>>2868836Imageboards aren't dying because of any intrinsic flaws in their design, but largely just because of the culture around them. 4chan is by far the biggest imageboard around and sucks all oxygen out of its competitors simply by proximity. The issue is that 4chan is actively repellent to most quality posters by virtue of the (largely deserved) reputation as "that website for retarded nazis" which it has fostered since the early '10s. As a result, the biggest influx of users they've had in the past fifteen years is to this day made up of 2016 election tourists, and the most active and culturally significant boards on the website like /pol/, /b/ and /r9k/, are all overran with them. All the while, the more benign interest-focussed boards like /a/, /v/, /lit/, /fa/, etc are running on fumes, fueled largely by the same group of oldfags which have been using the site for decades by this point. The slow trickle-in of comparatively newer users brings with it only further culture war baiting and low-effort trollposts, so the quality of posts on the site is in a continual noticeable decline. At the same time, all the biggest alternative chans cater towards people who manage to get themselves banned off of 4chan proper, and are accordingly unusable shitholes and/or glorified fed terrorist recruitment forums from the start. The only way you're even going to be aware of the existence of better imageboards is if you've been around to see this fiasco from the beginning or if you've found yourself attracted to 4chan-adjacent culture, which means that the target demographic is made up of a continuously shrinking cohort of oldfags and a larger group of low-quality post-2016 posters (obviously generalizing here). The only way you're meaningfully going to be bringing in new blood is by producing OC posts and memes that can be organically shared across other forums and social media, thus bringing in interest in the source board.
Frankly, the idea to pivot this website to a setup more like traditional forums or social media is a non-starter. You're never going to be able to out-reddit reddit or out-twitter twitter, those markets are already thoroughly captured and both already contain far-left ecospheres. It's also just undesirable to begin with. Imageboards, for all their flaws, have unique quirks which are worth preserving. The ability to post anonymously and the fact that posts are cyclically archived means that there is an incentive towards discussion with a low barrier of entry that just isn't there on other types of websites. This is why, somehow, /lit/ is still one of the places on the internet where you're most likely to see actual discussion of books, and how a weekly post on /v/ about a niche game routinely manages to hit the bump limit and stir more meaningful discussion than that game's subreddit does in multiple months. This is true for this website as well, users are way more likely to weigh in on an ideological discussion if they don't have to worry about upsetting whatever hugbox they're posting in.