I think message boards will be around for awhile. Look at how the Internet has changed since message boards appeared, the boards are still here.
“Message Boards” have been around since long before the Internet was accessible to the general public. Back in the early 1980s, up through the 1990s, until the Internet took over, we called them “Bulletin Board Systems”, or BBSes. In it's simplest form, a BBS consisted of a computer with a modem, set to answer incoming phone calls from users calling in with their modems; typically having only one phone line and allowing only one user to be on at a time. The user could post messages,and read messages that had been left by other users. More sophisticated forms operated in a loose network, wherein certain times of the day were designated for the BBSes participating in a network to call each other and pass messages around, rather than taking calls from users.
My wife and I met over a BBS network, called FidoNet. Back then, these BBSes were mostly inhabited by stereotypical nerds—intelligent, shy, socially-awkward male computer geeks, desperate for female companionship and unable to obtain it. I was probably one of the more extreme examples of such. Perhaps you can imagine the disturbance when a user identified herself as female, and expressed dissatisfaction with the dating prospects in her area. I consider it miraculous that I was the one who succeeded in attracting her attention to me, and convincing her to consider me as a possible romantic interest. After some months of corresponding, she made the trip from her home in Reedsport, Oregon, to visit me in Santa Barbara, California. Four days later, we were engaged, and a year after that, we were married, and we have now been married for almost twenty-one years.
