Are Facebook groups that much "better"? I've not been very active in the few I joined (and eventually left). They seemed to attract more derp than the forums (at least the reloading group I was in for a while).
Chris
I'm sure facebook is a large part of the drop, including here. I'm not on it, but having seen how "posts" are setup on it, it seems to me it would be difficult to carry on the same types of conversations we have in topics here in any logical structure. Much in the same way viewing Twitter conversations confuses me. The only way I can abide them is via Twitchy, where a dozen or more "conversations" are combined into something similar to a single post on a forum. Maybe they make more sense if you have a Twitter account, but the randomness drives me crazy.
Also on the email thing, I occasionally run into sites that won't accept my gmail address because of their spam filter.
Tangent: An analog is email and texting. Nobody wants to email me anymore, they all want to text. Especially bad with the 30 and under crowd (and I'm sure they say the same about me in the reverse). I don't mind texting that only requires short replies (in fact I prefer it over a phone call), but I hate getting texts that require me to type in long answers. I'm selling one of my dad's rentals for him right now, and the real estate agent, who's probably in her late 40's, constantly texts me questions that require long ass answers. My response is always "check your email", where I answer her using a freaking real keyboard, which is ten times as fast for me as using the dinky phone virtual keyboard and having to correct autocorrect on every other word.
EDIT: For clarity, my tangent is equating email to forums and texts to social media.