Gargantuan
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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)
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)
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)
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)
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
Below are a few examples of recognisable long-term contributors from earlier forum cohorts:
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
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
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
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)
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"
Figure 7 — Why the “forum is dead” debate never ends
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
– 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
@NumbThePain @Randomized @tuberculosisinmybal
