Discussion for article #233985
Online Forums: A chance to organize your thoughts into a cohesive engaging conversation. A bit like gathering in a room with group of people to talk, even if that room can be quite large. It doesn’t guarantee an engaging conversation, but it at least allows for it.
Twitter: Shouting at the top of your lungs from a street corner at cars that drive by, while hold a atrociously spelled cardboard sign.
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Seriously? I know there are slow news days but…seriously?
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I belong to not one but TWO listserve groups. No kidding.
D
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TPM has been my favorite go to online forum since I started reading the comments in '05.
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Harumph. The Internet has been going downhill since the Long September.
When Usenet started to founder.Long Live the memory of the great pirate corsair Ayeffdeequeue (alt-fan.dan-qualye, and its great Dan Quayle Quotes file, its long-running naval battles with the bewigged Tories of the HMS Burke (alt.fan.edmund-burke), and its trolling raids on the bottom-feeders of alt.fan.rush-limbaugh.
I get a whole lot out of facebook, where I interact with a strong community of users in my mountain region, but have found no good replacement for fairly in-depth conversations, like we used to have on usenet.
Our forum of fans of the great San Francisco Giants, which has its origins (I am told, I wasn’t there) on a dial-up bulletin board, has successfully migrated to Facebook, and we have mechanisms for ejecting haters (we have established both the existence and the rarity of polite and articulate Dodgers fans). We had a good political thing going in a Facebook group "Rasta Cabinet: I got to be the Secretary of Energy …but to keep things civil the group has to be closed, which limits its reach. We shut down the group when it got sclerotic.
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27,000?
What a piker.
Hell I have 14,518 here at TPM just since they shifted over to their proprietary commenting system from Disqus a little while back. My total here at TPM over the various platforms they have had for commenting must be well into the high-end of the 6 digits (and would honestly not be shocked if I have cracked a million). That’s to say nothing in the other forums, Facebook, etc. I have participated in over the years and to the present day.
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I still maintain that Twitter’s only use is to afford pols and celebrities a chance to say something stupid that can be blown up into a big kerfuffle.
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My online home has always been the Well which started as a bulletin board in California in 1985. I joined in '93, dialing in long distance to have a chance to hang out there (and it all cost by the hour back then, there weren’t really ISPs yet. To reach the 'net you had to accept a service license that swore you would never use the Internet for commercial purposes. How times have changed!).
We’re having a party for our 30th anniversary next month but it’s not clear whether we’ll survive. The Well is a small for-pay community that never hit 10,000 members, and over the years we’ve definitely seen the same drain on energy and population you’re talking about. There are a couple thousand members still but many of them rarely post to the public spaces.
I’ve worked as a professional host and moderator for various online communities over the years and seen many of them mishandled by their owners or shuttered when they didn’t bring in the cash. It’s always terribly sad for the people forced out, because the relationships we form online can be as real as any we have in meat space.
I hope the Well survives. A group of members recently bought the whole shebang from Salon, which bought it from a private owner years ago when they still had Table Talk and were sort of vaguely interested in online community. So at least we aren’t the pawn of corporate owners any more. But it’s very hard if not impossible to fight against the pull of free services like Facebook and Twitter, which have cannibalized much of our membership.
I can’t even begin to count how many posts I’ve made in the 21 years I’ve been there. I met my husband on a Muse many years ago because of the Well. I am still there every day and if we finally shutter the place it will leave a huge hole in my life and my heart.
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I met my husband in a discussion forum. We both used to have a lot of fun there, met a lot of interesting people, went to some great parties. Then the crazies took over and it’s no fun any more.
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Everybody out of the TPM pool.
Andgetoffa’mylawn!
TPM. This place is my only real online home-away-from-work-- since it’s inception in 2000.
Among the scant few posters above-- I’ve enjoyed DJ’s and Lestat’s wit and wisdom for many of those years.
Still a great place to read what intelligent-types think.
jw1
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Don’t make me go all Sally Fields on you.
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Either Han Solo OR Indiana Jones would be sure to survive a crash.
I think you are in the wrong thread.
Really, TPM? Bless your heart.
Each person uses what works for them. I do twitter and facebook and here, and a forum designed for crafters, but which hosts groups for liberal politics, wingnuts, and everything in between as well. It works for me.
I’ve lost count of how many forums I’ve been on. I started out on Usenet, moved on to message boards, and now primarily use Twitter and Tumblr. I actually started missing one message board I read a while back and went there, and pretty much all my favorite posters weren’t using it anymore, which made me a bit sad. But people move on. Interests change. Technology changes. It’s part of what makes the internet so interesting.
I find that Facebook brings a lot more people into the conversation. Usenet discussions could go into great detail and flamewars could go on and on and on. That’s less likely to happen on FB where every discussion has a Moderator.
Having started on Usenet in 1994, I’ve found that experience valuable. There was only one way to defend yourself on Usenet and it was with your words. On Facebook you can shut someone off. On Usenet you had to outwit them. Or, as the Mad Hatter once noted, you had to fight them in a way they hadn’t seen before.
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Holy crap!
That was prescient!
http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/harrison-ford-crash-lands-ww2-vintage-plane-on-golf-course-survives?
jw1
I was a regular on Salon’s Table Talk for many years. I still miss it. A whole bunch of political bloggers got their start there.
Writers got to write. That is why I don’t find 27,000 posts on one online forum to be outside the range of normal behavior.
Recently a friend of mine who has been posting to his little blog every week wrote he was going to quit because of his age, eyesight and health. That retirement lasted about 3 days.
He is also active on a professional list serve and facebook. I guess he twitters as well. Writers got to write.
For me the really interesting questions concern the impact of social media on the creation and transmission of information and ideas. We know the internet has really impacted newspapers and television economically. I suspect social media has had a big impact on other aspects of society. Social media sure has given people who love to write a place to publish. I wonder about the impact of social media on productivity, but I think there is far less impact than most believe. What about politics? How politically active are people who vent their frustrations online?