I'll throw out a pet theory/unpopular opinion? In earlier days there weren't 28 blogs and 72 1/2 YouTube channels devoted to every single niche topic on the face of the earth the way that there are now. In those times, one might visit a message board to share or look for advice on something firearms-related. Now, it's just about the least efficient way to convey information.
For example, you might hypothetically post a thread asking for an opinion on a specific product that's been on the market for a while. If the post generates a moderate level of interest, you'll likely end up with about 30 responses that shake out something like this:
-10-15 of the responses will be from people who have no firsthand experience with the topic at hand but will throw that "they heard..."
-10-15 responses will be completely unrelated tangents
-The remaining handful of posts will be by people that are actually adressing the topic with firsthand experience, but very few people reading the post will have any sense of what level of expertise is being brought to bear to answer the question.
In summary, you can get an iffy answer to a question over the course of a week or two from a message board, or you can google that same question and find the same or better information from a known-quantity source.
Beyond advice/experience posts, it seems like pretty much everything else devolves into something political, which is pissing into the wind 100% of the time.
That really just leaves BST as the single feature that shines vs better and/or more readily available sources of information.
Thanks for listening to my TED talk.
