Originally Posted by
moondog
I can sort of hypothesize why trending and/or new posts pages aren't appealing from IB's perspective; their SEO value is probably close to zero. The pages that attract views from the internet at large and can be marketed to them are presumably popular airline forums like BA (we've been told of its greatness many times) and travel hack type content (e.g. mileage run deals) that competes with blog sites.
The thing is, a lot of the people speaking up in this thread are the among the much smaller group of content creators who happen to enjoy trending threads.
Stripping away that functionality might seemingly be a smart use of IB's resources in the short term, but if the content creators drift away out of boredom, then the quality of the remaining content will diminish.
I googled “best seat on United 777” on my work computer- which I never log into Flyertalk with, and never use for personal browsing.
The first link related to Flyertalk is the 21st result and links to a blog post from Jan 9, 2020, not the forums.
the 28th result is the UA thread “Everything You Want to know about where to sit on a 77-200 Polaris…”
The SEO for the forums is…dismal, at best.