What is the state of Broadwayworld now in 2025?

I participate in a variety of forums about different topics, and this one has by far the most deliberately rude and obnoxious members. I agree that this behavior is generally limited to a relatively small slice of the larger population, but that slice comprises a nasty lot of know-it-alls who dominate the threads with posts that reek of condescension and gleeful malice for no apparent reason. It seems they just enjoy it. While not a solution, the only thing that helps at all is generous use of the "Block" feature.

I'm on with musical and Broadway sub Reddit. Ernengarde's summation is spot on: much younger, lots of repeats, and no sense of community. The backbitong is still there, but you are less likely to see it unless I you are a part of it. Once you read a thread, you only know of additional comments if the have responded directly to you.



One thing I love here is the sense of community. I feel I "know" many of us (good and bad). There it's more random and removed.

Things ain't great.

As with many anonymized forums, people seem to come here specifically to be as vile as possible. I was scrolling a post yesterday that immediately became a platform to trade barbs rather than discuss the topic.... it was so severe and nonsensical that it was almost comical. Though I loathe the incessant injection of politics into every gahddamn thing, I can't say I don't struggle with making that mistake myself because of our national circumstances. 'Digital Humans' have not learned how to also be decent humans. I'll wait.

To those who post with interesting bits of tid, insights and come to exercise their love of theatre - THANK YOU. You're the reason I still come here.

I'm over at the Broadway Reddit page more and more. This site is becoming unbearable with all of the trolls and endless, annoying pop-up ads and videos. No pop-up ads over at Reddit. The lone issue with Reddit is your thread gets pushed downward the longer it's there and they're hard to dig up again.

I thought I'd respond to binau's question about ATC, since I check it every few days (though I don't participate to any significant extent). The big attraction there is the presence of several posters (a few of whom post here as well) who are very knowledgeable about Broadway history and the nuances of the business. I go there specifically to listen in on some rather detailed and high-minded conversations on these topics, something which is now pretty rare on BWW.

It's clear that the users there skew older, and although the tone is generally more polite than it is here, ATC has its share of grumpiness and long-standing animosity.

The big downside is the very stunted state of technological advancement (even compared to BWW). The format is very old-fashioned, basically just a Craigslist-style list of links; every conversation passes off the first page after a few days and is basically dead after that. (One advantage of the format is that I can immediately see which posts I've read and which ones I haven't.) They've also had some internal technical issues recently that have made it difficult to use the site at times, though they're working to fix that.

BorisTomashevsky said: "It’s just a microcosm of what’s going on on the street. It makes perfect sense."

No it doesn't. But I guess if you like to disrupt or talk negative about things you would say that.

In my experience, the best discussion forum for the theatre arts right now is going on in the more specialized Facebook groups like Professional Music Directors, Musical Theatre Orchestrators, etc. Unfortunately those aren't actually PUBLIC (or at least are picky about who they let in), so for now BWW forum is the best place that anyone can read or jump into, for better or worse.

I think Reddit has more useful information at times, like things about discounts or ways to get tickets, the daily rush report, and now a new weekly understudy thread. What bothers me is that sometimes it can turn into an echo chamber. The voting paradigm means that if there's an opinion a lot of people agree with it gets upvoted, and other opinions get downvoted so unless you read through an entire thread, you'd only really see people agreeing with each other. There are a few times when I've seen actually interesting discussion happening, but a lot of it is more surface level.

I recently found that ATC has a "flat mode", which is way to see all the replies on the same page instead of needing to click into them. I haven't used the site overall that much but that alone makes it MUCH more appealing to me so I might give it more of a shot. But there also doesn't seem to be as much engagement as on here. A lot of posts have 0 replies and are basically just the press release.

Some of the Facebook groups can have pretty interesting discussions as well (two in particular that come to mind are Finishing the Chat, for Sondheim specifically, and Broadway Remembered). I do think it's more of a mixed bag, as some people really have a wealth of knowledge and some people really don't, and it's also not organized into threads like this where all reviews pertaining to a specific show would be under the same thread, so you often see repeated questions or posts made by people who didn't realize a prior post already existed.

Overall, the Broadway Reddit seems a lot more fanboy / fangirl-y to me. Every time I go there (which admittedly, isn't a lot) the top threads seem to be about who stage doors, how amazing [insert actor] was last night, things that actors posted on IG, etc.

What I appreciate about here is that there are number of users with industry knowledge and historical knowledge that are willing to share insights. The preview / review threads are extremely useful to me as someone who only visits NYC a couple times a year.

The moderation is definitely better on Reddit, as evidenced by the MHE thread that has gone completely off the rails, but overall I find the content here a lot more useful, entertaining and insightful. I just wish the boards here were better moderated cause we all know, it only takes one or two people to hijack a thread!