No and honestly I am tired of wasting my time on people like you who make idiotic insinuations like this. We buy forums that were created just a few years ago and are actively pursuing buying forums created even less than that. These forums were built from the ground up by people who were passionate about their topic. I am not going to go back and forth with you on this issue. I stand by everything I said in my original post.
Facebook Groups will not kill forums. Period. Are they doing some cool things that maybe forums could look at? Possibly. Never once said that they didn't do somethings better. This urgency by some to completely want to rethink forums is ridiculous though.
Brent, I never said that facebook will totally kill forums, now you're the one spouting hyperbole. You said "
At the end of the day, we care about our communities because we are invested in them in one way or the other. I was 17 years old when I started my first forum and I am sure others here can date that back even longer and to an even earlier age of the internet.", as if facebook group admins aren't invested in them and don't care about them, and you do because you've been doing it for so long. That's why I said what I said. Anyway, sorry if I picked up on that more so than I should have.
What I'm trying to say is that facebook groups are definitely housing many of the new generation of potential forums admins. There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of communities getting cultivated and grown on there. Those who know what they're doing like yourself will do just fine with traditional forums. You have years of experience in community management and funds to sink into optimising and making money from your forums.
I'm speaking as someone who is observing daily the activity explosion happen in many active groups, and also as a facebook group admin myself.
Many new potential admins will just think to themselves "Hmm, lets give this facebook group a go for this topic I'm interested in", and then boom, they have a very active community that keeps growing and growing and they're locked into it. Facebook are now making sure that their feature set will expand in order to keep those admins within the network.
Then someone will start arguing away from that when called out on it and then the conversation will turn to actual productive things like algorithms to present already existing content in a better way or making it easier to upload videos.
That is where the conversation should be, not a complete overhaul of forums to be "like facebook".
I agree and this is exactly what I am talking about. lol, you list all the topics I've spoken about in various posts around various sites. Algorithmic alerts, video upload, onboarding, content discovery, profile completion, bettery content discovery of those you're friends with/engage with the most. I'm not saying forums should be
exactly like facebook. But guess what? All those features are on facebook and we both agree that forums could benefit from them.
What I'm saying it's got some useful features that we need and users now expect that we need to emulate. Whatever way you look at it though, if you start to emulate some of the features others will say you are making it more '
like' facebook. The fact is, the objective is to make whatever community you run it into a platform that users want to use with features they want to use. It doesn't matter who implemented the feature first. The features either work to drive engagement, allow users to discover or rediscover content better, share the type of content they want to share easier, allow members to connect directly with other members more easily in such a way to strengthen the relationships of everyone within that community, or they don't.
I've yet to be involved in a Facebook discussion that has any sort of depth or breadth to it that a forum provides. Are these actually going on on Facebook and I'm just missing them?
There definitely is some, depending on the group. It is tough with the way everything is so compacted. There's definitely an emphasis on immediacy rather than depth on there, which works for many fledgling communities starting out. That certainly hasn't stopped me encountering some very long posts within threads that reach decent post counts quite quickly. I wouldn't be surprised if they end up starting to alter the group presentation to allow better viewing for long format discourse at some point. They could expand the layout and stick a few extra ads in between the posts.