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.