I don't go to talk about my favorite games anymore because it's all circle jerking and 'My favorite' topics over and over again no theories or anything that requires thinking that you can't just post a WIKIA link too or otherwise they think your trolling.
I got banned because I incited deeper thought conversation which is supposedly a crime now that can't be covered by a wiki article or something. 😢 Nobody gives a shit now beyond 'I broooooooke my Swiiiiiiiiitch' or 'Grandma got a free Swiiiiiiiiiiiiitch!' which gets 500 or more votes. And most posts are just memes of people doing shitty things in their game offering no conversation pattern beyond hive mind responses.
My eyes are really bothering me so I cannot explain better. 😢
The reason you aren't seeing forum growth despite the success of BOTW is twofold: reddit has eaten the forum space and the overwhelming majority of players are bugmen casuals whose idea of nerding out is buying funkopops.
Tangential note: NFT's seem to be a scam and joke, but they still are a better purchase than a Funkopop figure because they don't clutter your house.
How come on Youtube there's all sorts of serious players that actually give a damn and want to break the limits of the game and find all there is to find? Unfortunately YT has made it so you have to be literally live on the chatroom to be seen which goes by too fast. I'm on a computer and most people are on phones so it's all f'ked up.
YT is great for lore videos but sucks for discussions of said videos.
I figured with how popular BOTW is (and still is) someone would make an ultimate BOTW website where all discussion can take place there and people can share experiences, Criticism, funny moments,etc and art/media,etc. Back in 1999 if BOTW was released I can guarantee people would have been creative with websites on it much like Ocarina of Time was.
You live in the age of the walled garden corporate internet. The time you remember of a half dozen search engines, each actually requiring going through multiple pages, and investing effort into figuring out which of two dozen different fansites you found from culling though those were actually good is gone.
Most of that lazy approach lies at the feet of many more people getting easy pocket access to the internet with smartphones, which are much harder and slower to navigate with. Easy first answers and whatever friends recommend get much more popular and sort of turn into black holes catching any other created sites in their orbit and crunching things down to one central source.
As plenty of other people have now explained, once you have that one centrally located critical mass that destroys the ability to have any other reasonable population site discussing something, it turns into a tempting target for outside predators and parasites looking to turn "we discuss this game" into "you must repeat the right politics first if you also want to talk about this game on the side."
I've noticed that too everything is 'politics first' now. BOTW discussion or any Zelda game discussion for that matter is moved aside for stupid meme pictures and 'Gee Har Har Har' which is actually the name of a shrine.
Also a name of a shrine s 'Jee No Shrine' which pronounced 'Gee No Shrine' and yes it actually is no shrine they just give you the spirit orb as a 'blessing'.
What is it like to navigate the web on a phone?
What are bugmen casuals and funkopops?
Bugmen casual as in your average metropolitan consumer with the attention span of a flea who has to look at his phone every few minutes. Casual in the sense that they don't play the game as much as hardcore players do.
Funkopops are these stupid little action figures.
So would they be the people in BOTW who boss rush to the final bad guy and ignore all the in between moments and not caring at all about the livelyhoods of some of the memorable NPC's? Yes there are a few out there and they thank you if you do a sidequest/save them,etc.