4 ms·
> Their focus on shallow and short term "engagement" means useful stuff disappears forever and experts get tired of answering the same questions repeatedly. Th
by Melting_Harps 6y ago
> Their focus on shallow and short term "engagement" means useful stuff disappears forever and experts get tired of answering the same questions repeatedly.
That's pretty much a distillation of why I never understood the wave of Social Media; it appeared to be a dumbed-down and watered-down version of what the Internet was created for and the promise it had in the 90s into the early 2000s for me as kid. Limited engagement via sensationalism at the cost of actual substance and community, it was the junkfood-ification of the Internet I loved and much like junkfood it has caused all sorts of maladies as malaise seems to be a part of the UX these days.
I'm still part of a forum that was a fork that happened from an earlier forum, where that exact situation happens; the older guys form the early days who migrated to the new site reference a thread from the old forum and just say 'go search.' The issue is that while the original forum still exists, it has the worst indexing and makes it near impossible to look up the keywords without getting threads for like 20 other issues that have nothing to do with your search, something that oddly reminds me of the early days of using search engines before the days of Google.
- brlewis 6y ago> I never understood the wave of Social Media; it appeared to be a dumbed-down and watered-down...junkfood... I'm confused. Before the semicolon you're claiming you don't understand the wave of Social Media. After the semicolon you demonstrate perfect understanding of it.
- findthewords 6y agoThey are using the colloquial expression of not finding it appealing.
- Melting_Harps 6y ago> They are using the colloquial expression of not finding it appealing. Correct.
- forgotmysn 6y ago..understood (the appeal) of social media....
- brlewis 6y agoThat it's dumbed down and watered down explains the appeal.
- culopatin 6y agoAlso isn’t a forum an earlier version of social media anyway? It was social and it had media, where is the line?
- smsm42 6y agoForums are built to support and foster discussion. Social media is built to feed dopamine addiction and sell ads. Forums have features to make long-term content and prolonged, thoughtful debate easy. Social network praise short-term satisfaction, emotional (over)reaction over thoughtful consideration, and actively discourage any attempt at organizing and preserving information.
- shi314 6y agoLine is how much you focus on ad optimization.
- _jal 6y agoFB, et al are about selling you to advertisers, not being useful. I have no idea, but I'm guessing archiving useful information would "suppress engagement" by actually answering your question rather than generating tabula rasa discussions for the nth time.
- mauvehaus 6y agoAnd yet, all those forums manage to pay their bills with ads. Generally relevant ones, too. And vendors who have a good track record get a lot of word of mouth advertising for free. I (mostly) lurk on the machinery forum, but I know who I'm going to call when I need new bearings for any of my equipment. Is the problem that VCs only fund companies that go for broad but shallow appeal so they can make a huge exit with less effort compared to building a useful community, or am I missing something?
- _jal 6y agoI think a big part of it is exit potential, yes. Content plays, especially the sort of niche stuff we're talking about, come with built-in "addressable audience" limits. There are a few niche forums I've been visiting for a long time. You can build a very loyal audience. And I can even think of ways they could extract more money from me than they do - I think they can make great businesses that provide steady income. But you are never going to see an X000% pop from your investment in a metalwork or sculpture forum.
- nsxwolf 6y ago> It does a poor job of handling long threads where people refine their hypothesis based on new data and questions the OP answers. Exactly. I enjoy reading some homebrew game development forums for old computers, and some threads go on for 5 or 6 years. You can watch a community go from talking about an idea to slowly iterating it toward a finished product and then a long cycle of support and improvements. You can't find that kind of attention span on Twitter or Facebook.