):

Figure 6 — Estimated annual moderation throughput (2022–2026)
View attachment 5096947
Estimated moderation throughput derived from cumulative moderation log intervals.

Interpretation​

Based on yearly moderation log intervals, our estimated workload has increased dramatically:

~39k (2022–23) → ~77k (2023–24) → ~127k (2024–25) → ~333k (2025–26, projected) moderation actions per year.

As the forum scales, so too does the amount of invisible work required to keep it functioning without the forum turning into a complete zoo

More users naturally means:

– more reports
– more approvals/queue processing
– more moderation decisions
– more general operational complexity

Naturally, this means that larger systems also require more maintenance. This is, of course, logical since a small village does not require the same infrastructure as a large city.

---

Part 6 — So… is the forum dead?​

Question answered:
How much truth is there to the claim that “the forum is dead”?

For as long as I can remember, even before I joined this forum, users have repeatedly claimed that “the forum is dead”

Funnily enough, this statement appears in literally every era of the forum’s history:

2019: https://looksmax.org/threads/forum-is-dead-today.76001/
2020: https://looksmax.org/threads/why-is-the-forum-dead.214676/
2021: https://looksmax.org/threads/the-forum-is-pretty-dead-right-now.346771/
2022: https://looksmax.org/threads/why-is-this-forum-so-dead.449811/
2023: https://looksmax.org/threads/this-forum-is-dead.774746/
2024: https://looksmax.org/threads/this-forum-is-so-dead-currently.1068627/
2025: https://looksmax.org/threads/why-is-the-forum-so-dead-right-now.1343621/
2026: https://looksmax.org/threads/dead-forum.1949282/

In fact, a simple search for "forum dead", sorted by "search titles only" across the entire thread history, returns 500+ unique threads across 11 pages of users claiming the forum is "dead"
View attachment 5097927

Figure 7 — Why the “forum is dead” debate never ends
View attachment 5096952
Left: forum growth (active members, 2021–2026).
Right: posts per active user (2021–2026).

Interpretation​

These two graphs explain why the debate surrounding the forum never truly disappears.

On the one hand, the graph on the left suggests that the forum is objectively thriving. Membership growth has accelerated dramatically, and overall activity continues to expand.

On the other hand, the graph on the right suggests that the forum experience has changed.
As mentioned earlier, the average user now contributes significantly less than before, which helps explain why the forum can sometimes feel “dead” despite its continued growth in overall size and activity.

Earlier forum years can be characterised as:

– smaller (another reason it felt “dead” in earlier years)
– denser
– having a higher overlap between familiar users
– having a stronger continuity

Current forum years can be characterised as:

– larger
– broader
– faster-moving
– more transient

This is why OGs who lament the good old days of the forum and newcels who think they are just being nostalgia merchants both have a valid perspective.
After all, they are describing different versions of the same organism.

---

Part 7 — What actually makes a forum survive?​

After looking at all of this data, one question naturally emerges:
What actually allows a forum to survive while continuing to scale?

The data points out that:

• Growth is accelerating
• Activity remains high
• New users continue arriving at rapid rates

At the same time, scaling naturally introduces tradeoffs:

– lower contribution density
– weaker continuity
– more transient users
– proportionally fewer deeply invested contributors

None of this necessarily means that the forum became worse.

It means the organism changed shape

And perhaps the most interesting thing the data reveals is this:

The forum has already solved this problem once before

The 2019–2021 cohorts produced the highest rates of deep contributor formation the forum has ever seen.
However, the forum today is a fundamentally different organism. It is larger and broader, and thus, it will not replicate 2020, but nor should it try.

Organisms are not static since they always adapt.
And the next generation of recognisable contributors is already forming somewhere in the current cohorts, just as every recognisable contributor once did.

Because ultimately:

Every recognisable user,

Every OG,

Every staff member,

Was once

Some random greycel no-name

They showed up consistently, contributed. and eventually:

They became part of the organism

The more interesting question moving forward is therefore not:

“Was the old forum better?” or “Is the forum dead?”

But rather:

Does the current organism still create the conditions for the next generation?

Because in the end:

That is what actually allows a forum to survive

---

View attachment 5096636

@NumbThePain @Randomized @tuberculosisinmybal​

---

Bump

 

[AscensionMan98]

the forum was better in '18

I was their on sluthate looksim net, and looksmax 18 but was a guest for the longest time was concerned id get addicted to the forum, and 10k posts later it seems to be true.

reality is it was a lot more active but I think its because we had way less users and less threads made as. a result so people could actually reply to more threads.

With so many users now its hard to get traction on threads since its drowned out by new threads

I wish looksmaxxing did not go mainstream too many new normies that would never have been competition now are competition.

All to make some fucking money

Thanks for ruining it clav and zeta

 

[ihatenewgens]

B

Introduction​

Having been a member of the forum for over 6 years now, I’ve seen many users and eras come and go.
During this time, the forum has transformed from an obscure niche community into a massive, mainstream community. Naturally, that has led to endless discussions throughout, where users will argue that:

“The forum used to be better in year X”
“The forum used to be shit, it’s better now”
“The forum peaked in year Y”

Recent discussion surrounding the forum’s historical trajectory, particularly threads by @Daddy's Home on changing forum quality and @Jason Voorhees on forum history/lore inspired a broader look into the forum’s development through actual longitudinal data.

So, instead of arguing from nostalgia or recency bias, I decided to look at the actual data, the numbers behind it all.
In this thread, I aim to provide a data-driven look at growth, activity, culture, and the forum's long-term health.

The goal is not to pick sides or argue that the forum used to be better. In many ways, the forum is objectively thriving.

What I am more interested in are two questions:

• How does a forum change as it scales?
• What actually makes a forum survive in the long term?

---

Part 1 — The scale explosion​

Question answered:
How much has the forum actually grown?

Figure 1 — Forum growth (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096928
Forum userbase growth from 2021 to 2026, including both active accounts and total accounts (including deleted users).

Interpretation​

Over the past five years, the forum has grown from roughly 8.5k members in 2021 to ~170k members today.

Still, this only paints half the picture regarding the historical footprint of this forum.
When accounting for deleted accounts (a feature introduced in February of 2021), the total user base rises from roughly 13k accounts in 2021 (April/May snapshot) to ~438k accounts in the present day.

Before 2023, growth remained relatively modest, but from roughly 2023 onward, the curve began bending upward sharply.
Unsurprisingly, and as many of you will know, this coincided with the forum being exposed to a much broader audience.
Key events here include:

---

Part 2 — The hidden cost of scale​

Question answered:
Does bigger automatically mean stronger?

Figure 2 — Posts per active user (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096932
Average number of posts per active user over time.

Interpretation​

At first glance, as evident in Figure 1, forum growth looks overwhelmingly positive: the forum transitioned from a period of modest early growth into a phase of accelerated, near-exponential scaling, particularly from 2023 onward, after the now infamous TikTok invasion.

However, scale comes with tradeoffs. This is particularly evident in posts per active user.
Back in 2021, the average user created roughly ~640 posts.
Now, in 2026, this figure had declined to roughly ~165 posts.

However, this should not automatically be interpreted as a decline. After all, smaller niche communities are naturally denser than larger, mainstream communities, which the forum has turned into.
As the forum scaled from late 2023 onward, the dynamic naturally shifted: more passive users, more lurkers, less overlap between familiar faces, and shorter engagement cycles overall.

Figure 3 — Threads per active user (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096936
Average number of threads created per active user over time.

Interpretation​

In addition to posts per active user declining substantially, thread creation per user has also dropped significantly.
Peaking in 2022, with roughly ~44 threads per user, this figure has declined to roughly ~12 as of the present day, 2026.

Nowadays, the average user contributes significantly less than before, both in participation and initiative, suggesting lower contribution density.
Altogether, proportionally fewer users are starting discussions, despite more threads getting churned out than ever before.

The forum did not necessarily become weaker. Instead, it simply transitioned into a broader organism.
However, broader communities also tend to feel thinner, which is why you’ll constantly see users claiming that “the forum is dead” (more on this later).

---

Part 3 — Are discussions still deep?​

Question answered:
Has discussion quality collapsed?

Figure 4 — Posts per thread (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096940
Average number of posts generated per thread over time.

Interpretation​

Even though both posts per user and threads per user have declined significantly, interestingly enough, this is not necessarily the case for discussion quality.

Evidently, the change here is not as dramatic.
In 2021, the average thread generated roughly ~16.7 posts per thread.
In 2026, this figure has dropped to roughly ~13.6 posts per thread.

Compared to the considerable decline in both posts and threads per user, as shown earlier, this decrease is relatively conservative.
Altogether, this suggests that threads are still generating discussion, which is clear for everyone to see who uses the forum actively.

While the forum may feel different, discussions themselves appear more resilient than the broader discourse sometimes suggests.

---

Part 4 — Who actually carries a forum?​

Question answered:
Does growth also create long-term contributors?

Before studying the data, it is worth defining what actually sustains a long-term community, like this forum.
Every long-lasting forum gradually develops a relatively small clique of core users who disproportionately shape its culture over time.

On .org, these are usually the users who:

• are considered forum chads
• OGs who have sustained consistent activity over the years
• have provided valuable insights/information/guides
• postmaxxers (or shitposters) who brute-forced exposure through sheer output

For simplicity, I will refer to these users as long-term contributors

Below are a few examples of recognisable long-term contributors from earlier forum cohorts:
View attachment 5136323

While contributors can be evaluated along various axes, we need a practical proxy for measurement.
And ultimately, the most important metric here is sustained output, since without output, there can be no visibility or long-term presence.

For this reason, post count thresholds will be used as a measurable indicator of long-term contribution, divided into three separate categories:
1k+ posts → committed contributor
5k+ posts → highly invested contributor
10k+ posts → core contributor

Figure 5A — Long-term contributor formation by join cohort
View attachment 5096943
Users reaching 1k+, 5k+, and 10k+ posts by join year.

Interpretation​

Initially, it would be common to assume that more growth automatically translates into more long-term contributors. However, the data paints a more nuanced picture.

At first glance, the number of users reaching 1k+ posts continues to rise sharply, meaning that the forum is still churning out committed users.
However, when looking at 5k+ and 10k+ contributors, a different pattern starts to emerge, with both cohorts plateauing.
So even though the forum is still attracting users who become engaged, proportionally fewer transition into long-term, deeply invested contributors.

This, too, is significant since we already established that every long-lasting community ultimately depends on a group of relatively small and highly invested users who sustain continuity over time.

At this point, another question naturally emerges: once users become committed, how likely are they to deepen into long-term contributors?

Figure 5B — Deep investment conversion by join cohort
View attachment 5096946
Percentage of 1k+ contributors progressing into 5k+ and 10k+ contributors.

Interpretation​

While the forum continues to produce committed users, the likelihood of those users progressing to deep, long-term investment appears to decline across newer cohorts.
This may also help explain why newer eras of the forum can sometimes feel less familiar to older users.
Recognisable long-term contributors still emerge, but proportionally fewer deepen into highly invested contributors over time.

Earlier cohorts converted into 5k+ and 10k+ contributors at substantially higher rates, especially in the 2020 cohort (indeed a great year to join .org ).
It is also worth noting that from 2021 onward, accounts now have the option to delete, and deleted accounts, while still counted in these figures, cease posting entirely, which may modestly suppress conversion rates in more recent cohorts.

To conclude, the forum still succeeds at creating active users, but at the same time, core depth is not accelerating at the same pace as growth.
This may ultimately be one of the most important long-term challenges for a rapidly scaling forum.

Figure 5C — BOTB contributor formation by join cohort
View attachment 5126735
Number of unique users from each join cohort who made it into the forum's Best of the Best (BOTB) section.

Interpretation​

The distribution of BOTB contributors by join cohort reinforces earlier findings regarding contributor depth, with the 2019–2020 cohorts once again standing out as the dominant cohorts, together accounting for nearly half of all BOTB representation by join year.
Since BOTB functions as a staff-curated archive of high-quality content, independent of raw activity/post count, this serves as an additional qualitative indicator of contributor impact, and one that cannot simply be accumulated through sheer posting volume.

While later cohorts still produced several BOTB contributors, their lower representation is likely structural.
After all, earlier cohorts had the luxury of establishing many areas of discussion that were still relatively underexplored, making foundational breakthroughs and key contributions easier to establish. As the forum evolves, the threshold for genuinely novel, standout content rises accordingly, not necessarily as a sign of decline, but as a natural consequence of a maturing organism building on its own foundations.

---

Part 5 — Moderation​

Question answered:
What does growth cost operationally?

Before moving on, I thought it would be interesting to briefly share a side of the forum most users never really get to see.

Having moderated this forum since late 2020, the change in forum growth isn't just visible in the numbers, it's felt operationally. Growth doesn't only produce more users, posts, and activity. It changes the entire reality required to keep a large system functioning.
Below is one such measure: estimated moderation actions processed per year (simply put, how much work us staff have to put in to keep the forum operational):

Figure 6 — Estimated annual moderation throughput (2022–2026)
View attachment 5096947
Estimated moderation throughput derived from cumulative moderation log intervals.

Interpretation​

Based on yearly moderation log intervals, our estimated workload has increased dramatically:

~39k (2022–23) → ~77k (2023–24) → ~127k (2024–25) → ~333k (2025–26, projected) moderation actions per year.

As the forum scales, so too does the amount of invisible work required to keep it functioning without the forum turning into a complete zoo

More users naturally means:

– more reports
– more approvals/queue processing
– more moderation decisions
– more general operational complexity

Naturally, this means that larger systems also require more maintenance. This is, of course, logical since a small village does not require the same infrastructure as a large city.

---

Part 6 — So… is the forum dead?​

Question answered:
How much truth is there to the claim that “the forum is dead”?

For as long as I can remember, even before I joined this forum, users have repeatedly claimed that “the forum is dead”

Funnily enough, this statement appears in literally every era of the forum’s history:

2019: https://looksmax.org/threads/forum-is-dead-today.76001/
2020: https://looksmax.org/threads/why-is-the-forum-dead.214676/
2021: https://looksmax.org/threads/the-forum-is-pretty-dead-right-now.346771/
2022: https://looksmax.org/threads/why-is-this-forum-so-dead.449811/
2023: https://looksmax.org/threads/this-forum-is-dead.774746/
2024: https://looksmax.org/threads/this-forum-is-so-dead-currently.1068627/
2025: https://looksmax.org/threads/why-is-the-forum-so-dead-right-now.1343621/
2026: https://looksmax.org/threads/dead-forum.1949282/

In fact, a simple search for "forum dead", sorted by "search titles only" across the entire thread history, returns 500+ unique threads across 11 pages of users claiming the forum is "dead"
View attachment 5097927

Figure 7 — Why the “forum is dead” debate never ends
View attachment 5096952
Left: forum growth (active members, 2021–2026).
Right: posts per active user (2021–2026).

Interpretation​

These two graphs explain why the debate surrounding the forum never truly disappears.

On the one hand, the graph on the left suggests that the forum is objectively thriving. Membership growth has accelerated dramatically, and overall activity continues to expand.

On the other hand, the graph on the right suggests that the forum experience has changed.
As mentioned earlier, the average user now contributes significantly less than before, which helps explain why the forum can sometimes feel “dead” despite its continued growth in overall size and activity.

Earlier forum years can be characterised as:

– smaller (another reason it felt “dead” in earlier years)
– denser
– having a higher overlap between familiar users
– having a stronger continuity

Current forum years can be characterised as:

– larger
– broader
– faster-moving
– more transient

This is why OGs who lament the good old days of the forum and newcels who think they are just being nostalgia merchants both have a valid perspective.
After all, they are describing different versions of the same organism.

---

Part 7 — What actually makes a forum survive?​

After looking at all of this data, one question naturally emerges:
What actually allows a forum to survive while continuing to scale?

The data points out that:

• Growth is accelerating
• Activity remains high
• New users continue arriving at rapid rates

At the same time, scaling naturally introduces tradeoffs:

– lower contribution density
– weaker continuity
– more transient users
– proportionally fewer deeply invested contributors

None of this necessarily means that the forum became worse.

It means the organism changed shape

And perhaps the most interesting thing the data reveals is this:

The forum has already solved this problem once before

The 2019–2021 cohorts produced the highest rates of deep contributor formation the forum has ever seen.
However, the forum today is a fundamentally different organism. It is larger and broader, and thus, it will not replicate 2020, but nor should it try.

Organisms are not static since they always adapt.
And the next generation of recognisable contributors is already forming somewhere in the current cohorts, just as every recognisable contributor once did.

Because ultimately:

Every recognisable user,

Every OG,

Every staff member,

Was once

Some random greycel no-name

They showed up consistently, contributed. and eventually:

They became part of the organism

The more interesting question moving forward is therefore not:

“Was the old forum better?” or “Is the forum dead?”

But rather:

Does the current organism still create the conditions for the next generation?

Because in the end:

That is what actually allows a forum to survive

---

View attachment 5096636

@NumbThePain @Randomized @tuberculosisinmybal​

---

bump ts so good

 

[Ultimate Subhuman™]

10k+ posts → core contributor

---

Feels good mane

 

[SwissArms]

not a word give me a tldr janny

 

[Gargantuan]

i found the predictive angle of it pretty interesting, the thread data gave me a lot of questions and ideas how to combine them (posts per user, finding threads per user or threads per year)

i decided to js stick with answering the main question of "Does the forum still produce users capable of contributing meaningful 'signal' to it."

i mostly stuck with what i did, tried to make a roughly predictive model to find the peak etc

i was thinking of trying other things (for example, redoing the botb and contributor graphs, cutting the data of the last 2 years, then trying to do the same prediction, the data drop on 2021 and small number of data points though made it really difficult to reliably fit any curve though)

the curve is likely about half correct, (although, maybe more peaks later or higher peaks on the graph, since as you said i ignored a decent amount of external variables that could cause a sudden or prolonged decrease or increase), but as you said the years are pretty doubtful since i don't have too many exact points and ways to account/predict external variables

the main force pulling the number of active users down though was activity (well now that i type it its obvious)

the ratio of inactive users to active users is growing (although, it seems to be slowing down, which would actually end up indicating .org having a higher peak, and a longer life span then i predicted)

the curve i made couldn't really account for any of those variables really

i think with the terminology curve i suggested though, i probably could find a way to get the active user count to being predicted by the curve instead, which averaging the two out maybe might make them more accurate

i think there are a good amount of interesting ways for this to go

i wonder if it would be possible to use information from the forum surveys to continue building on this

The survey angle is particularly interesting to me ngl, good shout.

The terminology idea is also intriguing, but the yearly surveys might be where the real gems are, simply because the data already exists and covers a huge number of variables (and we already have an extensive back catalogue of them spanning multiple years at this point).
Utilising them, it could potentially be possible to start tracking how the actual composition of the userbase has changed over time rather than just looking at activity metrics. Things like age, discovery pipeline, forum sentiment, posting habits, and so on.

In a way, that would complement the kind of analysis I did in this thread. The activity metrics tell us what the forum is doing, whereas the surveys potentially tell us who the forum is made up of.
In turn, that would probably get us closer to answering some of the deeper questions raised here regarding cultural change, identity, and long-term forum evolution.

 

[shedontluv-U]

I've reread it several times, and from what I understand, a huge influx of new users doesn't necessarily mean a long-term conversation ,what benefits the platform the most is a minority of users who have managed to remain relevant over the years. And who have managed to create engagement through the platform, with information and the guides, or the shitposts, or even just being loved and relevant,

These kinds of users strengthen the forum's bond through their consistency and relevance, encouraging greater engagement and creating a sense of belonging to a kind of community,

But since the growth rate of registrations has not increased the conversion rate, with its demand for more moderation resources and the creation of fewer long-term contributors. Because the system is completely different, instead of feeling like you're in a community, you have the impression of being in an impersonal megalopolis, where everyone is fighting for visibility.

But from what I understand, we're a bit like cooks, aren't we?

Because what appears to be an improvement is not

More resources

The survey angle is particularly interesting to me ngl, good shout.

The terminology idea is also intriguing, but the yearly surveys might be where the real gems are, simply because the data already exists and covers a huge number of variables (and we already have an extensive back catalogue of them spanning multiple years at this point).
Utilising them, it could potentially be possible to start tracking how the actual composition of the userbase has changed over time rather than just looking at activity metrics. Things like age, discovery pipeline, forum sentiment, posting habits, and so on.

In a way, that would complement the kind of analysis I did in this thread. The activity metrics tell us what the forum is doing, whereas the surveys potentially tell us who the forum is made up of.
In turn, that would probably get us closer to answering some of the deeper questions raised here regarding cultural change, identity, and long-term forum evolution.

I agree, it's not a binary answer like everyone would have wanted, and that's a good thing, and I really liked the comparison with the organism and the noise.

 

[Joestar$]

Introduction​

Having been a member of the forum for over 6 years now, I’ve seen many users and eras come and go.
During this time, the forum has transformed from an obscure niche community into a massive, mainstream community. Naturally, that has led to endless discussions throughout, where users will argue that:

“The forum used to be better in year X”
“The forum used to be shit, it’s better now”
“The forum peaked in year Y”

Recent discussion surrounding the forum’s historical trajectory, particularly threads by @Daddy's Home on changing forum quality and @Jason Voorhees on forum history/lore inspired a broader look into the forum’s development through actual longitudinal data.

So, instead of arguing from nostalgia or recency bias, I decided to look at the actual data, the numbers behind it all.
In this thread, I aim to provide a data-driven look at growth, activity, culture, and the forum's long-term health.

The goal is not to pick sides or argue that the forum used to be better. In many ways, the forum is objectively thriving.

What I am more interested in are two questions:

• How does a forum change as it scales?
• What actually makes a forum survive in the long term?

---

Part 1 — The scale explosion​

Question answered:
How much has the forum actually grown?

Figure 1 — Forum growth (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096928
Forum userbase growth from 2021 to 2026, including both active accounts and total accounts (including deleted users).

Interpretation​

Over the past five years, the forum has grown from roughly 8.5k members in 2021 to ~170k members today.

Still, this only paints half the picture regarding the historical footprint of this forum.
When accounting for deleted accounts (a feature introduced in February of 2021), the total user base rises from roughly 13k accounts in 2021 (April/May snapshot) to ~438k accounts in the present day.

Before 2023, growth remained relatively modest, but from roughly 2023 onward, the curve began bending upward sharply.
Unsurprisingly, and as many of you will know, this coincided with the forum being exposed to a much broader audience.
Key events here include:

---

Part 2 — The hidden cost of scale​

Question answered:
Does bigger automatically mean stronger?

Figure 2 — Posts per active user (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096932
Average number of posts per active user over time.

Interpretation​

At first glance, as evident in Figure 1, forum growth looks overwhelmingly positive: the forum transitioned from a period of modest early growth into a phase of accelerated, near-exponential scaling, particularly from 2023 onward, after the now infamous TikTok invasion.

However, scale comes with tradeoffs. This is particularly evident in posts per active user.
Back in 2021, the average user created roughly ~640 posts.
Now, in 2026, this figure had declined to roughly ~165 posts.

However, this should not automatically be interpreted as a decline. After all, smaller niche communities are naturally denser than larger, mainstream communities, which the forum has turned into.
As the forum scaled from late 2023 onward, the dynamic naturally shifted: more passive users, more lurkers, less overlap between familiar faces, and shorter engagement cycles overall.

Figure 3 — Threads per active user (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096936
Average number of threads created per active user over time.

Interpretation​

In addition to posts per active user declining substantially, thread creation per user has also dropped significantly.
Peaking in 2022, with roughly ~44 threads per user, this figure has declined to roughly ~12 as of the present day, 2026.

Nowadays, the average user contributes significantly less than before, both in participation and initiative, suggesting lower contribution density.
Altogether, proportionally fewer users are starting discussions, despite more threads getting churned out than ever before.

The forum did not necessarily become weaker. Instead, it simply transitioned into a broader organism.
However, broader communities also tend to feel thinner, which is why you’ll constantly see users claiming that “the forum is dead” (more on this later).

---

Part 3 — Are discussions still deep?​

Question answered:
Has discussion quality collapsed?

Figure 4 — Posts per thread (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096940
Average number of posts generated per thread over time.

Interpretation​

Even though both posts per user and threads per user have declined significantly, interestingly enough, this is not necessarily the case for discussion quality.

Evidently, the change here is not as dramatic.
In 2021, the average thread generated roughly ~16.7 posts per thread.
In 2026, this figure has dropped to roughly ~13.6 posts per thread.

Compared to the considerable decline in both posts and threads per user, as shown earlier, this decrease is relatively conservative.
Altogether, this suggests that threads are still generating discussion, which is clear for everyone to see who uses the forum actively.

While the forum may feel different, discussions themselves appear more resilient than the broader discourse sometimes suggests.

---

Part 4 — Who actually carries a forum?​

Question answered:
Does growth also create long-term contributors?

Before studying the data, it is worth defining what actually sustains a long-term community, like this forum.
Every long-lasting forum gradually develops a relatively small clique of core users who disproportionately shape its culture over time.

On .org, these are usually the users who:

• are considered forum chads
• OGs who have sustained consistent activity over the years
• have provided valuable insights/information/guides
• postmaxxers (or shitposters) who brute-forced exposure through sheer output

For simplicity, I will refer to these users as long-term contributors

Below are a few examples of recognisable long-term contributors from earlier forum cohorts:
View attachment 5136323

While contributors can be evaluated along various axes, we need a practical proxy for measurement.
And ultimately, the most important metric here is sustained output, since without output, there can be no visibility or long-term presence.

For this reason, post count thresholds will be used as a measurable indicator of long-term contribution, divided into three separate categories:
1k+ posts → committed contributor
5k+ posts → highly invested contributor
10k+ posts → core contributor

Figure 5A — Long-term contributor formation by join cohort
View attachment 5096943
Users reaching 1k+, 5k+, and 10k+ posts by join year.

Interpretation​

Initially, it would be common to assume that more growth automatically translates into more long-term contributors. However, the data paints a more nuanced picture.

At first glance, the number of users reaching 1k+ posts continues to rise sharply, meaning that the forum is still churning out committed users.
However, when looking at 5k+ and 10k+ contributors, a different pattern starts to emerge, with both cohorts plateauing.
So even though the forum is still attracting users who become engaged, proportionally fewer transition into long-term, deeply invested contributors.

This, too, is significant since we already established that every long-lasting community ultimately depends on a group of relatively small and highly invested users who sustain continuity over time.

At this point, another question naturally emerges: once users become committed, how likely are they to deepen into long-term contributors?

Figure 5B — Deep investment conversion by join cohort
View attachment 5096946
Percentage of 1k+ contributors progressing into 5k+ and 10k+ contributors.

Interpretation​

While the forum continues to produce committed users, the likelihood of those users progressing to deep, long-term investment appears to decline across newer cohorts.
This may also help explain why newer eras of the forum can sometimes feel less familiar to older users.
Recognisable long-term contributors still emerge, but proportionally fewer deepen into highly invested contributors over time.

Earlier cohorts converted into 5k+ and 10k+ contributors at substantially higher rates, especially in the 2020 cohort (indeed a great year to join .org ).
It is also worth noting that from 2021 onward, accounts now have the option to delete, and deleted accounts, while still counted in these figures, cease posting entirely, which may modestly suppress conversion rates in more recent cohorts.

To conclude, the forum still succeeds at creating active users, but at the same time, core depth is not accelerating at the same pace as growth.
This may ultimately be one of the most important long-term challenges for a rapidly scaling forum.

Figure 5C — BOTB contributor formation by join cohort
View attachment 5126735
Number of unique users from each join cohort who made it into the forum's Best of the Best (BOTB) section.

Interpretation​

The distribution of BOTB contributors by join cohort reinforces earlier findings regarding contributor depth, with the 2019–2020 cohorts once again standing out as the dominant cohorts, together accounting for nearly half of all BOTB representation by join year.
Since BOTB functions as a staff-curated archive of high-quality content, independent of raw activity/post count, this serves as an additional qualitative indicator of contributor impact, and one that cannot simply be accumulated through sheer posting volume.

While later cohorts still produced several BOTB contributors, their lower representation is likely structural.
After all, earlier cohorts had the luxury of establishing many areas of discussion that were still relatively underexplored, making foundational breakthroughs and key contributions easier to establish. As the forum evolves, the threshold for genuinely novel, standout content rises accordingly, not necessarily as a sign of decline, but as a natural consequence of a maturing organism building on its own foundations.

---

Part 5 — Moderation​

Question answered:
What does growth cost operationally?

Before moving on, I thought it would be interesting to briefly share a side of the forum most users never really get to see.

Having moderated this forum since late 2020, the change in forum growth isn't just visible in the numbers, it's felt operationally. Growth doesn't only produce more users, posts, and activity. It changes the entire reality required to keep a large system functioning.
Below is one such measure: estimated moderation actions processed per year (simply put, how much work us staff have to put in to keep the forum operational):

Figure 6 — Estimated annual moderation throughput (2022–2026)
View attachment 5096947
Estimated moderation throughput derived from cumulative moderation log intervals.

Interpretation​

Based on yearly moderation log intervals, our estimated workload has increased dramatically:

~39k (2022–23) → ~77k (2023–24) → ~127k (2024–25) → ~333k (2025–26, projected) moderation actions per year.

As the forum scales, so too does the amount of invisible work required to keep it functioning without the forum turning into a complete zoo

More users naturally means:

– more reports
– more approvals/queue processing
– more moderation decisions
– more general operational complexity

Naturally, this means that larger systems also require more maintenance. This is, of course, logical since a small village does not require the same infrastructure as a large city.

---

Part 6 — So… is the forum dead?​

Question answered:
How much truth is there to the claim that “the forum is dead”?

For as long as I can remember, even before I joined this forum, users have repeatedly claimed that “the forum is dead”

Funnily enough, this statement appears in literally every era of the forum’s history:

2019: https://looksmax.org/threads/forum-is-dead-today.76001/
2020: https://looksmax.org/threads/why-is-the-forum-dead.214676/
2021: https://looksmax.org/threads/the-forum-is-pretty-dead-right-now.346771/
2022: https://looksmax.org/threads/why-is-this-forum-so-dead.449811/
2023: https://looksmax.org/threads/this-forum-is-dead.774746/
2024: https://looksmax.org/threads/this-forum-is-so-dead-currently.1068627/
2025: https://looksmax.org/threads/why-is-the-forum-so-dead-right-now.1343621/
2026: https://looksmax.org/threads/dead-forum.1949282/

In fact, a simple search for "forum dead", sorted by "search titles only" across the entire thread history, returns 500+ unique threads across 11 pages of users claiming the forum is "dead"
View attachment 5097927

Figure 7 — Why the “forum is dead” debate never ends
View attachment 5096952
Left: forum growth (active members, 2021–2026).
Right: posts per active user (2021–2026).

Interpretation​

These two graphs explain why the debate surrounding the forum never truly disappears.

On the one hand, the graph on the left suggests that the forum is objectively thriving. Membership growth has accelerated dramatically, and overall activity continues to expand.

On the other hand, the graph on the right suggests that the forum experience has changed.
As mentioned earlier, the average user now contributes significantly less than before, which helps explain why the forum can sometimes feel “dead” despite its continued growth in overall size and activity.

Earlier forum years can be characterised as:

– smaller (another reason it felt “dead” in earlier years)
– denser
– having a higher overlap between familiar users
– having a stronger continuity

Current forum years can be characterised as:

– larger
– broader
– faster-moving
– more transient

This is why OGs who lament the good old days of the forum and newcels who think they are just being nostalgia merchants both have a valid perspective.
After all, they are describing different versions of the same organism.

---

Part 7 — What actually makes a forum survive?​

After looking at all of this data, one question naturally emerges:
What actually allows a forum to survive while continuing to scale?

The data points out that:

• Growth is accelerating
• Activity remains high
• New users continue arriving at rapid rates

At the same time, scaling naturally introduces tradeoffs:

– lower contribution density
– weaker continuity
– more transient users
– proportionally fewer deeply invested contributors

None of this necessarily means that the forum became worse.

It means the organism changed shape

And perhaps the most interesting thing the data reveals is this:

The forum has already solved this problem once before

The 2019–2021 cohorts produced the highest rates of deep contributor formation the forum has ever seen.
However, the forum today is a fundamentally different organism. It is larger and broader, and thus, it will not replicate 2020, but nor should it try.

Organisms are not static since they always adapt.
And the next generation of recognisable contributors is already forming somewhere in the current cohorts, just as every recognisable contributor once did.

Because ultimately:

Every recognisable user,

Every OG,

Every staff member,

Was once

Some random greycel no-name

They showed up consistently, contributed. and eventually:

They became part of the organism

The more interesting question moving forward is therefore not:

“Was the old forum better?” or “Is the forum dead?”

But rather:

Does the current organism still create the conditions for the next generation?

Because in the end:

That is what actually allows a forum to survive

---

View attachment 5096636

@NumbThePain @Randomized @tuberculosisinmybal​

---

This site feels waterd down ngl I wish Love-shy.com was never deleted

 

[VeryFuglyNiyguhs]

Introduction​

Having been a member of the forum for over 6 years now, I’ve seen many users and eras come and go.
During this time, the forum has transformed from an obscure niche community into a massive, mainstream community. Naturally, that has led to endless discussions throughout, where users will argue that:

“The forum used to be better in year X”
“The forum used to be shit, it’s better now”
“The forum peaked in year Y”

Recent discussion surrounding the forum’s historical trajectory, particularly threads by @Daddy's Home on changing forum quality and @Jason Voorhees on forum history/lore inspired a broader look into the forum’s development through actual longitudinal data.

So, instead of arguing from nostalgia or recency bias, I decided to look at the actual data, the numbers behind it all.
In this thread, I aim to provide a data-driven look at growth, activity, culture, and the forum's long-term health.

The goal is not to pick sides or argue that the forum used to be better. In many ways, the forum is objectively thriving.

What I am more interested in are two questions:

• How does a forum change as it scales?
• What actually makes a forum survive in the long term?

---

Part 1 — The scale explosion​

Question answered:
How much has the forum actually grown?

Figure 1 — Forum growth (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096928
Forum userbase growth from 2021 to 2026, including both active accounts and total accounts (including deleted users).

Interpretation​

Over the past five years, the forum has grown from roughly 8.5k members in 2021 to ~170k members today.

Still, this only paints half the picture regarding the historical footprint of this forum.
When accounting for deleted accounts (a feature introduced in February of 2021), the total user base rises from roughly 13k accounts in 2021 (April/May snapshot) to ~438k accounts in the present day.

Before 2023, growth remained relatively modest, but from roughly 2023 onward, the curve began bending upward sharply.
Unsurprisingly, and as many of you will know, this coincided with the forum being exposed to a much broader audience.
Key events here include:

---

Part 2 — The hidden cost of scale​

Question answered:
Does bigger automatically mean stronger?

Figure 2 — Posts per active user (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096932
Average number of posts per active user over time.

Interpretation​

At first glance, as evident in Figure 1, forum growth looks overwhelmingly positive: the forum transitioned from a period of modest early growth into a phase of accelerated, near-exponential scaling, particularly from 2023 onward, after the now infamous TikTok invasion.

However, scale comes with tradeoffs. This is particularly evident in posts per active user.
Back in 2021, the average user created roughly ~640 posts.
Now, in 2026, this figure had declined to roughly ~165 posts.

However, this should not automatically be interpreted as a decline. After all, smaller niche communities are naturally denser than larger, mainstream communities, which the forum has turned into.
As the forum scaled from late 2023 onward, the dynamic naturally shifted: more passive users, more lurkers, less overlap between familiar faces, and shorter engagement cycles overall.

Figure 3 — Threads per active user (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096936
Average number of threads created per active user over time.

Interpretation​

In addition to posts per active user declining substantially, thread creation per user has also dropped significantly.
Peaking in 2022, with roughly ~44 threads per user, this figure has declined to roughly ~12 as of the present day, 2026.

Nowadays, the average user contributes significantly less than before, both in participation and initiative, suggesting lower contribution density.
Altogether, proportionally fewer users are starting discussions, despite more threads getting churned out than ever before.

The forum did not necessarily become weaker. Instead, it simply transitioned into a broader organism.
However, broader communities also tend to feel thinner, which is why you’ll constantly see users claiming that “the forum is dead” (more on this later).

---

Part 3 — Are discussions still deep?​

Question answered:
Has discussion quality collapsed?

Figure 4 — Posts per thread (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096940
Average number of posts generated per thread over time.

Interpretation​

Even though both posts per user and threads per user have declined significantly, interestingly enough, this is not necessarily the case for discussion quality.

Evidently, the change here is not as dramatic.
In 2021, the average thread generated roughly ~16.7 posts per thread.
In 2026, this figure has dropped to roughly ~13.6 posts per thread.

Compared to the considerable decline in both posts and threads per user, as shown earlier, this decrease is relatively conservative.
Altogether, this suggests that threads are still generating discussion, which is clear for everyone to see who uses the forum actively.

While the forum may feel different, discussions themselves appear more resilient than the broader discourse sometimes suggests.

---

Part 4 — Who actually carries a forum?​

Question answered:
Does growth also create long-term contributors?

Before studying the data, it is worth defining what actually sustains a long-term community, like this forum.
Every long-lasting forum gradually develops a relatively small clique of core users who disproportionately shape its culture over time.

On .org, these are usually the users who:

• are considered forum chads
• OGs who have sustained consistent activity over the years
• have provided valuable insights/information/guides
• postmaxxers (or shitposters) who brute-forced exposure through sheer output

For simplicity, I will refer to these users as long-term contributors

Below are a few examples of recognisable long-term contributors from earlier forum cohorts:
View attachment 5136323

While contributors can be evaluated along various axes, we need a practical proxy for measurement.
And ultimately, the most important metric here is sustained output, since without output, there can be no visibility or long-term presence.

For this reason, post count thresholds will be used as a measurable indicator of long-term contribution, divided into three separate categories:
1k+ posts → committed contributor
5k+ posts → highly invested contributor
10k+ posts → core contributor

Figure 5A — Long-term contributor formation by join cohort
View attachment 5096943
Users reaching 1k+, 5k+, and 10k+ posts by join year.

Interpretation​

Initially, it would be common to assume that more growth automatically translates into more long-term contributors. However, the data paints a more nuanced picture.

At first glance, the number of users reaching 1k+ posts continues to rise sharply, meaning that the forum is still churning out committed users.
However, when looking at 5k+ and 10k+ contributors, a different pattern starts to emerge, with both cohorts plateauing.
So even though the forum is still attracting users who become engaged, proportionally fewer transition into long-term, deeply invested contributors.

This, too, is significant since we already established that every long-lasting community ultimately depends on a group of relatively small and highly invested users who sustain continuity over time.

At this point, another question naturally emerges: once users become committed, how likely are they to deepen into long-term contributors?

Figure 5B — Deep investment conversion by join cohort
View attachment 5096946
Percentage of 1k+ contributors progressing into 5k+ and 10k+ contributors.

Interpretation​

While the forum continues to produce committed users, the likelihood of those users progressing to deep, long-term investment appears to decline across newer cohorts.
This may also help explain why newer eras of the forum can sometimes feel less familiar to older users.
Recognisable long-term contributors still emerge, but proportionally fewer deepen into highly invested contributors over time.

Earlier cohorts converted into 5k+ and 10k+ contributors at substantially higher rates, especially in the 2020 cohort (indeed a great year to join .org ).
It is also worth noting that from 2021 onward, accounts now have the option to delete, and deleted accounts, while still counted in these figures, cease posting entirely, which may modestly suppress conversion rates in more recent cohorts.

To conclude, the forum still succeeds at creating active users, but at the same time, core depth is not accelerating at the same pace as growth.
This may ultimately be one of the most important long-term challenges for a rapidly scaling forum.

Figure 5C — BOTB contributor formation by join cohort
View attachment 5126735
Number of unique users from each join cohort who made it into the forum's Best of the Best (BOTB) section.

Interpretation​

The distribution of BOTB contributors by join cohort reinforces earlier findings regarding contributor depth, with the 2019–2020 cohorts once again standing out as the dominant cohorts, together accounting for nearly half of all BOTB representation by join year.
Since BOTB functions as a staff-curated archive of high-quality content, independent of raw activity/post count, this serves as an additional qualitative indicator of contributor impact, and one that cannot simply be accumulated through sheer posting volume.

While later cohorts still produced several BOTB contributors, their lower representation is likely structural.
After all, earlier cohorts had the luxury of establishing many areas of discussion that were still relatively underexplored, making foundational breakthroughs and key contributions easier to establish. As the forum evolves, the threshold for genuinely novel, standout content rises accordingly, not necessarily as a sign of decline, but as a natural consequence of a maturing organism building on its own foundations.

---

Part 5 — Moderation​

Question answered:
What does growth cost operationally?

Before moving on, I thought it would be interesting to briefly share a side of the forum most users never really get to see.

Having moderated this forum since late 2020, the change in forum growth isn't just visible in the numbers, it's felt operationally. Growth doesn't only produce more users, posts, and activity. It changes the entire reality required to keep a large system functioning.
Below is one such measure: estimated moderation actions processed per year (simply put, how much work us staff have to put in to keep the forum operational):

Figure 6 — Estimated annual moderation throughput (2022–2026)
View attachment 5096947
Estimated moderation throughput derived from cumulative moderation log intervals.

Interpretation​

Based on yearly moderation log intervals, our estimated workload has increased dramatically:

~39k (2022–23) → ~77k (2023–24) → ~127k (2024–25) → ~333k (2025–26, projected) moderation actions per year.

As the forum scales, so too does the amount of invisible work required to keep it functioning without the forum turning into a complete zoo

More users naturally means:

– more reports
– more approvals/queue processing
– more moderation decisions
– more general operational complexity

Naturally, this means that larger systems also require more maintenance. This is, of course, logical since a small village does not require the same infrastructure as a large city.

---

Part 6 — So… is the forum dead?​

Question answered:
How much truth is there to the claim that “the forum is dead”?

For as long as I can remember, even before I joined this forum, users have repeatedly claimed that “the forum is dead”

Funnily enough, this statement appears in literally every era of the forum’s history:

2019: https://looksmax.org/threads/forum-is-dead-today.76001/
2020: https://looksmax.org/threads/why-is-the-forum-dead.214676/
2021: https://looksmax.org/threads/the-forum-is-pretty-dead-right-now.346771/
2022: https://looksmax.org/threads/why-is-this-forum-so-dead.449811/
2023: https://looksmax.org/threads/this-forum-is-dead.774746/
2024: https://looksmax.org/threads/this-forum-is-so-dead-currently.1068627/
2025: https://looksmax.org/threads/why-is-the-forum-so-dead-right-now.1343621/
2026: https://looksmax.org/threads/dead-forum.1949282/

In fact, a simple search for "forum dead", sorted by "search titles only" across the entire thread history, returns 500+ unique threads across 11 pages of users claiming the forum is "dead"
View attachment 5097927

Figure 7 — Why the “forum is dead” debate never ends
View attachment 5096952
Left: forum growth (active members, 2021–2026).
Right: posts per active user (2021–2026).

Interpretation​

These two graphs explain why the debate surrounding the forum never truly disappears.

On the one hand, the graph on the left suggests that the forum is objectively thriving. Membership growth has accelerated dramatically, and overall activity continues to expand.

On the other hand, the graph on the right suggests that the forum experience has changed.
As mentioned earlier, the average user now contributes significantly less than before, which helps explain why the forum can sometimes feel “dead” despite its continued growth in overall size and activity.

Earlier forum years can be characterised as:

– smaller (another reason it felt “dead” in earlier years)
– denser
– having a higher overlap between familiar users
– having a stronger continuity

Current forum years can be characterised as:

– larger
– broader
– faster-moving
– more transient

This is why OGs who lament the good old days of the forum and newcels who think they are just being nostalgia merchants both have a valid perspective.
After all, they are describing different versions of the same organism.

---

Part 7 — What actually makes a forum survive?​

After looking at all of this data, one question naturally emerges:
What actually allows a forum to survive while continuing to scale?

The data points out that:

• Growth is accelerating
• Activity remains high
• New users continue arriving at rapid rates

At the same time, scaling naturally introduces tradeoffs:

– lower contribution density
– weaker continuity
– more transient users
– proportionally fewer deeply invested contributors

None of this necessarily means that the forum became worse.

It means the organism changed shape

And perhaps the most interesting thing the data reveals is this:

The forum has already solved this problem once before

The 2019–2021 cohorts produced the highest rates of deep contributor formation the forum has ever seen.
However, the forum today is a fundamentally different organism. It is larger and broader, and thus, it will not replicate 2020, but nor should it try.

Organisms are not static since they always adapt.
And the next generation of recognisable contributors is already forming somewhere in the current cohorts, just as every recognisable contributor once did.

Because ultimately:

Every recognisable user,

Every OG,

Every staff member,

Was once

Some random greycel no-name

They showed up consistently, contributed. and eventually:

They became part of the organism

The more interesting question moving forward is therefore not:

“Was the old forum better?” or “Is the forum dead?”

But rather:

Does the current organism still create the conditions for the next generation?

Because in the end:

That is what actually allows a forum to survive

---

View attachment 5096636

@NumbThePain @Randomized @tuberculosisinmybal​

---

Good effort on your part. The big problem I see is a lot of high quality, high IQ users leaving and clavicular making the black pill officially mainstream thing. I've heard coworkers referencing stuff about the blackpill, like getting plastic surgery and talking about hair loss.


Honestly I think users should like Androgenic and Clavicular shouldn't be allowed on here for the fact they made the blackpill mainstream. It draws too many normies in here and ruined the forum to me as a whole. This rule is pretty much impossible to implement without stalking people, but if you are caught talking about black pill ideas in public you should get banned immediately. The only rule of the black pill is not to speak on it in public. Though if your with your incel friends it should be fine. One of the best things for me was being able to talk about the black pill without getting ostracized. I already posted my story here and this forum is the only place I could ever legit express my legitimate thoughts.

Ironically I think .org is one of the big 3 reasons why there's very little incel violence. The first is porn allowing them to get sexually off without interaction with women, the second is that video games and niche hobbies create a distraction for us, and three forums like this serve as a way for us to vent our frustrations without being shot down.

 

[Detective]

quantity up quality down simple logic

 

[Algernon]

i am too lazy to work on it rn but if you or anyone else viewing this feels like making it

here would be a potential methodology

gather a large word bank (the larger the better is preferred i think, and try to encompass the overall terminology of .org throughout all the years, even new and old dead ones, i was thinking of getting some from https://incels.wiki/w/Incel_Glossary, but 50% of these feel like they were placed here by users trying to popularize them instead of already being popular)

sample ~5 of these words (the more the better, but it is complicated)

then create .org language for it vs a list of non .org language (for example, foid vs women, girls, "huzz", etc)

search up each of these from (exclude 2026 so far since the year is only halfway done) Jan 1 2025 to Dec 31 2025, Jan 1 2024 to Dec 31 2024, etc all the way back to 2021

not sure if this is true but i think if you search up all the alternative words (women girl) it can show just one specifically, so the total amount here contains the total amount of both individually which saves a lot of time, idk if its true though

to find the number of instances a word occurs, just search it up, take the number of pages, multiply by 50 (i think there are 50 per thread), subtract 50 since you don't know if the last page has all 50, then just add up the number of instances on the last page to get the total number

part of a flaw in this is that this includes replies though so the actual number is skewed (quoting to a post including for example the word "ok", even if you don't say ok it will include it in the search bar when you search ok, this sites search engine can be pretty bad at times and miss a lot of replies) so the data may be slightly off

then put it in a table like

year	word 1 .org unique language	word 1 non-unique language (this is adding up all of the different substitutes, like foid -> women + girls however many mentions)
2025	# of times	# of times
2024	...	...
2023	...	...
...	...	...
...	...	...

then

year	ratio (# of times .org unique language)/(total, # of times .org language + # of times non-unique language)
2025	x%
...	...
...	...

do this for each word

then, per year take an average among the 5 words

year	average percent usage
2025	x%
...	...
...	...

interpreting this, if it decreases then native forum terminology usage has decreased (100% means that whenever someone can use .org language they will, 0% means there is no usage anymore of any unique .org language, 50% would be right inbetween, people use both equally), similar numbers over time indicates a lack of erosion at forum identity, and an increase means the forum identity has only grown stronger

native forum terminology, while not directly forum identity (botb, fuoty, etc), it addresses changing forum identity pretty well and gives an accurate comparison to how uniform this forum is in comparison to other places online

i did it, methodology isn't that accurate with only 5 samples, would probably need 30, even then it will still be inaccurate

while it quantifies it (poorly), the only thing it revealed was just that general usage rates of some terms decreased while others increased, on average it decreased

even that might just be a result of a small sample size though

 

[Gus17]

read through it all, had 2 things to say

i think this part was too big of an oversimplification, if the forum loses its identity at the cost of becoming larger and passing on, it loses what makes it special and dies out on the next one

even if it seems as if it is doing good, or infact start doing better, it could immediately die out the next "generation"

this could be due to loss of forum identity (less looksmax.org niche language used, for example if you measured average use of foid instead of women per user in 2020, much higher the today), loss of high quality (a forum can finish, even if it has a social factor, the main source to looksmax has ended since they can js view botb and not interact anymore), among other factors

this is unnoticeable when you just measure by how much old and new users interact and growth rate

i know you said the following

but i think the main worry people have isn't the forum dying, it's the quality and main culture of it devolving into something thats already just like ig or tiktok, to where it has no individual purpose or usage and they could have just used something else (if not for botb)

Yea his white washing what losing identity and culture does to a community. When there is fewer corer users and more transient new fags the group loses it's identity, this will make people less engaged overtime leaving it vulnerable to trends. BP will not stay popular on TikTok forever, eventually it will just be considered self care and only the most dedicated will still care.

 

[Gus17]

I was their on sluthate looksim net, and looksmax 18 but was a guest for the longest time was concerned id get addicted to the forum, and 10k posts later it seems to be true.

reality is it was a lot more active but I think its because we had way less users and less threads made as. a result so people could actually reply to more threads.

With so many users now its hard to get traction on threads since its drowned out by new threads

I wish looksmaxxing did not go mainstream too many new normies that would never have been competition now are competition.

All to make some fucking money

Thanks for ruining it clav and zeta

The average person is still to lazy to take action. Most Americans know being fat makes their life worse especially women but they still are because their too lazy to make a change. The greatest resource in the world is willpower and when most people lack it then an action based ideology like looks-max will never truly be practised by them. If anything a larger amount of lazy people in the black pill could be good. They could help pass legislation that would actually damage hypergamy like legalised prostitution and importing female immigrants over men.

 

[Lookologist003]

idk where I went wrong man... Never did recover, everything still feels meaningless to me

Is your cousin better-looking than you like my cousin is better-looking than me? I know what part of me went wrong.

Thanks for ruining it clav and zeta

If it wasn't them it would be someone else. It was inevitable, because looksmaxing is for nonchads the only hope for salvation. Plenty of guys feel terrible but don't know the reasons why their social life is abysmal, or didn't know. The initial signs of change and signs of hurting were first Andrew Tate and that Hamza scammer guy (LOL if you remember him).

BP will not stay popular on TikTok forever

Not in the way that it's packaged in this year or previous years. Great philosopher once said that all truth goes through three stages

https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/arthur_schopenhauer_103608

The state of truth in the generations that grew up with social media is between stage 2 and stage 3. The journey to it becoming self-evident will be forgotten in the adults of the 2040s or whatever. Older folks who are today while being born in 1970 or 1960 are too distant to have experienced the ills of social media and how social media has effected the behaviors of and have inflated the egos of young women; the last bluepill ideas may die out when those generations do.

still are because their too lazy to make a change.

I dunno. I did post that young American men today because of the pressures of female looks hypergamy will as a cohort become healthier than prior generations. Plenty of guys can only stand a chance in today's dating market if they're beginning with a low amount of body fat. I think blackpill ideas and acceptance will be what convinces guys to loose weight if they in their bluepill years put on weight. There's no attempt to deny the immense popularity of going to the gym. We will know once public health survery's are conducted.

pass legislation that would actually damage hypergamy like legalised prostitution and importing female immigrants over men.

Prostitution should never have been made illegal in America. But importing female immigrants over men would only make the situation worse, because once poor women adapt in the infrastructure and the environment of smartphones, easy jobs of Zoom meetings, slayers who are looking to expand their harem, soys who continue to unscrupulously drive this civilisation to the grave, adapt to become the average roastie with an inflate ego who does the beaten path of carousel, then betabucks or cats, and fertility rate 1.2.

 

[heiwa]

Introduction​

Having been a member of the forum for over 6 years now, I’ve seen many users and eras come and go.
During this time, the forum has transformed from an obscure niche community into a massive, mainstream community. Naturally, that has led to endless discussions throughout, where users will argue that:

“The forum used to be better in year X”
“The forum used to be shit, it’s better now”
“The forum peaked in year Y”

Recent discussion surrounding the forum’s historical trajectory, particularly threads by @Daddy's Home on changing forum quality and @Jason Voorhees on forum history/lore inspired a broader look into the forum’s development through actual longitudinal data.

So, instead of arguing from nostalgia or recency bias, I decided to look at the actual data, the numbers behind it all.
In this thread, I aim to provide a data-driven look at growth, activity, culture, and the forum's long-term health.

The goal is not to pick sides or argue that the forum used to be better. In many ways, the forum is objectively thriving.

What I am more interested in are two questions:

• How does a forum change as it scales?
• What actually makes a forum survive in the long term?

---

Part 1 — The scale explosion​

Question answered:
How much has the forum actually grown?

Figure 1 — Forum growth (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096928
Forum userbase growth from 2021 to 2026, including both active accounts and total accounts (including deleted users).

Interpretation​

Over the past five years, the forum has grown from roughly 8.5k members in 2021 to ~170k members today.

Still, this only paints half the picture regarding the historical footprint of this forum.
When accounting for deleted accounts (a feature introduced in February of 2021), the total user base rises from roughly 13k accounts in 2021 (April/May snapshot) to ~438k accounts in the present day.

Before 2023, growth remained relatively modest, but from roughly 2023 onward, the curve began bending upward sharply.
Unsurprisingly, and as many of you will know, this coincided with the forum being exposed to a much broader audience.
Key events here include:

---

Part 2 — The hidden cost of scale​

Question answered:
Does bigger automatically mean stronger?

Figure 2 — Posts per active user (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096932
Average number of posts per active user over time.

Interpretation​

At first glance, as evident in Figure 1, forum growth looks overwhelmingly positive: the forum transitioned from a period of modest early growth into a phase of accelerated, near-exponential scaling, particularly from 2023 onward, after the now infamous TikTok invasion.

However, scale comes with tradeoffs. This is particularly evident in posts per active user.
Back in 2021, the average user created roughly ~640 posts.
Now, in 2026, this figure had declined to roughly ~165 posts.

However, this should not automatically be interpreted as a decline. After all, smaller niche communities are naturally denser than larger, mainstream communities, which the forum has turned into.
As the forum scaled from late 2023 onward, the dynamic naturally shifted: more passive users, more lurkers, less overlap between familiar faces, and shorter engagement cycles overall.

Figure 3 — Threads per active user (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096936
Average number of threads created per active user over time.

Interpretation​

In addition to posts per active user declining substantially, thread creation per user has also dropped significantly.
Peaking in 2022, with roughly ~44 threads per user, this figure has declined to roughly ~12 as of the present day, 2026.

Nowadays, the average user contributes significantly less than before, both in participation and initiative, suggesting lower contribution density.
Altogether, proportionally fewer users are starting discussions, despite more threads getting churned out than ever before.

The forum did not necessarily become weaker. Instead, it simply transitioned into a broader organism.
However, broader communities also tend to feel thinner, which is why you’ll constantly see users claiming that “the forum is dead” (more on this later).

---

Part 3 — Are discussions still deep?​

Question answered:
Has discussion quality collapsed?

Figure 4 — Posts per thread (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096940
Average number of posts generated per thread over time.

Interpretation​

Even though both posts per user and threads per user have declined significantly, interestingly enough, this is not necessarily the case for discussion quality.

Evidently, the change here is not as dramatic.
In 2021, the average thread generated roughly ~16.7 posts per thread.
In 2026, this figure has dropped to roughly ~13.6 posts per thread.

Compared to the considerable decline in both posts and threads per user, as shown earlier, this decrease is relatively conservative.
Altogether, this suggests that threads are still generating discussion, which is clear for everyone to see who uses the forum actively.

While the forum may feel different, discussions themselves appear more resilient than the broader discourse sometimes suggests.

---

Part 4 — Who actually carries a forum?​

Question answered:
Does growth also create long-term contributors?

Before studying the data, it is worth defining what actually sustains a long-term community, like this forum.
Every long-lasting forum gradually develops a relatively small clique of core users who disproportionately shape its culture over time.

On .org, these are usually the users who:

• are considered forum chads
• OGs who have sustained consistent activity over the years
• have provided valuable insights/information/guides
• postmaxxers (or shitposters) who brute-forced exposure through sheer output

For simplicity, I will refer to these users as long-term contributors

Below are a few examples of recognisable long-term contributors from earlier forum cohorts:
View attachment 5136323

While contributors can be evaluated along various axes, we need a practical proxy for measurement.
And ultimately, the most important metric here is sustained output, since without output, there can be no visibility or long-term presence.

For this reason, post count thresholds will be used as a measurable indicator of long-term contribution, divided into three separate categories:
1k+ posts → committed contributor
5k+ posts → highly invested contributor
10k+ posts → core contributor

Figure 5A — Long-term contributor formation by join cohort
View attachment 5096943
Users reaching 1k+, 5k+, and 10k+ posts by join year.

Interpretation​

Initially, it would be common to assume that more growth automatically translates into more long-term contributors. However, the data paints a more nuanced picture.

At first glance, the number of users reaching 1k+ posts continues to rise sharply, meaning that the forum is still churning out committed users.
However, when looking at 5k+ and 10k+ contributors, a different pattern starts to emerge, with both cohorts plateauing.
So even though the forum is still attracting users who become engaged, proportionally fewer transition into long-term, deeply invested contributors.

This, too, is significant since we already established that every long-lasting community ultimately depends on a group of relatively small and highly invested users who sustain continuity over time.

At this point, another question naturally emerges: once users become committed, how likely are they to deepen into long-term contributors?

Figure 5B — Deep investment conversion by join cohort
View attachment 5096946
Percentage of 1k+ contributors progressing into 5k+ and 10k+ contributors.

Interpretation​

While the forum continues to produce committed users, the likelihood of those users progressing to deep, long-term investment appears to decline across newer cohorts.
This may also help explain why newer eras of the forum can sometimes feel less familiar to older users.
Recognisable long-term contributors still emerge, but proportionally fewer deepen into highly invested contributors over time.

Earlier cohorts converted into 5k+ and 10k+ contributors at substantially higher rates, especially in the 2020 cohort (indeed a great year to join .org ).
It is also worth noting that from 2021 onward, accounts now have the option to delete, and deleted accounts, while still counted in these figures, cease posting entirely, which may modestly suppress conversion rates in more recent cohorts.

To conclude, the forum still succeeds at creating active users, but at the same time, core depth is not accelerating at the same pace as growth.
This may ultimately be one of the most important long-term challenges for a rapidly scaling forum.

Figure 5C — BOTB contributor formation by join cohort
View attachment 5126735
Number of unique users from each join cohort who made it into the forum's Best of the Best (BOTB) section.

Interpretation​

The distribution of BOTB contributors by join cohort reinforces earlier findings regarding contributor depth, with the 2019–2020 cohorts once again standing out as the dominant cohorts, together accounting for nearly half of all BOTB representation by join year.
Since BOTB functions as a staff-curated archive of high-quality content, independent of raw activity/post count, this serves as an additional qualitative indicator of contributor impact, and one that cannot simply be accumulated through sheer posting volume.

While later cohorts still produced several BOTB contributors, their lower representation is likely structural.
After all, earlier cohorts had the luxury of establishing many areas of discussion that were still relatively underexplored, making foundational breakthroughs and key contributions easier to establish. As the forum evolves, the threshold for genuinely novel, standout content rises accordingly, not necessarily as a sign of decline, but as a natural consequence of a maturing organism building on its own foundations.

---

Part 5 — Moderation​

Question answered:
What does growth cost operationally?

Before moving on, I thought it would be interesting to briefly share a side of the forum most users never really get to see.

Having moderated this forum since late 2020, the change in forum growth isn't just visible in the numbers, it's felt operationally. Growth doesn't only produce more users, posts, and activity. It changes the entire reality required to keep a large system functioning.
Below is one such measure: estimated moderation actions processed per year (simply put, how much work us staff have to put in to keep the forum operational):

Figure 6 — Estimated annual moderation throughput (2022–2026)
View attachment 5096947
Estimated moderation throughput derived from cumulative moderation log intervals.

Interpretation​

Based on yearly moderation log intervals, our estimated workload has increased dramatically:

~39k (2022–23) → ~77k (2023–24) → ~127k (2024–25) → ~333k (2025–26, projected) moderation actions per year.

As the forum scales, so too does the amount of invisible work required to keep it functioning without the forum turning into a complete zoo

More users naturally means:

– more reports
– more approvals/queue processing
– more moderation decisions
– more general operational complexity

Naturally, this means that larger systems also require more maintenance. This is, of course, logical since a small village does not require the same infrastructure as a large city.

---

Part 6 — So… is the forum dead?​

Question answered:
How much truth is there to the claim that “the forum is dead”?

For as long as I can remember, even before I joined this forum, users have repeatedly claimed that “the forum is dead”

Funnily enough, this statement appears in literally every era of the forum’s history:

2019: https://looksmax.org/threads/forum-is-dead-today.76001/
2020: https://looksmax.org/threads/why-is-the-forum-dead.214676/
2021: https://looksmax.org/threads/the-forum-is-pretty-dead-right-now.346771/
2022: https://looksmax.org/threads/why-is-this-forum-so-dead.449811/
2023: https://looksmax.org/threads/this-forum-is-dead.774746/
2024: https://looksmax.org/threads/this-forum-is-so-dead-currently.1068627/
2025: https://looksmax.org/threads/why-is-the-forum-so-dead-right-now.1343621/
2026: https://looksmax.org/threads/dead-forum.1949282/

In fact, a simple search for "forum dead", sorted by "search titles only" across the entire thread history, returns 500+ unique threads across 11 pages of users claiming the forum is "dead"
View attachment 5097927

Figure 7 — Why the “forum is dead” debate never ends
View attachment 5096952
Left: forum growth (active members, 2021–2026).
Right: posts per active user (2021–2026).

Interpretation​

These two graphs explain why the debate surrounding the forum never truly disappears.

On the one hand, the graph on the left suggests that the forum is objectively thriving. Membership growth has accelerated dramatically, and overall activity continues to expand.

On the other hand, the graph on the right suggests that the forum experience has changed.
As mentioned earlier, the average user now contributes significantly less than before, which helps explain why the forum can sometimes feel “dead” despite its continued growth in overall size and activity.

Earlier forum years can be characterised as:

– smaller (another reason it felt “dead” in earlier years)
– denser
– having a higher overlap between familiar users
– having a stronger continuity

Current forum years can be characterised as:

– larger
– broader
– faster-moving
– more transient

This is why OGs who lament the good old days of the forum and newcels who think they are just being nostalgia merchants both have a valid perspective.
After all, they are describing different versions of the same organism.

---

Part 7 — What actually makes a forum survive?​

After looking at all of this data, one question naturally emerges:
What actually allows a forum to survive while continuing to scale?

The data points out that:

• Growth is accelerating
• Activity remains high
• New users continue arriving at rapid rates

At the same time, scaling naturally introduces tradeoffs:

– lower contribution density
– weaker continuity
– more transient users
– proportionally fewer deeply invested contributors

None of this necessarily means that the forum became worse.

It means the organism changed shape

And perhaps the most interesting thing the data reveals is this:

The forum has already solved this problem once before

The 2019–2021 cohorts produced the highest rates of deep contributor formation the forum has ever seen.
However, the forum today is a fundamentally different organism. It is larger and broader, and thus, it will not replicate 2020, but nor should it try.

Organisms are not static since they always adapt.
And the next generation of recognisable contributors is already forming somewhere in the current cohorts, just as every recognisable contributor once did.

Because ultimately:

Every recognisable user,

Every OG,

Every staff member,

Was once

Some random greycel no-name

They showed up consistently, contributed. and eventually:

They became part of the organism

The more interesting question moving forward is therefore not:

“Was the old forum better?” or “Is the forum dead?”

But rather:

Does the current organism still create the conditions for the next generation?

Because in the end:

That is what actually allows a forum to survive

---

View attachment 5096636

@NumbThePain @Randomized @tuberculosisinmybal​

---

Got hated on for saying forum isn’t worst after more people,
In the end only the commited one matters,
niggas we’re like « uhh like we care » same dude crying about 2020 and being nostalgic about old org
Good thread and good effort

 

[Joaking]

Dnr but what I can say is that the newgens will slowly get bored and fade out (coming from an ex frequent unregistered offsiter grey )

 

[unotwerk]

Fr so many greys, I can't even find a good method that people can suggest most of them just use rofl emoji

 

[JohnDoe]

Remember when the entire forum was begging master to close registrations or limit the viewing permissions for guests? Ofcourse he didn't until it was too late, he saw dollar signs. He's making 6 figures now so why would he care? Basically sold out the forum for money. Every thread is now spammed by greycels with dnr. Forum is unusable.

 

[jozsef316@gmail]

Shit thread cuck

 

[heiwa]

Remember when the entire forum was begging master to close registrations or limit the viewing permissions for guests? Ofcourse he didn't until it was too late, he saw dollar signs. He's making 6 figures now so why would he care? Basically sold out the forum for money. Every thread is now spammed by greycels with dnr. Forum is unusable.

You are part of the problem mostly non greys are saying dnr to actually high effort shit,
Greys are mostly asking dumb questions just ignore them
The real problem is
AI slop low effort guides are getting recognition while actually high effort shit are getting slept on
Look at teddy he ain’t getting vip just because he’s a 2026cel that’s fucking dumb y’all should not be judging people on join date or whatever,
The fact that you need to lurk on off topic forums for days to get some recognition is dumb af
There’s a brutal hate towards anyone from after 2023 even though it’s fucking a retarded behaviour
Forum isn’t « unusable » it’s just you convincing yourself greys are ruining it

 

[JohnDoe]

You are part of the problem mostly non greys are saying dnr to actually high effort shit,
Greys are mostly asking dumb questions just ignore them
The real problem is
AI slop low effort guides are getting recognition while actually high effort shit are getting slept on
Look at teddy he ain’t getting vip just because he’s a 2026cel that’s fucking dumb y’all should not be judging people on join date or whatever,
The fact that you need to lurk on off topic forums for days to get some recognition is dumb af
There’s a brutal hate towards anyone from after 2023 even though it’s fucking a retarded behaviour
Forum isn’t « unusable » it’s just you convincing yourself greys are ruining it

 

[Gus17]

I dunno. I did post that young American men today because of the pressures of female looks hypergamy will as a cohort become healthier than prior generations. Plenty of guys can only stand a chance in today's dating market if they're beginning with a low amount of body fat. I think blackpill ideas and acceptance will be what convinces guys to loose weight if they in their bluepill years put on weight. There's no attempt to deny the immense popularity of going to the gym. We will know once public health survery's are conducted.

I doubt it tbh. We only recently saw a drop in rising obesity levels due to ozempic, despite gym being a trend for like 10 years at this point.

Prostitution should never have been made illegal in America. But importing female immigrants over men would only make the situation worse, because once poor women adapt in the infrastructure and the environment of smartphones, easy jobs of Zoom meetings, slayers who are looking to expand their harem, soys who continue to unscrupulously drive this civilisation to the grave, adapt to become the average roastie with an inflate ego who does the beaten path of carousel, then betabucks or cats, and fertility rate 1.2.

I don’t believe they’ll be traditional lol, but I do think an abundance of women and a shortage of men could fix our issues. Dating is ultimately an economic market and when there’s a shortage of a good it become more valuable. Thus if there was let’s say double the women there as men then at least 50% of them would never be able to fufill their desire to have a guy to themselves creating a demand pressure on men overall. This would give men more negotiating power and the ability to choose women rather then it being women choosing men.

The government could maintain this by incentivizing in vitro and regulating the amount of men a family could have. I would say a family needs 2 daughters to be allowed to have one boy.

 

[ZyzzReincarnate]

Having been a member of the forum for over 6 years now, I’ve seen many users and eras come and go.

JoinedMar 31, 2020

 

[ZyzzReincarnate]

I wish looksmaxxing did not go mainstream too many new normies that would never have been competition now are competition.

JoinedJun 14, 2020

 

[Nexom]

Enjoyable read as usual

 

[captain steve]

Enjoyable read as usual

what happened to you bro

 

[Nexom]

what happened to you bro

Just taking care of life
I'm still around though

 

[Rope'n'Roll]

An insightful post, as always.

 

[Lookologist003]

despite gym being a trend for like 10 years at this point.

TikTok and Chad standard hasn't been around for ten years.

Look at this dude on the rating subforum. This is what women expect you to look like. And never forget the female laycount blackpill. I don't know if you're lucky enough to have a girlfriend, but if you will get one and aren't literally 18, she could have had so much sex with chads. I've given up. The social contract that keeps civilsation going and children existing has been destroyed and acid-faced and ripped to shreds where the women and chads are laughing. Fertility rate 1.2, average age new mother 39.

The government could maintain this by incentivizing in vitro and regulating the amount of men a family could have. I would say a family needs 2 daughters to be allowed to have one boy.

I would be behind this. But it's already too late. And we know women are mentally inferior, so it will weaken the next generations of computer engineers and people who build power stations and repair airplanes, and develop civilisation so we don't have to live like its 1950 and can have things like Elden Ring. I would so be behind this. The idea that we just need to abort male babies is one solution to the problem, or one way to allay the problem. But it's already too late. There will be much suffering to come.

 

[Divineincel]

The social contract that keeps civilsation going and children existing has been destroyed and acid-faced and ripped to shreds where the women and chads are laughing. Fertility rate 1.2, average age new mother 39.

Insightful comment. Men are expected to fulfill their social contract (what foids call manly or a real man) and when they are demanded to fulfill their social contract it is oppressive and literally fascism

 

[JohnDoe]

FIrst he promotes gambling to underaged kids and now he is shilling some meme sponsorship with a peptide seller with no real authenticity and again it's primarily aimed at kids who don't know any better. This forum just serves as a place to extract money from the parents of these 14-15 year old kids who will use their mommy's credit card to buy these things. There is no end to lamarcus's greed. Don't bother fellas, it's been over.

 

[ghenghis]

I found this post very interesting. Even though everyone else dnrd

 

[usernameusername0]

Introduction​

Having been a member of the forum for over 6 years now, I’ve seen many users and eras come and go.
During this time, the forum has transformed from an obscure niche community into a massive, mainstream community. Naturally, that has led to endless discussions throughout, where users will argue that:

“The forum used to be better in year X”
“The forum used to be shit, it’s better now”
“The forum peaked in year Y”

Recent discussion surrounding the forum’s historical trajectory, particularly threads by @Daddy's Home on changing forum quality and @Jason Voorhees on forum history/lore inspired a broader look into the forum’s development through actual longitudinal data.

So, instead of arguing from nostalgia or recency bias, I decided to look at the actual data, the numbers behind it all.
In this thread, I aim to provide a data-driven look at growth, activity, culture, and the forum's long-term health.

The goal is not to pick sides or argue that the forum used to be better. In many ways, the forum is objectively thriving.

What I am more interested in are two questions:

• How does a forum change as it scales?
• What actually makes a forum survive in the long term?

---

Part 1 — The scale explosion​

Question answered:
How much has the forum actually grown?

Figure 1 — Forum growth (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096928
Forum userbase growth from 2021 to 2026, including both active accounts and total accounts (including deleted users).

Interpretation​

Over the past five years, the forum has grown from roughly 8.5k members in 2021 to ~170k members today.

Still, this only paints half the picture regarding the historical footprint of this forum.
When accounting for deleted accounts (a feature introduced in February of 2021), the total user base rises from roughly 13k accounts in 2021 (April/May snapshot) to ~438k accounts in the present day.

Before 2023, growth remained relatively modest, but from roughly 2023 onward, the curve began bending upward sharply.
Unsurprisingly, and as many of you will know, this coincided with the forum being exposed to a much broader audience.
Key events here include:

---

Part 2 — The hidden cost of scale​

Question answered:
Does bigger automatically mean stronger?

Figure 2 — Posts per active user (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096932
Average number of posts per active user over time.

Interpretation​

At first glance, as evident in Figure 1, forum growth looks overwhelmingly positive: the forum transitioned from a period of modest early growth into a phase of accelerated, near-exponential scaling, particularly from 2023 onward, after the now infamous TikTok invasion.

However, scale comes with tradeoffs. This is particularly evident in posts per active user.
Back in 2021, the average user created roughly ~640 posts.
Now, in 2026, this figure had declined to roughly ~165 posts.

However, this should not automatically be interpreted as a decline. After all, smaller niche communities are naturally denser than larger, mainstream communities, which the forum has turned into.
As the forum scaled from late 2023 onward, the dynamic naturally shifted: more passive users, more lurkers, less overlap between familiar faces, and shorter engagement cycles overall.

Figure 3 — Threads per active user (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096936
Average number of threads created per active user over time.

Interpretation​

In addition to posts per active user declining substantially, thread creation per user has also dropped significantly.
Peaking in 2022, with roughly ~44 threads per user, this figure has declined to roughly ~12 as of the present day, 2026.

Nowadays, the average user contributes significantly less than before, both in participation and initiative, suggesting lower contribution density.
Altogether, proportionally fewer users are starting discussions, despite more threads getting churned out than ever before.

The forum did not necessarily become weaker. Instead, it simply transitioned into a broader organism.
However, broader communities also tend to feel thinner, which is why you’ll constantly see users claiming that “the forum is dead” (more on this later).

---

Part 3 — Are discussions still deep?​

Question answered:
Has discussion quality collapsed?

Figure 4 — Posts per thread (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096940
Average number of posts generated per thread over time.

Interpretation​

Even though both posts per user and threads per user have declined significantly, interestingly enough, this is not necessarily the case for discussion quality.

Evidently, the change here is not as dramatic.
In 2021, the average thread generated roughly ~16.7 posts per thread.
In 2026, this figure has dropped to roughly ~13.6 posts per thread.

Compared to the considerable decline in both posts and threads per user, as shown earlier, this decrease is relatively conservative.
Altogether, this suggests that threads are still generating discussion, which is clear for everyone to see who uses the forum actively.

While the forum may feel different, discussions themselves appear more resilient than the broader discourse sometimes suggests.

---

Part 4 — Who actually carries a forum?​

Question answered:
Does growth also create long-term contributors?

Before studying the data, it is worth defining what actually sustains a long-term community, like this forum.
Every long-lasting forum gradually develops a relatively small clique of core users who disproportionately shape its culture over time.

On .org, these are usually the users who:

• are considered forum chads
• OGs who have sustained consistent activity over the years
• have provided valuable insights/information/guides
• postmaxxers (or shitposters) who brute-forced exposure through sheer output

For simplicity, I will refer to these users as long-term contributors

Below are a few examples of recognisable long-term contributors from earlier forum cohorts:
View attachment 5136323

While contributors can be evaluated along various axes, we need a practical proxy for measurement.
And ultimately, the most important metric here is sustained output, since without output, there can be no visibility or long-term presence.

For this reason, post count thresholds will be used as a measurable indicator of long-term contribution, divided into three separate categories:
1k+ posts → committed contributor
5k+ posts → highly invested contributor
10k+ posts → core contributor

Figure 5A — Long-term contributor formation by join cohort
View attachment 5096943
Users reaching 1k+, 5k+, and 10k+ posts by join year.

Interpretation​

Initially, it would be common to assume that more growth automatically translates into more long-term contributors. However, the data paints a more nuanced picture.

At first glance, the number of users reaching 1k+ posts continues to rise sharply, meaning that the forum is still churning out committed users.
However, when looking at 5k+ and 10k+ contributors, a different pattern starts to emerge, with both cohorts plateauing.
So even though the forum is still attracting users who become engaged, proportionally fewer transition into long-term, deeply invested contributors.

This, too, is significant since we already established that every long-lasting community ultimately depends on a group of relatively small and highly invested users who sustain continuity over time.

At this point, another question naturally emerges: once users become committed, how likely are they to deepen into long-term contributors?

Figure 5B — Deep investment conversion by join cohort
View attachment 5096946
Percentage of 1k+ contributors progressing into 5k+ and 10k+ contributors.

Interpretation​

While the forum continues to produce committed users, the likelihood of those users progressing to deep, long-term investment appears to decline across newer cohorts.
This may also help explain why newer eras of the forum can sometimes feel less familiar to older users.
Recognisable long-term contributors still emerge, but proportionally fewer deepen into highly invested contributors over time.

Earlier cohorts converted into 5k+ and 10k+ contributors at substantially higher rates, especially in the 2020 cohort (indeed a great year to join .org ).
It is also worth noting that from 2021 onward, accounts now have the option to delete, and deleted accounts, while still counted in these figures, cease posting entirely, which may modestly suppress conversion rates in more recent cohorts.

To conclude, the forum still succeeds at creating active users, but at the same time, core depth is not accelerating at the same pace as growth.
This may ultimately be one of the most important long-term challenges for a rapidly scaling forum.

Figure 5C — BOTB contributor formation by join cohort
View attachment 5126735
Number of unique users from each join cohort who made it into the forum's Best of the Best (BOTB) section.

Interpretation​

The distribution of BOTB contributors by join cohort reinforces earlier findings regarding contributor depth, with the 2019–2020 cohorts once again standing out as the dominant cohorts, together accounting for nearly half of all BOTB representation by join year.
Since BOTB functions as a staff-curated archive of high-quality content, independent of raw activity/post count, this serves as an additional qualitative indicator of contributor impact, and one that cannot simply be accumulated through sheer posting volume.

While later cohorts still produced several BOTB contributors, their lower representation is likely structural.
After all, earlier cohorts had the luxury of establishing many areas of discussion that were still relatively underexplored, making foundational breakthroughs and key contributions easier to establish. As the forum evolves, the threshold for genuinely novel, standout content rises accordingly, not necessarily as a sign of decline, but as a natural consequence of a maturing organism building on its own foundations.

---

Part 5 — Moderation​

Question answered:
What does growth cost operationally?

Before moving on, I thought it would be interesting to briefly share a side of the forum most users never really get to see.

Having moderated this forum since late 2020, the change in forum growth isn't just visible in the numbers, it's felt operationally. Growth doesn't only produce more users, posts, and activity. It changes the entire reality required to keep a large system functioning.
Below is one such measure: estimated moderation actions processed per year (simply put, how much work us staff have to put in to keep the forum operational):

Figure 6 — Estimated annual moderation throughput (2022–2026)
View attachment 5096947
Estimated moderation throughput derived from cumulative moderation log intervals.

Interpretation​

Based on yearly moderation log intervals, our estimated workload has increased dramatically:

~39k (2022–23) → ~77k (2023–24) → ~127k (2024–25) → ~333k (2025–26, projected) moderation actions per year.

As the forum scales, so too does the amount of invisible work required to keep it functioning without the forum turning into a complete zoo

More users naturally means:

– more reports
– more approvals/queue processing
– more moderation decisions
– more general operational complexity

Naturally, this means that larger systems also require more maintenance. This is, of course, logical since a small village does not require the same infrastructure as a large city.

---

Part 6 — So… is the forum dead?​

Question answered:
How much truth is there to the claim that “the forum is dead”?

For as long as I can remember, even before I joined this forum, users have repeatedly claimed that “the forum is dead”

Funnily enough, this statement appears in literally every era of the forum’s history:

2019: https://looksmax.org/threads/forum-is-dead-today.76001/
2020: https://looksmax.org/threads/why-is-the-forum-dead.214676/
2021: https://looksmax.org/threads/the-forum-is-pretty-dead-right-now.346771/
2022: https://looksmax.org/threads/why-is-this-forum-so-dead.449811/
2023: https://looksmax.org/threads/this-forum-is-dead.774746/
2024: https://looksmax.org/threads/this-forum-is-so-dead-currently.1068627/
2025: https://looksmax.org/threads/why-is-the-forum-so-dead-right-now.1343621/
2026: https://looksmax.org/threads/dead-forum.1949282/

In fact, a simple search for "forum dead", sorted by "search titles only" across the entire thread history, returns 500+ unique threads across 11 pages of users claiming the forum is "dead"
View attachment 5097927

Figure 7 — Why the “forum is dead” debate never ends
View attachment 5096952
Left: forum growth (active members, 2021–2026).
Right: posts per active user (2021–2026).

Interpretation​

These two graphs explain why the debate surrounding the forum never truly disappears.

On the one hand, the graph on the left suggests that the forum is objectively thriving. Membership growth has accelerated dramatically, and overall activity continues to expand.

On the other hand, the graph on the right suggests that the forum experience has changed.
As mentioned earlier, the average user now contributes significantly less than before, which helps explain why the forum can sometimes feel “dead” despite its continued growth in overall size and activity.

Earlier forum years can be characterised as:

– smaller (another reason it felt “dead” in earlier years)
– denser
– having a higher overlap between familiar users
– having a stronger continuity

Current forum years can be characterised as:

– larger
– broader
– faster-moving
– more transient

This is why OGs who lament the good old days of the forum and newcels who think they are just being nostalgia merchants both have a valid perspective.
After all, they are describing different versions of the same organism.

---

Part 7 — What actually makes a forum survive?​

After looking at all of this data, one question naturally emerges:
What actually allows a forum to survive while continuing to scale?

The data points out that:

• Growth is accelerating
• Activity remains high
• New users continue arriving at rapid rates

At the same time, scaling naturally introduces tradeoffs:

– lower contribution density
– weaker continuity
– more transient users
– proportionally fewer deeply invested contributors

None of this necessarily means that the forum became worse.

It means the organism changed shape

And perhaps the most interesting thing the data reveals is this:

The forum has already solved this problem once before

The 2019–2021 cohorts produced the highest rates of deep contributor formation the forum has ever seen.
However, the forum today is a fundamentally different organism. It is larger and broader, and thus, it will not replicate 2020, but nor should it try.

Organisms are not static since they always adapt.
And the next generation of recognisable contributors is already forming somewhere in the current cohorts, just as every recognisable contributor once did.

Because ultimately:

Every recognisable user,

Every OG,

Every staff member,

Was once

Some random greycel no-name

They showed up consistently, contributed. and eventually:

They became part of the organism

The more interesting question moving forward is therefore not:

“Was the old forum better?” or “Is the forum dead?”

But rather:

Does the current organism still create the conditions for the next generation?

Because in the end:

That is what actually allows a forum to survive

---

View attachment 5096636

@NumbThePain @Randomized @tuberculosisinmybal​

---

damn i used to hang out here back in 2023-2024 summer without an account and i mostly consumed this type of content on social media i wish i had made an org account back then

 

[Macan]

This guy knows, what's up!

 

[Be_ConfidentBro]

It's over

 

[shortbeasts.alt]

Introduction​

Having been a member of the forum for over 6 years now, I’ve seen many users and eras come and go.
During this time, the forum has transformed from an obscure niche community into a massive, mainstream community. Naturally, that has led to endless discussions throughout, where users will argue that:

“The forum used to be better in year X”
“The forum used to be shit, it’s better now”
“The forum peaked in year Y”

Recent discussion surrounding the forum’s historical trajectory, particularly threads by @Daddy's Home on changing forum quality and @Jason Voorhees on forum history/lore inspired a broader look into the forum’s development through actual longitudinal data.

So, instead of arguing from nostalgia or recency bias, I decided to look at the actual data, the numbers behind it all.
In this thread, I aim to provide a data-driven look at growth, activity, culture, and the forum's long-term health.

The goal is not to pick sides or argue that the forum used to be better. In many ways, the forum is objectively thriving.

What I am more interested in are two questions:

• How does a forum change as it scales?
• What actually makes a forum survive in the long term?

---

Part 1 — The scale explosion​

Question answered:
How much has the forum actually grown?

Figure 1 — Forum growth (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096928
Forum userbase growth from 2021 to 2026, including both active accounts and total accounts (including deleted users).

Interpretation​

Over the past five years, the forum has grown from roughly 8.5k members in 2021 to ~170k members today.

Still, this only paints half the picture regarding the historical footprint of this forum.
When accounting for deleted accounts (a feature introduced in February of 2021), the total user base rises from roughly 13k accounts in 2021 (April/May snapshot) to ~438k accounts in the present day.

Before 2023, growth remained relatively modest, but from roughly 2023 onward, the curve began bending upward sharply.
Unsurprisingly, and as many of you will know, this coincided with the forum being exposed to a much broader audience.
Key events here include:

---

Part 2 — The hidden cost of scale​

Question answered:
Does bigger automatically mean stronger?

Figure 2 — Posts per active user (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096932
Average number of posts per active user over time.

Interpretation​

At first glance, as evident in Figure 1, forum growth looks overwhelmingly positive: the forum transitioned from a period of modest early growth into a phase of accelerated, near-exponential scaling, particularly from 2023 onward, after the now infamous TikTok invasion.

However, scale comes with tradeoffs. This is particularly evident in posts per active user.
Back in 2021, the average user created roughly ~640 posts.
Now, in 2026, this figure had declined to roughly ~165 posts.

However, this should not automatically be interpreted as a decline. After all, smaller niche communities are naturally denser than larger, mainstream communities, which the forum has turned into.
As the forum scaled from late 2023 onward, the dynamic naturally shifted: more passive users, more lurkers, less overlap between familiar faces, and shorter engagement cycles overall.

Figure 3 — Threads per active user (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096936
Average number of threads created per active user over time.

Interpretation​

In addition to posts per active user declining substantially, thread creation per user has also dropped significantly.
Peaking in 2022, with roughly ~44 threads per user, this figure has declined to roughly ~12 as of the present day, 2026.

Nowadays, the average user contributes significantly less than before, both in participation and initiative, suggesting lower contribution density.
Altogether, proportionally fewer users are starting discussions, despite more threads getting churned out than ever before.

The forum did not necessarily become weaker. Instead, it simply transitioned into a broader organism.
However, broader communities also tend to feel thinner, which is why you’ll constantly see users claiming that “the forum is dead” (more on this later).

---

Part 3 — Are discussions still deep?​

Question answered:
Has discussion quality collapsed?

Figure 4 — Posts per thread (2021–2026)
View attachment 5096940
Average number of posts generated per thread over time.

Interpretation​

Even though both posts per user and threads per user have declined significantly, interestingly enough, this is not necessarily the case for discussion quality.

Evidently, the change here is not as dramatic.
In 2021, the average thread generated roughly ~16.7 posts per thread.
In 2026, this figure has dropped to roughly ~13.6 posts per thread.

Compared to the considerable decline in both posts and threads per user, as shown earlier, this decrease is relatively conservative.
Altogether, this suggests that threads are still generating discussion, which is clear for everyone to see who uses the forum actively.

While the forum may feel different, discussions themselves appear more resilient than the broader discourse sometimes suggests.

---

Part 4 — Who actually carries a forum?​

Question answered:
Does growth also create long-term contributors?

Before studying the data, it is worth defining what actually sustains a long-term community, like this forum.
Every long-lasting forum gradually develops a relatively small clique of core users who disproportionately shape its culture over time.

On .org, these are usually the users who:

• are considered forum chads
• OGs who have sustained consistent activity over the years
• have provided valuable insights/information/guides
• postmaxxers (or shitposters) who brute-forced exposure through sheer output

For simplicity, I will refer to these users as long-term contributors

Below are a few examples of recognisable long-term contributors from earlier forum cohorts:
View attachment 5136323

While contributors can be evaluated along various axes, we need a practical proxy for measurement.
And ultimately, the most important metric here is sustained output, since without output, there can be no visibility or long-term presence.

For this reason, post count thresholds will be used as a measurable indicator of long-term contribution, divided into three separate categories:
1k+ posts → committed contributor
5k+ posts → highly invested contributor
10k+ posts → core contributor

Figure 5A — Long-term contributor formation by join cohort
View attachment 5096943
Users reaching 1k+, 5k+, and 10k+ posts by join year.

Interpretation​

Initially, it would be common to assume that more growth automatically translates into more long-term contributors. However, the data paints a more nuanced picture.

At first glance, the number of users reaching 1k+ posts continues to rise sharply, meaning that the forum is still churning out committed users.
However, when looking at 5k+ and 10k+ contributors, a different pattern starts to emerge, with both cohorts plateauing.
So even though the forum is still attracting users who become engaged, proportionally fewer transition into long-term, deeply invested contributors.

This, too, is significant since we already established that every long-lasting community ultimately depends on a group of relatively small and highly invested users who sustain continuity over time.

At this point, another question naturally emerges: once users become committed, how likely are they to deepen into long-term contributors?

Figure 5B — Deep investment conversion by join cohort
View attachment 5096946
Percentage of 1k+ contributors progressing into 5k+ and 10k+ contributors.

Interpretation​

While the forum continues to produce committed users, the likelihood of those users progressing to deep, long-term investment appears to decline across newer cohorts.
This may also help explain why newer eras of the forum can sometimes feel less familiar to older users.
Recognisable long-term contributors still emerge, but proportionally fewer deepen into highly invested contributors over time.

Earlier cohorts converted into 5k+ and 10k+ contributors at substantially higher rates, especially in the 2020 cohort (indeed a great year to join .org ).
It is also worth noting that from 2021 onward, accounts now have the option to delete, and deleted accounts, while still counted in these figures, cease posting entirely, which may modestly suppress conversion rates in more recent cohorts.

To conclude, the forum still succeeds at creating active users, but at the same time, core depth is not accelerating at the same pace as growth.
This may ultimately be one of the most important long-term challenges for a rapidly scaling forum.

Figure 5C — BOTB contributor formation by join cohort
View attachment 5126735
Number of unique users from each join cohort who made it into the forum's Best of the Best (BOTB) section.

Interpretation​

The distribution of BOTB contributors by join cohort reinforces earlier findings regarding contributor depth, with the 2019–2020 cohorts once again standing out as the dominant cohorts, together accounting for nearly half of all BOTB representation by join year.
Since BOTB functions as a staff-curated archive of high-quality content, independent of raw activity/post count, this serves as an additional qualitative indicator of contributor impact, and one that cannot simply be accumulated through sheer posting volume.

While later cohorts still produced several BOTB contributors, their lower representation is likely structural.
After all, earlier cohorts had the luxury of establishing many areas of discussion that were still relatively underexplored, making foundational breakthroughs and key contributions easier to establish. As the forum evolves, the threshold for genuinely novel, standout content rises accordingly, not necessarily as a sign of decline, but as a natural consequence of a maturing organism building on its own foundations.

---

Part 5 — Moderation​

Question answered:
What does growth cost operationally?

Before moving on, I thought it would be interesting to briefly share a side of the forum most users never really get to see.

Having moderated this forum since late 2020, the change in forum growth isn't just visible in the numbers, it's felt operationally. Growth doesn't only produce more users, posts, and activity. It changes the entire reality required to keep a large system functioning.
Below is one such measure: estimated moderation actions processed per year (simply put, how much work us staff have to put in to keep the forum operational):

Figure 6 — Estimated annual moderation throughput (2022–2026)
View attachment 5096947
Estimated moderation throughput derived from cumulative moderation log intervals.

Interpretation​

Based on yearly moderation log intervals, our estimated workload has increased dramatically:

~39k (2022–23) → ~77k (2023–24) → ~127k (2024–25) → ~333k (2025–26, projected) moderation actions per year.

As the forum scales, so too does the amount of invisible work required to keep it functioning without the forum turning into a complete zoo

More users naturally means:

– more reports
– more approvals/queue processing
– more moderation decisions
– more general operational complexity

Naturally, this means that larger systems also require more maintenance. This is, of course, logical since a small village does not require the same infrastructure as a large city.

---

Part 6 — So… is the forum dead?​

Question answered:
How much truth is there to the claim that “the forum is dead”?

For as long as I can remember, even before I joined this forum, users have repeatedly claimed that “the forum is dead”

Funnily enough, this statement appears in literally every era of the forum’s history:

2019: https://looksmax.org/threads/forum-is-dead-today.76001/
2020: https://looksmax.org/threads/why-is-the-forum-dead.214676/
2021: https://looksmax.org/threads/the-forum-is-pretty-dead-right-now.346771/
2022: https://looksmax.org/threads/why-is-this-forum-so-dead.449811/
2023: https://looksmax.org/threads/this-forum-is-dead.774746/
2024: https://looksmax.org/threads/this-forum-is-so-dead-currently.1068627/
2025: https://looksmax.org/threads/why-is-the-forum-so-dead-right-now.1343621/
2026: https://looksmax.org/threads/dead-forum.1949282/

In fact, a simple search for "forum dead", sorted by "search titles only" across the entire thread history, returns 500+ unique threads across 11 pages of users claiming the forum is "dead"
View attachment 5097927

Figure 7 — Why the “forum is dead” debate never ends
View attachment 5096952
Left: forum growth (active members, 2021–2026).
Right: posts per active user (2021–2026).

Interpretation​

These two graphs explain why the debate surrounding the forum never truly disappears.

On the one hand, the graph on the left suggests that the forum is objectively thriving. Membership growth has accelerated dramatically, and overall activity continues to expand.

On the other hand, the graph on the right suggests that the forum experience has changed.
As mentioned earlier, the average user now contributes significantly less than before, which helps explain why the forum can sometimes feel “dead” despite its continued growth in overall size and activity.

Earlier forum years can be characterised as:

– smaller (another reason it felt “dead” in earlier years)
– denser
– having a higher overlap between familiar users
– having a stronger continuity

Current forum years can be characterised as:

– larger
– broader
– faster-moving
– more transient

This is why OGs who lament the good old days of the forum and newcels who think they are just being nostalgia merchants both have a valid perspective.
After all, they are describing different versions of the same organism.

---

Part 7 — What actually makes a forum survive?​

After looking at all of this data, one question naturally emerges:
What actually allows a forum to survive while continuing to scale?

The data points out that:

• Growth is accelerating
• Activity remains high
• New users continue arriving at rapid rates

At the same time, scaling naturally introduces tradeoffs:

– lower contribution density
– weaker continuity
– more transient users
– proportionally fewer deeply invested contributors

None of this necessarily means that the forum became worse.

It means the organism changed shape

And perhaps the most interesting thing the data reveals is this:

The forum has already solved this problem once before

The 2019–2021 cohorts produced the highest rates of deep contributor formation the forum has ever seen.
However, the forum today is a fundamentally different organism. It is larger and broader, and thus, it will not replicate 2020, but nor should it try.

Organisms are not static since they always adapt.
And the next generation of recognisable contributors is already forming somewhere in the current cohorts, just as every recognisable contributor once did.

Because ultimately:

Every recognisable user,

Every OG,

Every staff member,

Was once

Some random greycel no-name

They showed up consistently, contributed. and eventually:

They became part of the organism

The more interesting question moving forward is therefore not:

“Was the old forum better?” or “Is the forum dead?”

But rather:

Does the current organism still create the conditions for the next generation?

Because in the end:

That is what actually allows a forum to survive

---

View attachment 5096636

@NumbThePain @Randomized @tuberculosisinmybal​

---

„Together we are, Looksmax.org“

 

[wayler]

Just from my experience, 2025 was better than 2026 but I feel like the userbase here is changing every 3 months or so

Yes it used a lot more active in 25 compared to 26 and even the little amount that are active now are completely different also a lot of big contributers have finally deleted or stopped posting in 26 so the forum feels quite empty now