Community New Year, What can we do better?

[Le Pertti]

We are a small community and we have our ups and downs but overall we do good. But I was wondering how could be be better?

Im mostly reflecting on that throughout the years we have lost a bunch of the old guard, the same group of people that went from NeoGAF to ResetERA and to here. Everyone has their own reasons but we all got along well at least I found it until they started to leave one by one.

I was wondering what is causing this? Like I would personally want to know if I in any way contributed to an unwelcome atmosphere?

Has anything here made you personally feel unwelcome?

 

[xinek]

I think forums in general are just dying. Which is tragic.

I know the forum is pretty diverse geographically, so not sure how much this applies to others, but as someone from the USA, I've noticed a complete intolerance or inability to cope with any opinion that doesn't agree with one's own. And I do notice that here sometimes. But that's not something that can really be solved; it's just a consequence of social media bubbles and polarization in general. Not sure if that's actually why people leave, though.

 

[fantomena]

Forums are dying and the fact that this forum is still standing is remarkable. If you see other forums, ERA, GAF, whatever, there is lower and lower activity on them too.

I think this forum should simply keep going until there's no activity left. Everything ends after all and I've had a good time here.

Some people say Discord is the new "forum", but I very much disagree.

 

[ExistentialThought]

Ditto on thinking it is mostly forums being a dying breed. My guess is forum users are likely trending older and it is easier to have more responsibilities compete for your free time. I know that is what has happened in my case. I read the majority of the Steam thread, and poke around a bit, but it is hard to spend more than a half an hour a day connected here. I still enjoy it and think more folks outside of this community would also enjoy it, but it is a catch-22 of never having quite enough users to naturally grow and sustain, but also keeping a nice little community where I have read some interesting things and found some really cool media without some of the drama that has occurred in forums of yore that were much larger than this.

Aside from this, biggest elephant in the room is having healthy threads outside of the main Steam thread, but again, it is a tricky situation as it requires enough users to see and want to participate in threads outside of the main Steam thread. As someone who mostly lurks these days, I do appreciate the other threads, but rarely find myself posting in them when I really try to post more outside of the Steam thread.

 

[Parsnip]

My guess is forum users are likely trending older and it is easier to have more responsibilities compete for your free time.

100%.

But yeah, forums don't have an appeal for a lot of people, and it's sad because discord and social media certainly aren't a replacement.

Perhaps I'm an optimist, but I also think that forums will make comeback at some point, in some form.
Anecdotal of course, but people are getting tired of social media entirely, not just because melon bought twitter and all that. Coming to a realization that water cooler chat of the entire internet is maybe actually not the greatest thing since sliced bread. Like I've seen people start their own blogs again, and using RSS feeds to actually get their own curated feed of actually interesting things instead of the firehose garbage feed of social media. But it's hard to tell if that's just 40+ years old people doing those things again and reminiscing when internet was good felt better.

 

[Le Pertti]

You all might be right about forums in general. But it all seemed so dramatic whenever someone left, not only would they deactivate their account and then even delete friends on steam and such. One resent example would be Desque, or Deku, think he had been with us since NeoGAF days right? Like what happened there? Made me sad to see.

 

[Stevey]

I used to post on the 3DR forums before they closed, then a lot of us from there had a private forum and a STEAM group.

Same thing happened there, people just left, others left, blocked everyone or put their STEAM profiles to private.
It's shit, but it's just what happens, I honestly don't think it's anything we're doing, people just leave for whatever reason.
Like now we have a discord where probably like 10-15 people post, it's nothing like what it was but what can you do?

 

[Parsnip]

Once upon a time I admined/moderated a fairly large and active game music forum, but as time passed on people just kind of left there as well. At the time spambots also started to get "smarter" so it became a bit of bother to keep the forums clean for the few of us that remained. So we eventually decided to lock the forums down and put them into archive mode. Actually not sure if the archive is still up.
We still have a discord channel and the main website remains up and runs a game music radio. The radio listener peak also isn't what it used to be, people just end up using spotify and such for that purpose more these days, game music radio isn't "unique" anymore. Anyways.

People from the old days pop by in the discord every now and then and as everyone probably expected, everyone got olded and priorities just shifted over time and game music moved to the background.

 

[LEANIJA]

As others have said, I think life just gets in the way and people fluctuate in and out of forums and other communities; its not necessarily any specific reason related to the forum per se that would make people leave. But no new people coming in is a problem. Ive been part of a gaming/films community since about 2000, and its been slowly dying in the past ten years or so – and it was sad to see. I think there it was definitely a mix of people getting older, interests shifting and time constraints; and lack of user influx.

I think to keep a forum going, you just need a healthy influx of new people (because people inevitably leave), and people that dont just shitpost or troll, obviously. Its so much nicer to interact with nice people (obviously)
But joining a forum can be daunting, so thats always gonna be a bit of a barrier...(it might be easier if there is a certain number of active members: the more, the easier it might feel)
and also, finding the forum might not always be easy. I learned about this forum by accident, and who knows who else would love to join but doesnt even know about this place?


Anyway, as for me, what I could recommend to users here, and just in general for good communication

• try to be clear in communcation (dont write one-line twitter-like things that make sense only if youre well-versed in obscure internet slang);
• at least write a little bit in your postings on your own (dont just post links or gifs or videos without anything else);
• accept that other people have other opinions (try to see the world less in black and white, evil and good, etc);
• try to be less negative (criticisim is obviosuly fine, but try to refrain from just shitting on things people enjoy, unless there is a very very good reason);
• stay on topic (dont use the Steam thread for any random topic or article link);
• use the other threads (they exist)...
• there is probably more but I cant think of anything else right now. And I wanna stress these are just what I feel are good tenets to follow when engaging in conversations.

Oh and if you get annoyed by anyone or any topic, try the Ignore function (at least for a while) – or just step away from the forum for a few days. In general, I can recommend to be offline inbetween, its good for your mental health.


In conclusion, be excellent to yourself and each other.