Are forum communities obsolete?

Here's a first hand account of the "Facebook effect".

Peggy said:
Actually, the forum at http://mahoningvalley.info/forum/, which Shaun linked to above, is the only other forum for this area/my city. This seems to have been an ongoing issue for years here. When I first started the forum, it was a joke among the locals on my MVT twitter account. Stuff like "Oh here we go, yet another discussion forum for Youngstown. I wonder how long this one will last" was a daily thing.

Something I discovered from the ONLY member to reply to my email about closing the site, was that a few other people have tried to do the same thing, and no one is interested. Everyone hangs out on Facebook. Not only our neighbors and residents, but our newspaper reporters, TV news anchors, city officials, state representatives, etc. That is where everyone is, and no one has any desire to go elsewhere to talk about what they already talk about on FB. *shrugs*
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dieketzer said:
it was probably vbHome then. iirc it was the best at the time.
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Right, it was vbhome

Here's a screenshot page.webp
 
Fred Sherman said:
Can't hide behind a disclaimer...
http://www.jdoasis.com/woman-sues-dating-service-over-sexual-assault

Civil suits are much easier to file.
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/te...cost-me-millions-filmmaker-20090715-dl4t.html

Human nature means people will always look to blame someone else for their misfortune. If personal responsibility was typical, McDonalds wouldn't have been sued because coffee is hot. So they look for the person who created the situation, a person with a real name. If you run a forum full of anonymous users, the last identifiable person in the chain is you.

As for "bad judgement", what is the purpose of a "dating site"? Could you reasonable argue in court that such a site isn't intended to bring people together in the real, non-digital world? Doesn't the name suggest enabling interpersonal contact?

The reality of forums is that you have to protect yourself from your users and their families as well. What if your site was a Euthanasia site? Heaven knows we are more humane to our terminally injured animals than to our terminally ill friends and relatives. But run a site like that and you can expect all sorts of criminal and civil suits. No amount of disclaimers will protect you from the family of a recently deceased user because they were never bound by it.

I think there are certain types of forums, the ones that go beyond just sharing opinions and benign information, ones that either overtly or covertly support some type of real world action, where the forum owners have to engage is a "threat assessment" and act accordingly. You can't regard the government as a threat and blindly ignore that the users, who we often protect too much, m,ay be just as big a threat.

And sometimes you just accept it. I ran a political discussion site for many years. Every user identity was completely protected and I was audited by the IRS every year for 8 years in a row.

There are no hard, fast rules other than this: first, protect yourself.
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Maybe this is a good time to use the conversation feature, since it's off topic. I'll reply there if you want to join me.
 
Digital Doctor said:
Here's a first hand account of the "Facebook effect".

Peggy said:
Actually, the forum at http://mahoningvalley.info/forum/, which Shaun linked to above, is the only other forum for this area/my city. This seems to have been an ongoing issue for years here. When I first started the forum, it was a joke among the locals on my MVT twitter account. Stuff like "Oh here we go, yet another discussion forum for Youngstown. I wonder how long this one will last" was a daily thing.

Something I discovered from the ONLY member to reply to my email about closing the site, was that a few other people have tried to do the same thing, and no one is interested. Everyone hangs out on Facebook. Not only our neighbors and residents, but our newspaper reporters, TV news anchors, city officials, state representatives, etc. That is where everyone is, and no one has any desire to go elsewhere to talk about what they already talk about on FB. *shrugs*
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You can't start a forum and say, "OK everyone in this geographical area, talk here." That has never worked well, even before Facebook and Twitter.

You need to give users a reason to participate. Content is a good reason. Unfortunately it is the expectation of many forum owners that users will generate the content, as appears to have been the case with mahoningvalley.info and other Youngstown sites. It's like offering people a sandbox and expecting them to bring the playground equipment.
 
Jake Bunce said:
You can't start a forum and say, "OK everyone in this geographical area, talk here." That has never worked well, even before Facebook and Twitter.

You need to give users a reason to participate. Content is a good reason. Unfortunately it is the expectation of many forum owners that users will generate the content, as appears to have been the case with mahoningvalley.info and other Youngstown sites. It's like offering people a sandbox and expecting them to bring the playground equipment.
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I'm very keen on developing local communities. I believe the future is local. Somewhere along the line, people are going to realize the Net needs a reality based anchor, and people will want a home base. Right now the Net is very fractured and getting more so by the day. I don't think that's sustainable over time. I believe "social media," is a bubble that will burst, as its users are destined to suffer major burnout some time in the not too distant future. It's not going to go away completely, but it will have to be transformed.

With smart phones, I believe local is the next big thing, but developing a community needs to be very well-thought out (essentially because it's new and there aren't very many success models). You can't just slap a forum up there and expect people to show up. As Jake said, "you need to give users a reason to participate." You also have to do local outreach and not rely on google search to populate your forum. People are generally not looking for that when they go online. (btw, AOL's Patch has got people working the neighborhoods, handing out flyers at the local supermarket.)

This is a wide open field and I think people like us need to get on it as fast as we can before "they" (I'll let you fill in who "they" are) get there first.

As I mentioned earlier URBAN75 is a good model for local online community. If they can garner 40,000 users in London, why couldn't other geographically-based forums succeed elsewhere?

The question is, what are they doing right that everyone else has been doing wrong.
 
Jake Bunce said:
You can't start a forum and say, "OK everyone in this geographical area, talk here." That has never worked well, even before Facebook and Twitter.

You need to give users a reason to participate. Content is a good reason. Unfortunately it is the expectation of many forum owners that users will generate the content, as appears to have been the case with mahoningvalley.info and other Youngstown sites. It's like offering people a sandbox and expecting them to bring the playground equipment.
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I honestly don't know how you could add more content than I already have. Local news items for discussion, upcoming events, neighborhood happenings, controversial topics for debate.

I've invited a news reporter and a neighborhood watch group leader to check over the site and content, to tell me what's missing, what I could do differently to attract people to post. One of them very honestly answered me. " to be honest Peggy, you have quite a lot of content to discuss/debate, etc. Problem is, I have no interest in joining another site when everything I need, and everyone I want to talk to, is on Facebook. All you have to do is add the discussion app to your FB page, and a discussion forum becomes unnecessary, in my opinion".

There's no way to argue with that.
 
Peggy said:
I honestly don't know how you could add more content than I already have. Local news items for discussion, upcoming events, neighborhood happenings, controversial topics for debate.

I've invited a news reporter and a neighborhood watch group leader to check over the site and content, to tell me what's missing, what I could do differently to attract people to post. One of them very honestly answered me. " to be honest Peggy, you have quite a lot of content to discuss/debate, etc. Problem is, I have no interest in joining another site when everything I need, and everyone I want to talk to, is on Facebook. All you have to do is add the discussion app to your FB page, and a discussion forum becomes unnecessary, in my opinion".

There's no way to argue with that.
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Was it your own content or was it syndicated from other sources? You can't succeed if you just pull content from larger publications. And discussion of other people's content is not enough. You need your own content. I like the local events idea. That could be successful if you are organizing and publicizing your events exclusively through your site. But more generally, it sounds like the space you are trying to occupy is already filled. In that case you need to be a worthy competitor. Offer something different, unique, better than Facebook does. Facebook did it to Myspace. Or if you don't want to deal with the competition then you need to find an unoccupied space to fill.

Back in the day I ran a Mac news site. That space was already filled by many established Mac news sites. So I tried to distinguish my site by only offering news gathered from my own personal sources, and offering my own insider perspective since I was directly involved in Mac sales and repair. I remember attending MWSF and taking pictures and benchmarks of new hardware right on the show floor. Then I would post that on my site. I got published by some big hardware sites including nvnews.net. But ultimately I didn't have the time to commit to keep fresh content coming in, and I wasn't willing to hire staff to help me.
 
Peggy said:
I honestly don't know how you could add more content than I already have. Local news items for discussion, upcoming events, neighborhood happenings, controversial topics for debate.

I've invited a news reporter and a neighborhood watch group leader to check over the site and content, to tell me what's missing, what I could do differently to attract people to post. One of them very honestly answered me. " to be honest Peggy, you have quite a lot of content to discuss/debate, etc. Problem is, I have no interest in joining another site when everything I need, and everyone I want to talk to, is on Facebook. All you have to do is add the discussion app to your FB page, and a discussion forum becomes unnecessary, in my opinion".

There's no way to argue with that.
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You've done a really nice job on your forum. :)

But let me ask you, what's going on in Mahoning Valley? If the community is trying to grapple with real issues, like debt, forclosures, unemployment, that most of the country is dealing with, then "talk" isn't going to get them all fired up. However, a way to take "action" might.

Perhaps you might think about how your forum could be presented as the tool to help them take action that solves real problems? Localized forums have the advantage of bringing people together to accomplish things. It's where the rubber hits the road, as it were. It's not like a theme based forum where people gather just to chat about a common interest.

As far as FB, I guess there's nothing anyone can do to tear people away once they get comfortable there. People are creatures of habit. Think of AOL users who still haven't figured out they don't have to pay a monthly fee to get email. They don't realize people have moved on. Someday FB users might be the ones who got left behind.
 
erich37 said:
just deleted my FB-Login App.
Facebook is totally crap.
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I have to disagree, in fact I am creating a site to try to get people away from FB groups and back into a forum setting. More so my site will be focused on a FB mass as members. The only way to register will be to use the FB connect feature, using a register form is disabled. This is helping create a smooth seamless connection between my site and FB.
 
Mike Edge said:
I have to disagree, in fact I am creating a site to try to get people away from FB groups and back into a forum setting. More so my site will be focused on a FB mass as members. The only way to register will be to use the FB connect feature, using a register form is disabled. This is helping create a smooth seamless connection between my site and FB.
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Sounds like a nice mission ;).
Kier said:
Six hundred million people would disagree with that statement.
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I don't think that they all really like it...they're just there bcuz as Floris said, the masses are there and so we all have to follow blindly.
 
Mike Edge said:
I have to disagree, in fact I am creating a site to try to get people away from FB groups and back into a forum setting. More so my site will be focused on a FB mass as members. The only way to register will be to use the FB connect feature, using a register form is disabled. This is helping create a smooth seamless connection between my site and FB.
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Good luck having Facebook controlling all your members. Hope they never decide to make that a chargeable service, if they do then suddenly all your members won't be able to use your site.
 
People use Facebook to connect quickly to lot's of people...because FB is brand recognizable and has a great mass it will gravitate more mass over time. I have come to not have anything bad to say about FB anymore but just don't use it myself. I use forums because of what they are and the fact that I can only think of forums and very few specific blogs that have ever helped me to better understand many things. I guess I'm just not very social. :-) I wouldn't say anyone has to follow facebook blindly but if one was to take advantage of FB integration in their forum they are in fact exposing their forum community to hundreds of millions of people potentially. Or do what I do and just don't mess with any aspect of it and not worry about it and continue to use forums. Either way the option is there to just not use it so it does not bother me one bit.

As far as forums being obsolete...LOL.
 

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