Once upon a time, since before the World Wide Web existed, in fact, pipe & tobacco forums were primarily a repository for information. The tone was more academic, research, and expert oriented. Threads stuck around and were referred to and added to.
The last great Old School threaded forum went away after a technical error erased the decades (centuries?) of man-hours that went into it. The "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" dynamic kept people from ever using it again in significant numbers.
At about the same time that occurred, so-called "social media" bloomed because storage and bandwidth stopped being consumer-level constraints. And as soon as that barrier fell, platforms were created to provide a steady stream of ephemeral content and reward participation. Platforms designed to exploit how human brains work.
Such platforms are great for harvesting personal information and creating vast numbers of addicts who will be forced to look at advertising all day long to receive their limbic hits, but not good for the sort of thing that threaded forums did so well.
In the dozen years or so since the shift began, a large percentage of the older gentlemen who had a lot to contribute to the subject of pipes and tobaccos aged out, while a large number of people who'd literally never seen a pipe in the wild came aboard. The latter were also people who'd grown up with social media and brought their expectations with them regarding technology and---especially---immediacy and convenience.
That a threaded-style forum exists at all in an age of mobile-using social media dominance is the surprising bit, not how repetitious or superficial it is. Kevin has given pipe smokers what they---in 2019---said they wanted. That it boils down to little more than running log of social back-and-forth is a sign of the times, not poor design or implementation.
