Post by Tommy Huynh on Sept 24, 2016 8:49:42 GMT -8
There are tons of Facebook groups out there - I, myself, am part of a group that has over 40k members and it is active. This organization also has other child groups in addition to its parent group. They are subsequently named: GROUPNAME [region], GROUPNAME [state].
As you can see, with a global community base of over 100k, this can become disorganized very fast. I approached the main staff of these groups about the idea to migrate to a forum. Some of the benefits were organization, better search, and ability to monetize. However, despite all of the palpable benefits, the organizational admins declined and opted to run their community entirely on social media. Why do you think that is?
1) Ease of access / Mobile
Everything is right there and always with you.
2) Push notifications
Someone commented on your post? You know that instantly. With forums you have to make a conscious effort to visit the community.
3) It's connected to everything else
Apps! Friends and family are on it.
4) User interface
More streamlined and easier to use.
It's mainly that different generations have been brought up on different expectations. Before the massive population of mobile devices, the way you accessed the internet was via PC, and on the PC the best places to be were, message boards.
You have a whole generation now of people whose first introduction to the internet was via a mobile device, and they never saw message boards much. In the same way a record player would confuse a 20 year-old today, message board software confuses the young, mostly mobile user. Because they have zero experience with it. And their expectations are pretty much set by their mobile experiences.
They will share and comment anything on post on the Facebook groups, but if I post a link for them to check out the site, and say something like "here it is, and sign up to join us in conversation at the site" they barely click and they don't ever register.
Too much work involved in registration and not enough instant gratification.
My observation is that internet users are being trained by social media to primarily be consumers of content and not creators of content. Things like Twitter posts, Facebook comments, and "likes" are very low effort. People are lazy, and the huge ecosphere of ad-supported content-stealing-and-remixing clickbait sites out there are competing for attention but they don't encourage real participation and real conversations like a forum does. And yeah, you could leave a one-word reply on a forum, but the forum posts that have value and get attention are the ones that are a paragraph or two or offer some sort of insight.
We do see a change that social media is creating in posting habits. It becomes increasingly hard to get members to stay on topic and to post in the right topic. For many years now people have become used to posting instantly and replying whatever to whatever they see on their mobile screen. They are not going to browse your forum nodes to find a place to post. They will just dump their thoughts in the first forum or thread they find. This is so far from the intention of organized forums that it keeps messing threads and forums up. And moderators are overrun on such a scale that we risk ending up with an unorganized messy cloud of posts.
What's appealing about Facebook is not your circle of friends but the fact that you can join various groups and pages which is the equivalent to joining various forums and websites and have their updates all come up in the one feed. A forum is just that 1 forum/site, when nothing interesting is happening for that topic on a given day then that's it, and when it is you might miss it if you don't log in on that given moment. Whereas on Facebook whilst one group is quiet another of many groups is buzzing it's all there in your feed to grab your attention to it.
This common behavior requires new approaches to forum functionality.
All of us were confused at our first experiences with message board software. The difference is, we took the time to learn it.
So to my fellow forum admins, how should we focus? What can we do to ensure our forums will never die (especially the admins who have spent money lol)
As you can see, with a global community base of over 100k, this can become disorganized very fast. I approached the main staff of these groups about the idea to migrate to a forum. Some of the benefits were organization, better search, and ability to monetize. However, despite all of the palpable benefits, the organizational admins declined and opted to run their community entirely on social media. Why do you think that is?
1) Ease of access / Mobile
Everything is right there and always with you.
2) Push notifications
Someone commented on your post? You know that instantly. With forums you have to make a conscious effort to visit the community.
3) It's connected to everything else
Apps! Friends and family are on it.
4) User interface
More streamlined and easier to use.
It's mainly that different generations have been brought up on different expectations. Before the massive population of mobile devices, the way you accessed the internet was via PC, and on the PC the best places to be were, message boards.
You have a whole generation now of people whose first introduction to the internet was via a mobile device, and they never saw message boards much. In the same way a record player would confuse a 20 year-old today, message board software confuses the young, mostly mobile user. Because they have zero experience with it. And their expectations are pretty much set by their mobile experiences.
They will share and comment anything on post on the Facebook groups, but if I post a link for them to check out the site, and say something like "here it is, and sign up to join us in conversation at the site" they barely click and they don't ever register.
Too much work involved in registration and not enough instant gratification.
My observation is that internet users are being trained by social media to primarily be consumers of content and not creators of content. Things like Twitter posts, Facebook comments, and "likes" are very low effort. People are lazy, and the huge ecosphere of ad-supported content-stealing-and-remixing clickbait sites out there are competing for attention but they don't encourage real participation and real conversations like a forum does. And yeah, you could leave a one-word reply on a forum, but the forum posts that have value and get attention are the ones that are a paragraph or two or offer some sort of insight.
We do see a change that social media is creating in posting habits. It becomes increasingly hard to get members to stay on topic and to post in the right topic. For many years now people have become used to posting instantly and replying whatever to whatever they see on their mobile screen. They are not going to browse your forum nodes to find a place to post. They will just dump their thoughts in the first forum or thread they find. This is so far from the intention of organized forums that it keeps messing threads and forums up. And moderators are overrun on such a scale that we risk ending up with an unorganized messy cloud of posts.
What's appealing about Facebook is not your circle of friends but the fact that you can join various groups and pages which is the equivalent to joining various forums and websites and have their updates all come up in the one feed. A forum is just that 1 forum/site, when nothing interesting is happening for that topic on a given day then that's it, and when it is you might miss it if you don't log in on that given moment. Whereas on Facebook whilst one group is quiet another of many groups is buzzing it's all there in your feed to grab your attention to it.
This common behavior requires new approaches to forum functionality.
All of us were confused at our first experiences with message board software. The difference is, we took the time to learn it.
So to my fellow forum admins, how should we focus? What can we do to ensure our forums will never die (especially the admins who have spent money lol)
