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Posts
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@bassingbourne55 wrote:
People have voted with their feet… This is only the second post on this board in this month, and we’re 2/3 of the way through it.
This bears out what people say in the old thread – people aren’t really interested in chatting to strangers the’ll never meet now that the initial few years of novelty have worn off.
Most of the active posters on JC now are from forum 3, they post in that section and rarely roam elsewhere on the boards.
I think people are still interested in chatting to strangers they’ll never meet, they just don’t use message boards to do it so much these days. People seem to prefer MSN or Facebook or similar. That’s how it seems to me anyway.
@bassingbourne55 wrote:
Even forums for interest groups like politics, railways, cars or 3D modelling have gone quiet compared with what they were.
Really? The forums for the interest groups that I belong to seem to be going from strength to strength…perhaps it’s not the forums that are dying but the interest in the area of interest…so to speak. :?
@bassingbourne55 wrote:
In my experience using discussion forums eventually leads to having a slanging match with another member, one who usually takes an extreme viewpoint and then condemns you for disagreeing with them! You only lndeed to look at YouTube and how almost any video on any subject attracts comments of derision and contempt from some people.
The internet is increasingly becoming a tool for practical use and high quality entertainment (I mean quality in terms of performance, not content!) and the poor old general chat room and message board will soon become a thing of the past.
Some people do seem to treat the internet as an outlet for their frustrations in real life but on the whole they are a vocal minority. In a forum with a strong sense of community the regulars don’t respond and freeze them out…or have a little sport with them until they get bored and then freeze them out. As for the chat room and message board becoming a thing of the past…I think I’ve been hearing that ever since I started using them. They are evolving but I think they will continue in one form or another for some time yet.
Jen Jen’s right.
It’s not forums/chatting in general that are dying off, it’s the areas of interest.
Back in the 90s/early 00s when we suddenly moved on from BBS to live chatting and fancy forums during the .com boom it was all.. new and exciting. We were meeting people we’d never have met in real life, larger than life characters, people from around the world, it was fun and refreshing.
We could joke, banter, talk about anything and nothing, make new friends.
That… has died off. The net’s become more niché than it was.
A forum targeted towards a particular niché or area of interest is far more likely to succeed than a forum for….. nothing. We’ve done nothing, nothing doesn’t interest any more.
Also social networking has contributed to this, through social networks we can connect with more specific people, we can narrow people down to like-minded potential friends and groups.
But social networks are also slowly dying off as the novelty has worn off – chatting to strangers is, again, slowly on the rise.
So communities targeted towards a particular group will grow from strength to strength as Jen aptly put it, whereas generalized communities and social networks with no particular genre are dwindling as once the novelty goes.. the interest goes.
I fell into this trap a bit, I re-created FC with the same mind-set of the last site, but what made my last site successful will not make the new site successful as the market and target audience has changed. Over the next few weeks I’ll be slowly tweaking and redeveloping certain aspects of the site, creating a specific niché for the community, and then optimize the site’s browser titles, page titles, meta keywords, meta title tags, search engine descriptions etc targeting that particular audience.
I have a love/hate relationship with the internet. That is.. I hate it, but it makes me money so I love it. :lol:
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