Public's perception about forums and what we can learn from IMDb's boards

[Wing]

And yes I know its a very simplistic worldview. Maybe naive or utopian. I want to see many unique forums not under one central control, ownership or guidance. I like winners AND losers.

Good thread. Will track it.

The issue is... this is a great mindset that I am sure we all share... BUT the general populace seems to care more about Reddit than all the unique forums/ownerships out there. So although your outlook is GREAT! How do we change the mass-culture of the new generations to think the same?

 

[Kleazy]

The issue is... this is a great mindset that I am sure we all share... BUT the general populace seems to care more about Reddit than all the unique forums/ownerships out there. So although your outlook is GREAT! How do we change the mass-culture of the new generations to think the same?

Yes I can see that.

Majority of people prefer convenience, easy life, simple, fast. vs. truth, merit, virtue etc.

Example; obesity is wide spread because munching a donut "feels" good is easy and instant sugar rush high vs. merit of nutritional food, fasting etc. Same for their social media they want the one SM that is build into their phone that everyone else is using (confirmation boas).

The majority of SM audience wants:

• convenience easy access
• group belonging, copy paste what others do

I will not compete on those values instead offer an alternative on the things that big box platforms simple can not offer. The human touch community. Lead in that field and followers will love it. Forums never died. Mine started in 1999 and will never go away.

 

[TPerry]

seems to care more about Reddit than all the unique forums/ownerships out there

Or could it be more the fact that there are (at least until the API prices kill a bunch of them) a slew of dedicated mobile apps out there to interact with that centralized site?
The biggest issue is a large part of society consumes on mobile.... so getting a downloadable app out (not PWA which most users don't know about) could help. The issue with (as I've said several times before) a dedicated app is it's going to usually be "first party add-on" specific and admins will lose a lot of feature when compared to the web.
The downfall on mobile interface is it's not really targeted towards longer detailed posts. It's happier in those SM 250 character or less posts and such.

 

[Suzanne O]

I remember when my space was around. It changed and it sucked again. Facebook came only to be invaded by pests.
Reddit came and it turned out to be a load of over moderated garbage.
Forums have not died.

 

[Suzanne O]

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

just something that you might think is going to be ok but isn't ok when using facebook groups

 

[Taylor J]

That should just be common sense.

 

[Mendalla]

The downfall on mobile interface is it's not really targeted towards longer detailed posts. It's happier in those SM 250 character or less posts and such.

This. Have I bashed out long posts on my phone? Sure. Did my arthritic fingers hate me with a passion afterwards? You betcha. Mobile has its limits with any kind of messaging.

 

[TPerry]

That should just be common sense.

One thing about common sense... it's not that common, especially in todays age.

 

[briansol]

This. Have I bashed out long posts on my phone? Sure. Did my arthritic fingers hate me with a passion afterwards? You betcha. Mobile has its limits with any kind of messaging.

mobile also has voice to text advantages, though. dictation can save the long-thumbed responses.


I partially agree with the concept of 'forum is to discuss the content'. Not fully. Because, a good portion of the content IS the forum topic. Perhaps it can be an article, etc, but really it's a post someone starts to share something and others respond to it and read it over the years.

All of my highest post views are in what i call my reference section. Oddly enough, it's read-only. So, basically it's curated posts and such that we've moved there and took out the bloat of replies.

But, I do follow the idea.

imdb was like that.
I play guitar and a lot of tab sites are like that, but again, it's 90% "you did it wrong, it's this way you moron" responses...



Long story short, I'm not 100% sold on it as the 'correct' way a forum is used. Thinking way back 20 years, most/all of the big boards were just boards. no sites. no gallery. no articles. no attachments. Use imageshack.
then they got acquired by the 3 big names and ruined.
and then photobucket & imageshack 404'ed half the internet and all the pictures died.

and that's when the forums all started to die off because corporate greed made them suck, ad bloated, dead pics, un-usable themes, and all the OG's left for greener pastures because they got annoyed with it.

So, I don't blame reddit or facebook or twitter. I blame money and greed. Free information became a profit and loss statement. To some extent, I'm guilty too. While I never went too crazy with ads, my site was very profitable for quite a few years in the mid 2000s and I spent more time managing ad sales then i did content or forward-thinking. I almost quit my job because I didn't need it. Luckily, i didn't because it didn't last forever. The ads dried up. The culture changed. Kids today don't do the things i grew up with 25 years ago that made it a hit.

I guess it's kinda like owning the last disco in the 80s. Glam metal was the thing, not roller skating to the beegee's.

Hey, some people still like the beegee's. I think.

 

[ForumFan]

My point is that XenForo is a discussion platform, not an article management system.

You are buying apples and expecting oranges.

XenForo is a forum. Expecting article publishing capabilities from a forum seems a little odd to me.

People wouldn’t install Wordpress and expect a full XenForo style forum as default, so what Is the difference in expecting article management tools similar to Wordpress?

Similarly, with some html knowledge plenty can be achieved using the built in article forum type and custom fields.

I am not against the idea, but I think article delivery is the responsibility of us as webmasters not XenForo, a forum developer.

Or you can have both... a Wordpress blog and a XenForo forum in the same website. That's what I did. Though, admittedly, I haven't really leveraged the blog side of the site much.

This is about IMDB's forums where they talk about how they miss it since they closed it years ago. This thread was created hours ago.

I fished out for you those messages relevant for us to make a point.

As you see, this is how the population sees us, this is their perception:

It has been my contention that the special interest social media pendulum has already started it's BIG swing back towards forums (like ours).

Forums have a LOT of advantages over the Big Tech social media sites. The ability to curate / archive topics in a forum is huge. Forums are far more easily searched, too. Forums are not a single linear "feed" like Reddit or Facebook. Forums are versatile and organized. Forums are generally owned and run by an individual / private owner rather than giant corporations who are more inclined to censor and ban users that could jeopardize their "ESG scores" or don't toe the politically correct line du jour. To wit... "Facebook jail." A lot of people are getting tired of it.

We STILL hear the canard that "forums are dead." Baloney. Mine's a bit over a year old and growing very nicely.

 

[Mendalla]

mobile also has voice to text advantages, though. dictation can save the long-thumbed responses.

I have had mixed results with voice typing. I can't exactly use it when I am sitting in my office posting on a break and I have an awful tendency to edit on the fly, which voice typing is not so good for, rather than typing the whole post and then editing.