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.