Forums are a dying niche from the early days of the internet. There was a reddit thread the other day about “what do you miss about the old internet” and a lot of people were missing forums and chat rooms. gCaptain is a niche within a niche, perhaps a testimony to the mariners commitment to doing things the way we’ve always done them - with technology from the 90’s.
r/Maritime has 13.2k members and apparently had over 100k visitors last year. Dont know what the stats are here, I’m seeing 14,000 monthly visists but who knows how many actuve users that is. The conversation here is just as useful on r/maritime.
I don’t agree that the conversation at r/Maritime is necessarily as useful as here. Reddit seems more towards the social media side of things then some subject specific forums.
It seems true of other topics as well, for example I more often get better results from Stack Overflow, more likely to get an answer from a professional forester on the Forestry forum etc.
Traditional internet forums were better than Facebook/Reddit
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Reddit definitely skews towards a younger crowd, and admittedly about half of r/maritime is people trying to understand the SIU apprenticeship or get their OS papers, but when folks do post topics of conversation there is usualy good feed back. I see, and have even asked, obscure ecdis questions with good answers all the time.
There were 9 new posts there in the last 24 hours, compared to here just having articles pinned to threads for the most part. There could have been more, because I block most of the accounts posting news articles (of varying quality. )
The difference is, mariners are already scrolling reddit on watch, so they’ll see new questions without having to come over to a specific website that may or may not have interesting updates.
This one is a little less intuitive because you’d need to know to ask r/marijuanaenthusiasts because r/trees was already taken by the potheads. 
Lots lf the niche subs for trades and hobbies are full of knowledgeable people, its just a different format.
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There’s some interesting threads there on a lot of different topics but I mean r/maritime. For example there an active thread here on Safety Management Systems, I didn’t spend much time but didn’t see much on Reddit. on that topic. Just in general this forum seems to go more in depths with a wider range of mariners.
I’ve found some good conversation at r/nautical before.
The maritime related reddit subs are pretty generally pretty quiet with mostly people who have no clue asking how do i get a job or whatever, even compared to this forum. I do get a lot of use out of r/askHR r/safetyproffesionals and a few other management/work culture subs that are now relevant to my job. Forums as a media have been in decline for a long time, this is a great forum bc of its niche subject matter and that we do often have great participation from subject matter experts, however I’ve been pretty quiet on here for some of the same reasons other people mentioned in the other thread. If i see someone asking for advice on here I try to chime in, but otherwise there’s not as much value as there was say 10 years ago.
Edit: I just realized the membership is muchhh higher on r/maritime than when i looked a few years ago. Previously r/nautical had the higher membership but still less than now. I’ll have to check r/maritime more often.
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