Where are people going for Vegas discussion?

The forums here on the LVA site used to be awesome. There was so much participation that I would learn stuff or be entertained without personally posting a question, although I would when I had a particular question.   What are some places to go online where there is alot of participation? I assume interest in Vegas hasn't declined that much, if at all, but it seems to have left here (the forums) long ago. 

 Let me make it clear, I'm not slamming LVA, I have been a member many years, and plan to be many more. I just want to find a place that provides what these forums used to.

I agree, also long & will remain a member. Vegas Fanatics, Vegas Message  Board, LasVega4ever, all have good info.

ksouth, my opinion, the re-design resuted in discussions being less "out there" than they were in the older system.   You could see at a quick glance who was posting and what about, easy to keep up with an ongoing discussion (or cat fight, LOL).  But the way Forums are set now, someone starts a topic, asks a question, maybe one or two folks respond, if that many, and it dies out pretty quickly.  (With the glaring exception of the political rhetoric on Kitchen Sink.) 

There is the Q&A section (not QOD), a 'repository' of frequently asked questions from the past, with updated relevant information.  Remember "What is the twenty dollar trick?"   LOL.  I suspect Q&A was created to reduce the repetition of such questions in the Forums, though I don't know how it would prevent that.  It is set up to allow us to reply, but few do.  And it must not be monitored because I've seen no replies to the few replies! 

The QOD section is distinctly awesome, IMO.  Outstanding researching and explanations.  And they often elicit a lot of discussion from posters.   And the way the QODs are archived is great.  You can find any topic from the past and all the discussion that ensued.   We can go on vacation and still read all the QODs that were done while we are away.

The Polls, they elicit a lot of discussion.

The Blogs elicit some discussion.  The Pod Casts...well...

And I really like the News of the Day section.  Can't reply to it, though, which is probably a good thing.

Thanks for the shout out! 

I also check these out, as well as TripAdvisor Vegas forums.

I, too, feel these forums are not as busy with the new formatting...not sure why.

If you look there are fewer message boards (on all topics) than there were ten to fifteen years ago. The ones that remain are generally less active than they were in their glory days. The new ones that cover the same topics as the old ones never reach the same highs in terms of users and activity that the old ones did. 

The discussion board business is so bad that a lot of the companies that made commercial discussion board software have gone broke moved on to providing other services and or radically changed their policies and procedures.  For example, I had a lifetime vBulletin license that was supposed to provide me unlimited updates and support. A few years back they simply changed the terms and said nope your lifetime license doesn't mean what we said it meant. It means you have to now pay if you want security updates and patches. They explained that they simply couldn't stay in business if they didn't change the terms. 

The reason for the decline of message boards is the rise of social media. All of the volume discussion about literally any topic can be found on Facebook via groups, Reddit, YouTube, and Twitter. If you do a YouTube search for Las Vegas related topics you will likely be shocked by the volume of videos and information available.  Google's search engine algorithms reinforce this bias. You could spend tens of thousands of dollars creating a discussion forum on any particular topic and you wouldn't be competitive in the Google rankings. For example, if someone searched for Las Vegas related topics they would likely be provided, ads, recent Las Vegas YouTube videos, recent Twitter posts relevant to Las Vegas, Reddit posts that cover Las Vegas, Trip advisor pages that cover Las Vegas and finally results from independent websites and discussion forums.  Ten to fifteen years ago the same type of search would likely have lead to places like the Las Vegas Advisor and the now-defunct Open Vegas first.   The overall point being 18-30-year-olds have already been conditioned to look to social media for discussion and any type of discussion forum has problems getting enough oxygen (search engine traffic) to prosper or even remain viable.   

If by some miracle somebody created a viable active community on a subject yet uncovered by social media they would soon find that they were supplanted. As soon as someone saw the viable discussion board, they would create Reddit subs, Facebook Groups, Tweet and make YouTube videos that covered the same subject. 

I agree.

I  started LasVegas4ever back in 2008.  It grew and was pretty active for quite a few years but social media brought that to a screeching halt.  (So I started a FB group too in 2015)

I understand the attraction of Facebook and Twitter etc in that they are so immediate.

 But there is something to be said for a forum in which the question you asked hasn't scrolled off into oblvion in a few hours if it gets no responses. (Yes I know there is a search feature but people rarely use it.)

Also I liked that boards/forums had more of a family feel to them.  You got to know your regulars.

My board and thousands of other were taken over by Tapatalk in 2017. They took away my abilty to make a few dollars from Adsense.  They are always changing things and we all hate change.  I have had members tell me  "I can't even figure out how to log into your board anymore...I give up"

For years I kept trying new things to try and up the activity but I have sort of given up now.

I frequently think about closing my forum but mainly just keep it around for the die hard friends that still visit.

Blonde4ever, I love hearing about your experiences as a webmaster/web author. I think for a travel blog/site to be successful these days it has to be all about YouTube. That is where all of the traffic is for that type of site.

People prefer to watch a video trip report that shows the room the person stayed in, the food they ate and the attractions they went to. The old written style reports just don't compare to being able to see the real-time reactions in the video trip reports.  At best the old written reports tend to have just a handful of pictures and most don't have any.  Since the report is usually written after the person returns home, a lot of details are missed that get picked up in the video reports. 

I am thinking about doing a travel vlog myself. I am in the early planning stage but the idea would be to shoot a lot of videos (cameras are cheap these days) and eventually get the YouTube channel rev share ads. (You need 120 hours of video to do that) In the interim use the traffic from the youtube videos to send them to a smaller site where I sell them something through affiliate links or my own product/services. 

I have suggested a couple of times here that AC ought to consider doing video content.  He has an existing brand that would do well in the Las Vegas video niche on YouTube.