The forum started life as electronic mailing list, evolved into a bulletin board, was rebranded as a forum then took over the online research world in many people’s eyes.

Then a funny thing happened to the forum.  It became laden with a huge burden of expectation, with would-be forum-ites demanding cheap, self-perpetuating, plentiful insight from customers.

Is this justified?

What a forum is

• A way for customers to build up online connections...

“there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know.”