Is Sythe dead?

I remember when Sythe was booming, just getting back into OSRS and dipping my feet into the black market/providing services and it seems as it Sythe is a lot less active than it use to be.

 

The market is not dead. The community outside of it, is. The biggest factor of that is due to once active participants growing up, having a change of interests, and or a busy life. Everything does not last forever. The website is mainly market designed and that aspect of it is very much alive.

 

That is understandable albeit sucks, I can remember the off-topic forums being very active back in the day. As I was browsing the forum today, it looks as if all this is anymore is 'bumps' to their thread and that's it.

 

i recently joined and it seems like a dead forum, it sucks how no one really engages with one another, and you're right about the people who just bump their posts to sell shit an not contributing by posting in other threads, its kinda annoying and they come off as scammers imho

 

This community has been around since 2005, so it’s not hard to believe why its activity has drastically dwindled since then. We also have to keep in mind that this website is primarily used as a Runescape blackmarket with no close second. If there was an overhaul in market appeal and incentives to continue discussion, then there could be a revitalization. I’m not going to fault anyone for not participating in discussion outside of the market, with the community in its current condition.

 

Forums in general are outdated and no longer the popular tool of communication and messaging online now, Discord and social media in general has taken over.

So yes it's sad but change is inevitable, the golden years of the late 2000s / early 2010s are behind us now.

 

well i like the pokeball and pokedex badge you got, idk how you got it but i would participate more if i could get that too, or other cool badges, but yea it would be nice if other members participated outside the market and i hope the forum improves in that regard

i mean discord is cool an all (even though i kind of have a distain for social media in general now) but the nostalgia of communicating on a forum hits different, but i definitely miss those (early internet) days, i wish we could find a way to bring that nostalgic feeling back

 

my wallets says no

 

There's a market section for these, you can also earn them trough community events

 

i'll check it out, also, i just recently found out about the community events, they recently had a pokemon event where community members battle each other (on a website i never knew about) and i thought that was cool af, i definitely want to participate in the next one to try and get a pokeball (or any other related) badge

 

There's also discord events every weekend ^

 

Forums* in general are just not very popular anymore in terms of discussion and socializing. There's better and more preferred methods for general and gaming discussion e.g. Discord.

Sythe's market is still active because Discord has strict rules against cheating communities, so users find value in that feature despite the archaic format that is web forums. Sythe was born on the premise of cheating, so it continues to be a haven for those interested where more popular formats are to risk-adverse to allow cheating.

The general discussion community will never be what it was in this forum-based format because of better platforms like Discord though. Older generations who had an emotional attachment to Sythe are long gone, in their late 20s, early 30s, having families, working jobs, and having no time for the edgelord toxicity that stayed behind here. Newer generations prefer a consistent location for their various communities. I dip in now and again out of curiosity and am always reminded the golden age is long gone.



There's also one specific paradigm shift that Discord and Reddit offers that Sythe could never: self-administration.

When a new trending game comes out, Discords channels and sub reddits can be spun up by just about anyone. Many channels will be created, a few will boom, one or two might solidify into an active community. All you as a user have to do is find them and join the channel, and then you can just context switch between channels depending on your interests on an given day. Sythe, conversely, is infinitely more rigid. It's the same stale view day after day. You don't just get to spin up a new subforum. You don't get to take a stab at leading the platform into a new trending game to capture that initial buzz. All you get to do is submit a suggestion, wait for 4 months for it to get approved (or likely denied), and IF it's approved, then an administrator needs to create the forums.

By the time ALL THAT is finally accomplished, Sythe will have missed the buzz. Interested gamers have already found their preferred channels elsewhere, there's zero incentive to switch to sythe for an optically dead subforum. For example, Pal World. It went from 2+ million concurrent players for a month straight, and barely 3 months later it plummeted to an average 100K or less. Sythe could have NEVER captured that new community because the buzz would have died by the time they spun up the forums to capture the new users.

And that's why you rarely see new subforums created here: because it makes no sense to try and beat the rush when Discord channels can be sprung up en masse with little to no effort to soak up that buzzing interest. Sythe's only possible play is to wait for a game to prove itself to be a gaming staple, and THEN accommodate their EXISTING users with some forums on the subject. That's not a growth tactic, that's an appeasement tactic for the current (shrinking) userbase.



tl;dr sythe has no means to attract new social users outside the market; any new users are often drive-bys with no interest in a community outside of their discord world, and just want to purchase some cheats.