Backstage - OOC Forums
General Discussion => The Speakeasy: OOG/Off-topic Discussion => Topic started by: Wanoah on 08 Jun 2012, 16:30
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You know what I miss? Forums. Yeah, you heard me! :P
All aboard the Nostalgia Train
Last night, I was talking with my SO, and we were both caught up in a wave of nostalgia for All Things Eve. A lot of what I miss is the interaction with other players now that I have this Eve-shaped hole in my life. A big part of that interaction was through various forums.
I started my Eve trial in 2004. As I recall, the tutorial then consisted of undocking then and being told how to mine a veldspar asteroid. Thanks CCP! I went to work that afternoon somewhat bemused, but with a sense that this game might have some of the atmosphere of Elite. At work, I started reading the forums to try and get a handle on this odd game, and thus began a long-term blight on my productivity that persists to this day.
The Eve-O forums were still pretty usable in 2004 as I remember. Well, CAOD was likely a joke from Day One, but the other areas still had a reasonable signal-to-noise ratio. General Discussion was already on its way down, though, and as time went by I began to notice that the moderation left much to be desired. The mods slavishly followed the rules laid down for them but had no remit to moderate for quality. All sorts of rank shitposting and idiocy not technically against the rules was allowed to stand while perfectly decent posters clocked up warnings for having signature images one pixel too wide, or bytes over the size limit.
For the record, The Intergalactic Summit was always shit.
The major alternative to the Eve-O forums was a site called EVE-I. This featured a number of useful tools for Eve pilots (and a few not-so-useful ones too) several guides and a very active forum. It became the de facto replacement for the official forums. Importantly, it also had regular posts from people that had been arbitrarily banned from Eve-O.
[spoiler](http://www.wanoah.co.uk/images/eve-i.600.04.jpg)[/spoiler]
Like many people, I was shocked when EVE-I disappeared from the web overnight one day in 2005, never to return. There was never an explanation. The guy that hosted it disappeared too. It seems unthinkable that such a successful and active hub of the community could go like that, without any kind of succession plan, but it did. What was left, was a gaping hole in the Eve community and no immediate contenders to step in as a replacement.
EVE-I died at just about the time I joined Ushra'Khan and was starting to get into EVE RP. I guess I kept busy with the alliance forums for a while before someone (Khaldorn Murino?) linked me to the OOC Forums. I think I reached a forum-whoring peak on the old OOC Forums. While there were frequent gripes and moans and spats, it was largely confined to the infamous Bitching Section. For me, the worst excesses of the Bitching Section were more than offset by the collection of passionate and opinionated people that posted in the other forum sections. I was inspired as often as I was aggravated. YMMV.
[spoiler](http://www.wanoah.co.uk/images/Chatsubo.600.06.jpg)[/spoiler]
With a change of host came a change of name: The Chatsubo. The Cosmopolite took over the running of the site from Pulgor, and he continued the laissez-faire approach to moderation. In retrospect, despite fully supporting unbounded free speech at the time, I think it was a mistake to continue unchanged. Numbers had grown, and that inevitably leads to an increase in conflict. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that. The real change in character, however, came as a result of events in Eve itself. Jericho Fraction / Star Fraction wars with various other RP entities seemed to result in a lot of OOC friction over time: friction that often erupted on the forums. Ultimately, I think that there were maybe half a dozen people with egos and histories that meant they simply could not get on. Cosmo, who always seemed to try his hardest to be reasonable in my experience, found himself in a difficult position. Although he continued to pay the bills, he no longer wanted to be responsible for running the forums and dealing with the endless hassle that it entailed. I took over as admin. How hard could it be?
Looking after The Chatsubo was fucking terrible.
It really was. The amount of shit you had to deal with was immense. Within a couple of weeks, I could see why first Pulgor, then Cosmo had wanted out. By this time, it had already acquired the alternative moniker of Crapsubo, and the problems were numerous. There were several regular trolls and several not-quite-trolls who were nonetheless controversial. Threads would start, the usual suspects would wade in, and the drama would inevitably kick off. There were several people that never posted except to post in the drama threads. They would then complain loudly elsewhere about how bad it all was. I lost a lot of respect for one or two "pillars of the community."
I had three people in my mind that I wanted to ban immediately. Three people that generated maybe 80% of the problems. The drama would have been epic. I have this inconvenient sense of fairness, however. I figured that I'd introduce some basic rules and then give these people enough rope to hang themselves. Amazingly, they didn't. One stopped any kind of trolling overnight. The other two...well, they were clever enough to never overtly cross the line. Things did quieten down quite a lot, but I was still relieved to hand back the reigns. Sadly, I think it was all too late: the damage was done and too many good people had been driven away. Once people have an idea in their heads, it's hard to adjust that. A reinvention or a fresh start was needed. This place is that fresh start, but it does lack all those old threads.
Scrapheap Challenge emerged in 2006. Early on, it was all about Team Minmatar. Later it grew to at least partially fill that void left by EVE-I. For my taste, the character of the place changed for the worse. In the beginning, the main focus was sensible talk about ships and fittings - a much needed antidote to the toxic idiocy on the Ships & Modules section of the Eve-O forums. Over the years, though, it seemed to devolve to a very cliquey environment dominated by shitposting and /b/ memes.
[spoiler](http://www.wanoah.co.uk/images/scrapheap06.jpg)[/spoiler]
Ironically, Scrapheap died in much the same way as EVE-I did: suddenly and unexpectedly. At least it got replaced by Failheap thanks to the efforts of some regulars. I never bothered to register though.
So, back to the present day and turning to Backstage. Perhaps Casiella's thread started this nostalgia train rolling: http://backstage.eve-inspiracy.com/index.php?topic=3286.0
Only a handful of posts there, but I thought I picked up on a kind of congratulatory tone to some of them. A sense of "We have got it right. We are successful. Yay us." Clearly, Backstage is not a failure (compare and contrast with its predecessor now, heh) but I'd argue that it's not very successful either. It's an active forum but I think that you need to ask yourself: is it as active as you'd like? Are there many interesting discussions and debates on a wide variety of topics that keep you coming back every day? Are you regularly inspired to go off researching things then come back to construct a thoughtful response to something someone has said? Has a thread here inspired you to immediately start scribbling down ideas for a story?
Because I'm not seeing it. I'm really not. I see a lot of threads where people basically navel-gaze about their own characters. I see a lot of topics where people carefully don't say all that much. I visit about once a month and I only see about 2 pages of new posts each time...and the numbers are getting progressively smaller. This is a pale shadow of the place it replaced. If I was away for a week, I'd have two pages of posts to read through on Chatsubo back in 2006.
I think there's a few things at play here. Blogs have had a major role I reckon. People that have things to say - people that in the past would have been frequent topic starters - now say them on their blogs. This is likely a direct net loss to forum communities. Virtually no one would write a post like this on a forum these days. This is a blog post!
Next, there's a general decline in the Eve playerbase and more specifically, there has been a sharp decline in people that created. This is hard to quantify, and I could be way off base here, but it's my perception that quite a few of the old guard that made stuff for Eve, that wrote about and for Eve have finally given up on it all. Many of the RP vets are noticeable by their absence. I assume that they no longer play or post. If I'm correct, I'm also hardly surprised. CCP generally dropped the ball for quite a long time with Eve, and the likes of Tony Gonzales did a lot of damage for people that were invested in the background material. There are only so many setbacks and disappointments you can take before you decide to go and do something else.
Finally, I do think that the policies here at Backstage have had a chilling effect over time. I understand that it was a NEVAR AGAIN reaction to The Chatsubo, but I maintain that it was, and is, an overreaction. It's all very polite and all, but it's also very tame. No one really says anything with any real conviction. There's passive-aggressive behaviour from some people, and that's as ballsy as it gets. From this outsider's POV it's mostly a little clique of people having their own little tea party and telling each other how nice it all is and how great they all are. Slow death, man. Slow death.
Yeah, sure. If I don't like it, I can always...well, what? Where is that feisty alternative? Maybe forums have just had their day now that Facebook inexplicably dominates the world. It's a damn shame.
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On the one hand: I certainly didn't intend for that thread to say that we have it right here, although I am generally pleased with it. Certainly it has flaws, as you note.
On the other hand, things have changed. We have far more blogs now than in the past, and the EVE Twitter community (#tweetfleet) is huge and active.
On the gripping hand: the mainstream EVE RP community is smaller in most ways. I say it like that because more people have an interest in the lore but consider themselves casual roleplayers at best. And they avoid us in the aggregate because they don't want to deal with "our" drama. Witness the reluctance of, say, the Tech 4 News folks or Mark726 (a close friend of mine who writes EVE Travel, among other things) to visit here or IGS.
All things considered, EVE RP is smaller than it was. But judging by how much more I like The Summit, IGS, and other things these days than a few years ago, maybe quality beats quantity.
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I hope I wasn't too awful on Chatsubo.
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I was around for the neuromancer days, the chatsubo days and the crapsubo days.
I skedaddled after TEA hit.
I was so deliciously Angry all the time, the flamewars and the drama fueled it all the time.
Passions were kindled because people actually cared about EVE and what was happening in it.
Now its all watered down.
I believe that it takes about four years to make a character in EVE that is good at everything.
The content of EVE takes much less than that to experience, after that it is just a grind.
...and EVE players scoff at WoW players for their mindless tedium, there is nothing like EVE for that.
I guess for me it was inflation of everything, ISK became meaningless when you had a few billions in your bank, a fleet of ships and yet another pointless war to lose them in. Already the endless Amarr-Minmatar conflict had left me jaded so FW really did not bring any kind of enthusiasm with it, especially the way that it was introduced.
Then the threads?
There is nothing to talk about, all the arguments have been had, all the points of view have been discussed, all the 't's have been crossed and 'i's dotted because there has not been any new content in the world of EVE since its conception.
It's gone from 'WOOOOO' into 'Meh'.
EVE won't die with a bang, it will fade away like a bad odour.
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I think there certainly is a chilling effect from the rules here, but that's basically intentional. From the start, at least from my POV as one of the people who was involved in starting (and as the person who currently pays for) Backstage, it wasn't meant to be new Chatsubo, or even better Chatsubo. It was meant to give people another option - but I don't think it was ever really presented as anything but a fairly heavily moderated place. Again, this was all by design, because a lighter set of rules would tend to be circumvented (as the so often were on Chatsubo, which lead to some of us getting quite fed up).
Which, I think, would be fine - except now Chatsubo is (last I checked, quite a while ago) a ghost town. So I think there's certainly a lot of room for a new, baggage free place for more mod-hands-off discussion.
Maybe people will visit here and there, maybe Backstage will end up like Chatsubo and Eve-I (man, eve-i, that takes me back) and be consigned to history. The main thing (and the reason I got involved with Backstage) is that I hope the Eve RP community always has a plae (or places) where they can connect. At the end of the day, I think it's a pretty great community, and these kind of avenues of communication help it be great.
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I hope I wasn't too awful on Chatsubo.
We were all awful on chatsubo, we were also sometimes brilliant. I think thats rather the charm.
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Which, I think, would be fine - except now Chatsubo is (last I checked, quite a while ago) a ghost town. So I think there's certainly a lot of room for a new, baggage free place for more mod-hands-off discussion.
There might well be room, but there isn't the user base any more to support two different RP forums - there just aren't enough of us.
Maybe people will visit here and there, maybe Backstage will end up like Chatsubo and Eve-I (man, eve-i, that takes me back) and be consigned to history. The main thing (and the reason I got involved with Backstage) is that I hope the Eve RP community always has a place (or places) where they can connect. At the end of the day, I think it's a pretty great community, and these kind of avenues of communication help it be great.
Despite my reservations at the founding and moderation choice for backstage I don't mind it really. Its quite a chilled and relaxed atmosphere. All it lacks is a bit of a passion really. But it might be that passion goes hand in hand with explosive drama and that too is kinda what wannoah was alluding too.
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I don't think so.
I think we just used to care more.
There isn't a reason to do that as much anymore, and many of us feel that well away from the world of forums.
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Interest, activity, and players themselves come and go, I guess. It's telling that you can see the hit Incarna delivered in the Backstage posting stats. The numbers were cut in half virtually overnight from June to July '11. EVE (and EVE RP) took a shot in the jollies when Incarna launched, but it didn't die and is now slowly crawling back with the last two successful expansions.
Sadly, the storyline has effectively been stagnant since the Tyrannis/Incursion live events culminated, so there really isn't anything new to get fired up about. The PS3 exclusivity of Dust 514 makes it harder to cross that setting over into EVE RP, but you never know what could happen. It's hard for me to say if the Backstage policies are really to blame for any genuine slow down in the community when there are plenty of other reasons for such a thing. Personally, I think they've been a net positive. More importantly, I think it's fair to say this community (tracing itself back to the Chatsubo days) has had a good percentage of the arguments and discussions that are worth having when it comes to EVE lore (which grows at a glacial pace) and various facets of RP (a finite topic). Most of the time, all we have that's new to talk about is ourselves (our characters), and a lot of that potential talk just goes to blogland or is played out in-game.
If it's the slow death, I guess the question whose answer might confirm such is this: Have we told all the stories that are worth telling about this universe?
I think maybe not. But if so, why not tell them again? There are still so many who have not yet heard them.
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So yes, you tell it yourself, the slow death of the community comes from external things, and not how the forum is operated, to my mind.
I have never been on chatsubo because I was less present OOCly in the RP community and also because it had an AWFUL reputation. I am perfectly fine with this forum and even sometimes find it too laxist on moderation, but these days most of the few trolls and agressive people I have in mind have vanished or do not post a lot anymore, so yes, I am fine with it. I still remember perfectly the discussions about the new backstage RP community forum on AFC's forums where Scagga invited a lot of people to talk about the things to do, the rules, the vision they wanted for backstage. This is what made me come here eventually. I say, if people want so much to bicker and immerse themselves in an OOC mudslinging contest of what the IGS is, they can still create another forum. I bet it will die soon enough because most people will soon find themselves disgusted of how people can behave, and I am sure I will be the first of them even if I am not even on that hypothetic forum considering how I litteraly despise people unable to show the slighest proof of respect because yarr, we haz internet anonymity. /o\
It's an active forum but I think that you need to ask yourself: is it as active as you'd like? Are there many interesting discussions and debates on a wide variety of topics that keep you coming back every day? Are you regularly inspired to go off researching things then come back to construct a thoughtful response to something someone has said? Has a thread here inspired you to immediately start scribbling down ideas for a story?
Yep to all your questions for me. Works perfectly fine.
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I have some fond memories of Chatsubo. I came in too late to see the worst of it, and caught what turned out to be the dead cat bounce before the end. I've wondered at times about dragging some people back there for certain chats which are unlikely to fit happily here.
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90% of the time my PC is online. I'm connected to the Internet, optimally, for all of that time. I keep several tabs open at virtually all times.
Backstage has since it's creation been open at all times.
I don't always post, I don't always care to get involved, but I do read 90% of all topics and offer input on most things I consider interesting. And with few exceptions, I'm able to partake in a decent conversation.
On Chatsubo, half the time was spent reading the trolling, flaming, shit-flinging, character-assassination, bitching and general negativity, the other half spent carefully reviewing anything on interest, sometimes bothering to post.
When half the posts and active conversations evolved around crappy flaming and pure bullshit, having an activity-ration twice as big as Backstage does now, becomes an irrelevant claim - on Backstage, you keep it civil or you STFU and GTFO, shortly. Thus; only half the activity, compared to Chatsubo, rolls around. The useful half.
No offense, but if you want the crappy interactions and childish filth again I'd point you in the directions of the Goon forums, SomethingAweful and the likes of 4Chan. If not, here we are. Hopefully we are what you wanted when you caved in from the stress of running the Chatsubo moderation, and I can't blame you cosmo or anyone for that - I only saw a limited bit of that and I was already disgusted.
On the other hand, the lack of activity here, AFAIK, can be blamed on a combination of many factors, most mentioned already. PF takes a dive, TonyG did his damage, blogs, twitter and facebook took over the world, and after Incarna many were convinced to go elsewhere, do other things. I can't blame them either.
In short, my opinion is thus; If Backstage, or EVE RP, or anything we have here, dies - slowly or otherwise - it was inevitable, based on the events of our history so far. There is little I can see done to 'revive' the activity here because there is NOTHING we can do to revive it artificially. Backstage is the 'official' OOC forum for EVE online's RP circle and if that group dwindles and dies this forum will too. Should EVE RP pick up, for whatever reason, this place will be more active as more people RP - all we can do is keep showing people the way here, human social interaction and EVE RP will do the rest.
I never saw EVE-I, I never bothered with Scrapheap/failheap, I regretted joining Chatsubo, and I'm still on these boards. All I need do now is RP more in-game. Or BE more in-game for that matter.
[mod]Rather than remove this post in its entirety, I have changed references to "Crapsubo" to "Chatsubo". It is one thing to use the moniker in reference to the community perception of the site (as Wan did), and another to use it constantly in this fashion. The latter is particularly disrespectful towards the people who spent so much of their own time and effort maintaining the site, and we would expect the same of them when it came to less-than-positive references to Backstage on Chatsubo. -Morwen[/mod]
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Memory lane indeed. :s
I'll say this regarding Backstage moderation: While I generally approve of the moderation policies that can be summed up as "stomp flameposting down before it becomes an issue", there have been times where I thought a scalpel rather than a hammer could have been used - that is, if a post starts reasonable and descends into flaming, *snip* out the rulebreaking bits rather than modhammering the whole post into the graveyard.
Regarding whether we are "better" or "more successful" than other EVE or even RP forums: Impossible to say. Personally I find forum activity waxes and wanes; some weeks I'll see absolutely nothing new (or nothing new that grabs my interest) for the whole week, and other days there are 3 or 4 threads in OOC Summit alone that I want to comment in, and I have to slow down a bit to pick one of them to focus on.
Certainly, the chilling effect of the percieved mishandling of the story by CCP has damaged the activity of any OOC forums - particularly among the "creator" class of participants, as Wanoah put it - mainly because, in my opinion, those who took the storyline very seriously found it hard to do so when the storyline ended up bandwagoning from one PLOT REVELATION! to another, with very little filler in between - i.e., it's quite painful to try and put a lot of time and personal effort into creating a culture for your own group when you feel as thought the plot will inevitably be overtaken by the next big thing - first it was SUDDENLY FW, then that was left to languish. Then it was SUDDENLY WORMHOLES, but that was dropped for a good couple years too. Then SUDDENLY SANSHA, and now SUDDENLY SLEEPERS again.
To be entirely fair, I was not an RPer during the early years, and so cannot specifically state that this is any different to how the community reacted to things like the succession trials or the Federal election. When nearly all of the worldbuilding and storybuilding in EVE is left to the playerbase, however, only to have their efforts periodically disrupted by periodic injections of PLOT REVELATION!, I can't help but feel that this foments a sense of "why bother?"
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I don't think so.
I think we just used to care more.
There isn't a reason to do that as much anymore, and many of us feel that well away from the world of forums.
Sadly, I have to agree. Reading more of the backstory (finished TEA, TBL and T1 now) makes me care less and less about the universe.
It's not somewhere I care about any more, and at least some of that is CCPs fault.
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Thanks for all the replies.
Just a couple of points on some of the Chatsubo comments. It is worth noting that part of its original intent was for free and open OOC discussion between people to try and settle disputes. That's a worthy ideal in a game where much is at stake and you don't want the juicy IC conflict to be wrecked by misunderstandings and individual grievances. In my experience, a certain amount of OOC friendliness was vital to sustain the forever war of the Amarrian/Minmatar conflict, for example, and a central venue was welcome.
Sadly, in a game where plenty of people have played on or off for almost a decade now, some of the grudges don't wear off due to natural wastage. Some people just didn't like each other, no amount of frank discussion was going to alter that, and the original framing of the rules could not contain such bitter feuds.
While I was admin, I read every single post on the forum. As such, I had a pretty good idea of what was going on and can say with confidence, that most people's perceptions were way off. There were one or two hot topics that would quickly attract the same aggrieved parties to happily go nuclear at each other, but the balance of posting was overwhelmingly positive and constructive. Human nature is what it is, though, and the casual posters zeroed in on the flames like moths. News organisations continue to thrive without reporting the continuing decline of violent crime and the sun sets in the west.
So, anyways, enough of that particular deceased equine. I'm wondering just how universal the decline in foruming is.
That there is a dilution with the arrival of Twitter, blogging, and (ugh) Facebook seems clear to me. I use / do all three, but not in the context of Eve.
I like Twitter, and it's marvellous for pithy commentary and drawing people's attention to things, but it's just not the venue for discussion. I like blogs, but they are mostly one-sided, and the comments under posts tend to be fairly awkward: the software just hasn't had the time and attention lavished on it in the same way that the latest versions of forum software has. Besides, where once you just had to browse a single forum, you maybe now have to browse multiple blogs to achieve the same thing. Google Reader is already tracking more stuff than I really have time to read.
As for Facebook, well, even with its reaction to Google+ circles, it just doesn't allow for the sort of separation I like for freedom of expression. While I lost any semblance of anonymity a long time ago, I still want people (i.e. barely tech-literate management types) to have to work at least a little bit at associating my spare time interests and activities with my real identity.
I like forums, dammit, and I think they work far better than the alternatives people seem to be wholeheartedly adopting. I like the idea of community based around an interest or group of interests, and I like that the discussion is moderated (as long as it's not moderated too much :P). I like that the discussion is structured, too.
I hadn't realised how fond I was of browsing and posting in a bunch of forums until they all died, succumbed to a kind of Eternal September level of asinine pandering to the lowest common denominator, or entered a slow death spiral of declining interest. Maybe it's just the places I visited? Maybe...maybe it's me? O.o :P
So, do you still visit forums that are actively thriving and growing?
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So, do you still visit forums that are actively thriving and growing?
Newp.
(and you have no idea how long that post was before I finally just answered the question :P)
I think forums will always have a place in EVE... But that place is likely mostly relegated to internal corps and alliance forums (+teamspeak server).
As for forums in general I can't really say, as apart from my teenage Highlander obsession, the only forums I've visited have been EVE ones.
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So, do you still visit forums that are actively thriving and growing?
Backstage is the only forum I ever visit with any sort of activity aside from EVE's official forums.
A little over a decade ago (holy crap) I joined a fresh gaming and entertainment forum. Over time, I moved from being a regular user into a mod, supermod and eventually an admin for the place as we moved into our veteran years. Despite all our arguments, spiteful comments and trolling (well before it even had a name) it had turned out that they were a great group of guys and girls that had become very special and close to me. The friendships we made became much stronger than the petty arguments. I had packed my bags and taken a trip across the continent on a couple occasions just to spend some time with them, have a few drinks and make good memories.
But something I noticed as time went by was the distinct lack of newcomers to our little community. We were uncommon to promote ourselves, sure, but we were listed and plenty of guest viewers (and bots) found their way there. Yet there came a point where I looked back and realized our newest members had been around for several years with not a single newbie in sight. We weren't exactly shrinking, but we stopped growing entirely. If I were to look at that little forum from the eyes of a newcomer I can see how incredibly daunting it would be to even attempt to join our circle; our entire forum had become a clique of people who knew each other incredibly well.
Members of that community and myself still keep in touch to this day (we are talking about a 2013 meetup), and I love the heck out of all of them, but this was a situation for which we were never actually able to find a remedy. Eventually our well-kept garden faded away as we all grew into unapproachable dinosaurs and our primary means of communication turned to social media and IM.
A relevent anecdote I wanted to share, anyway.
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I've tried to stay active on some forums outside of EVE stuff, and generally find that I wander away from them. They either have a horrible signal to noise ratio or not enough activity to justify checking often, which results in me totally forgetting to check them. I've personally moved over to blogs for most of my outside EVE reading and community stuff in my professional sphere (this might change a little with some certs I've finished recently and their internal discussion forums).
I've been doing a lot of reading and research about community building (especially WRT blogs) so I may add more detailed thoughts later. I'm personally curious about this project http://sett.com which might bridge the gap between forum and blog platforms a little.
One random guess of mine is that as forums get more mature newcomers might feel like they don't have anything meaningful to contribute once they join; instead they have to figure out how the community operates and work themselves into the circle slowly without really feeling like a part of it yet. I can't really think of a good example of a forum that avoids this problem. More thoughts later, heading out soon.
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I always wondered why people don't cross-post their blog posts onto Backstage in order to generate more comment on the material. I know cross-posting is often seen as something dirty to do, but I don't think it is if the goal is not to just funnel traffic back to your blog site for some reason.
I read many Eve related blogs but have never commented on any of them. Blogs, the actual pages and not the content, just are not good for creating a discussion. I have read many blog posts that have only one or two very small well thought out comments, but the same content if posted fully on Backstage (not just a link to the blog post) would generate a huge amount of discussion.
As noted by the OP, a message like the OP's would normally be a blog post, which may have only got a few small quick responses. Compare that to the (healthy?) discussion the same content has generated here.
If there was a blog section on Backstage where people were encouraged to cross-post the full content of both their IC and OOC blogs to, it would definitely get a lot comments from me.
As to the moderation discussion, I will just say that I often err on the side of caution and choose just to not comment at all, rather that upset someone or get told that I am telling people that they are doing it wrong.
EDIT TO ADD:
... One random guess of mine is that as forums get more mature newcomers might feel like they don't have anything meaningful to contribute once they join; instead they have to figure out how the community operates and work themselves into the circle slowly without really feeling like a part of it yet. I can't really think of a good example of a forum that avoids this problem. More thoughts later, heading out soon.
I think that Misan may be onto something regarding some online communities. They reach a certain size and then struggle to attract new members.
I never felt part of the Chatsubo community because I joined it very late (in 2009), and the Backstage community after the collapse of Chatsubo was for all intents and purposes the same community. I have always suffered from the "don't have anything meaningful to contribute once they join" syndrome, and all the posts that you see every so often about how players have "seen everything before" and complaints about "the same reoccurring arguments on IGS" doesn't help change my perceptions.
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I never felt part of the Chatsubo community because I joined it very late (in 2009), and the Backstage community after the collapse of Chatsubo was for all intents and purposes the same community. I have always suffered from the "don't have anything meaningful to contribute once they join" syndrome, and all the posts that you see every so often about how players have "seen everything before" and complaints about "the same reoccurring arguments on IGS" doesn't help change my perceptions.
This is something I hated about the IGS for a while - the recurrence of the same arguments, etc - before I learned to enjoy it. How many of us, at one time or another, got involved in an argument over the merits of slavery? Or the respective superiority of Federation values vs. the State? And sure, some of those arguments are tired and dull if you're looking for an intellectually stimulating discussion. I've stopped reading most of the arguments, and instead started reading the characters. It's like watching them grow up or something.
"Oh, look, it's a new one! Ooh, he's a hardline conservative."
A few months later, "Hmm, his resolve seems to have taken a few blows."
A bit later, "Oh, he's finally reached moral relativism!"
It's like watching a kid take its first steps.
There is, of course, the urge to roll your eyes and say, "Oh look, this debate again," when one of those pops up. But really, what does that accomplish? Congrats, you're winning RP again by putting everyone in their place, but you're basically just being a killjoy. An RP Killjoy. There's just something wrong with that.
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I always wondered why people don't cross-post their blog posts onto Backstage in order to generate more comment on the material. I know cross-posting is often seen as something dirty to do, but I don't think it is if the goal is not to just funnel traffic back to your blog site for some reason.
I read many Eve related blogs but have never commented on any of them. Blogs, the actual pages and not the content, just are not good for creating a discussion. I have read many blog posts that have only one or two very small well thought out comments, but the same content if posted fully on Backstage (not just a link to the blog post) would generate a huge amount of discussion.
As noted by the OP, a message like the OP's would normally be a blog post, which may have only got a few small quick responses. Compare that to the (healthy?) discussion the same content has generated here.
If there was a blog section on Backstage where people were encouraged to cross-post the full content of both their IC and OOC blogs to, it would definitely get a lot comments from me.
The main answer you already took care of yourself: it seems to be perceived as attention seeking (in a negative way). If we were all writing super srs blogs with aims at getting loads of traffic and page views then perhaps it would be attention seeking, but I doubt that's the case for most people here. So I think the perception is just generalized (incorrectly) from the larger blogging community possibly.
It's totally possible to have a vibrant commenting community on a given blog, but it does seem to be rare. I'm sure things like the anti-spam measures and other things contribute to increasing the friction involved in getting someone to actually drop a comment. I think that is why in some ways forums get more responses to most posts, as anyone who actively reads and posts here has already committed to be involved in the community on some level and they don't have to jump through hoops to actually post their thoughts (comment system logins suck) on anything.
I'd be willing to set up an experimental section for people to put their blog posts into, assuming that the discussion and comments on them remain OOC. I know that cross-posting my scouting guide was very helpful for feedback, so I'm sure it can be useful for other people to share their posts here too. My only real concern is that the sub-section will need some clear thread naming and posting rules to make content easier to find and generally keep the thing readable. If this sounds like a good idea I'll make a thread over in web dev to discuss it further.
Edit: It also needs to be very clearly differentiated from the content that gets posted in EVE Fiction and Discussion.
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I have some fond memories of Chatsubo. I came in too late to see the worst of it, and caught what turned out to be the dead cat bounce before the end. I've wondered at times about dragging some people back there for certain chats which are unlikely to fit happily here.
Go right ahead.
The place is still up as you know and I visit regularly to keep it clean of spam and bots.
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I have some fond memories of Chatsubo. I came in too late to see the worst of it, and caught what turned out to be the dead cat bounce before the end. I've wondered at times about dragging some people back there for certain chats which are unlikely to fit happily here.
Go right ahead.
The place is still up as you know and I visit regularly to keep it clean of spam and bots.
I have the picture in my mind now of Chatsubo being the bicycle shed at the far end of a high school campus, where boys meet to sort out their differences like men, free from the gazing eyes of any teachers.
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I just wanted to thank the members of the mod team here. Its literally a thankless job, but one thats made this forum an enjoyable and useful place to visit.
Thanks guys. Would buy you a beer if I saw you at a Fanfest.
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I just wanted to thank the members of the mod team here. Its literally a thankless job, but one thats made this forum an enjoyable and useful place to visit.
Thanks guys. Would buy you a beer if I saw you at a Fanfest.
This, minus the buying beer part. I could however give you the money needed to buy it yourself :lol:
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I have some fond memories of Chatsubo. I came in too late to see the worst of it, and caught what turned out to be the dead cat bounce before the end. I've wondered at times about dragging some people back there for certain chats which are unlikely to fit happily here.
Go right ahead.
The place is still up as you know and I visit regularly to keep it clean of spam and bots.
As I assume you noticed, I was reading it yesterday. (I'm stuck in bed at the moment, hence the bout of forum spam from me. Love my iPad.) Its thread on the ethics of infiltration in EVE (http://www.eve-chatsubo.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=5434) is still my definitive coverage of the main perspectives on that topic. That thread also includes one of the best apologies for bad forum behaviour.
I have the picture in my mind now of Chatsubo being the bicycle shed at the far end of a high school campus, where boys meet to sort out their differences like men, free from the gazing eyes of any teachers.
More a case of divvying up the playground, I imagine. "Okay: high-drama zone over there, bittervets who still roleplay over there, bittervets who don't roleplay but insist anyone who does is doinitrong over there....".
Edited to add: "In good part because EVE RP is a niche interest with few adherents, and I'd like to work out the overlapping zones where we could do stuff together even though our differences in style and faction mean there are good reasons for our primary play being in separate neighbourhoods."
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Mata: damn you for sucking away my evening as I re-read that old thread on infiltration. ;)
(and in case it wasn't clear, <3 and I'm not actually cursing you :P )
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Mata: damn you for sucking away my evening as I re-read that old thread on infiltration. ;)
(and in case it wasn't clear, <3 and I'm not actually cursing you :P )
:) It's a good thread. A bunch of people who disagreed passionately managed to express the things they disagreed about in ways which I still come back to when poking at the ideas of magic circles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Circle_(virtual_worlds)) and meta-meta-gaming.
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Just on Twitter and blogs...
I feel that they are the product of this time.
They are of the same skein as the concept of a consumer being an individual.
Whatever you do, it makes you special and because you are special then you have to be seen and heard.
And how to do it, by buying buying and buying.
It's all this American Dream bullshit with Warhols fifteen minutes of Fame for everybody.
Worst of all, it teaches you to express your innermost thoughts to complete strangers with wild abandon.
While feeling good about it.
During the Cold War the intelligence agencies would have been glad to give facebook a few bob to know what is going on within their population. (Do you think that contemporary dictatorships do not?)
Timeline would have been a perfect tool to weed out the malcontents and the people that oppose the party lines.
It's all a very much o.O to me.
Why on earth would I want someone out of arms reach know what I am thinking?
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It's all a very much o.O to me.
Why on earth would I want someone out of arms reach know what I am thinking?
Well, in general, people like to communicate themselves to others, and to hear others communicate. It makes more sense if you realize that the act of communication is often an end in itself, not simply a means. And there's also the fact that - despite the occasional act of bullying or violence - most humans are fairly decent and will happily accept you into their "tribe" if you can relate to their own inner thoughts and desires.
I don't mind the increasing publication of personal thoughts, ideas, and philosophies. In history (a very general assertion here), the greatest eras of development, invention, and toleration are found in those societies where communication was least hindered, and people were most willing to communicate their ideas.
And yes, 99 out of 100 ideas suck. But those ideas tend to be discarded in the end, or improved upon, and that 1 great idea often sets mankind forward by centuries. Now, there are those who don't see more knowledge, more technology, and more intelligence as good things, but I can't count myself among them and hope that they are few in number.
As for blogs and etc making it easier to manipulate us, I rather doubt that. The greater the number of voices, and the greater the diversity of opinions, the more difficult it is to control them. Convince a person that they are the only heretic, and they will shut up. Let them know that every other person in the nation feels the same way, and the despots and tyrants will find their reigns increasingly founded on the most desperate and slippery of foundations.
As for a consumer culture, the reason we have a consumer culture is largely because humans are consumers. We always have been. We like shiny things, we like new things, and we like being special and being seen and heard. And, not only that, most of us tend to like other people getting shiny things, getting new things, and being seen and heard. It's not some complicated cultural thing - almost every human from every age in history, will prefer air-conditioning, a new computer, and a nice car to whatever circumstance you pulled them out of. Our products, our markets, and our media are conformed first and foremost to our innate desire for comfort, amusement, and sustenance, not the other way around. It's easy to show this - for example, the Catholic church has spent about 2000 years trying to make sex more of a duty than a temptation, and they've utterly failed. They failed even in the middle ages, at the height of their cultural power.
Indeed, one could argue that religions pretty much make their profession off of asking us to deny what we are in some particular, and while this doesn't necessarily call their veracity into question, one might point out that they have been spectacularly unsuccessful in the majority of cases. Given this, we could well question the capability of a corporation to, in a few advertising campaigns, manage what far more sophisticated and well-designed systems of propaganda (I use the term in the non-prejudicial form) have not. And, from what I have studied in advertising, I can't say that most corporations are trying to brainwash you - actually, most of them are simply trying to get you to remember them when you need the product they offer.
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Few things.
I don't believe that Internets can ever give you fulfilling social interaction.
It can give you something that make you feel like you can fill your social needs through it.
But it will never compare to the real deal.
I think that you need to be face to face with a person in a real life situation to actually be able to communicate.
Because language in itself is a very faulty way of communicating things.
It is the only one that we have at the moment, so to minimize misunderstandings a real social interaction is the only one I really trust these days.
Then the consumer thing...
I don't believe that we have evolved into consumers, it is something that has been indoctrinated to us through the media and culture. It is reinforced by psychological mechanisms that are constantly being used by the media to manipulate people into defining themselves by what they consume.
My parents are from a previous generation than I am, if they buy something they want something that lasts and which is permanent. They invest with their purchases for the future, they have stuff that are generations old that is still in use. They are not consumers in the sense that the current generation is.
I believe that the current generation that has been raised with computers and the internet in their lives have been indoctrinated to such an extent that is of a completely different scale than the previous generations.
Mainly because the tools of the indoctrination really were not there to do this to the previous generations.
Their brains weren't altered by constant barrage of stress inducing programming since childhood to be bored if something in their surrounding does not change every 10 seconds.
The standards of living were not high enough to have a screen of some kind in every room of the house.
They we're not constantly at the beck and call of their social circles.
Which is the situation that we are dealing at the moment.
The mechanics are not something that is new, they are something that charlatans have been using for ages.
There is plenty of psychologists that have discovered plenty of things about the way that human mind works by examining the mechanics of why people perceive things that are not there, mostly of supernatural variety, ghosts, prophecy, mediums and whatnot.
It's a good read. (http://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/books/paranormality-why-we-see-what-isnt-there/) It has stories and statistics and all that.
But the mechanics in us are sound, for example.
If I would say that all the people in these forums are more creative than the norm, they have better sense of humor than the average person, they are better drivers than the average person and are more trustworthy than the average person in EVE. I could add on adjectives like more literate than the average forum user in the EVE forums, more capable of seeing the other side of the discussion etc.
Most people would actually identify with these things even though I have not met any one of them.
A statistical funny fact:
80% of people believe that they are better than the average drivers.
75% of people that have been asked the same question while they are in the hospital after a car crash believe that.
Most of the study to these mechanics has been done after the sixties, since psychology has not really been a science (still not is, some people think that Freud is the bees knees still) for not that long.
Which means that these mechanics were not consciously used to manipulate the masses for that long.
It has probably taken until the nineties until they could be fully utilized.
Which would conveniently explain why the religion has failed to such extent, compared to the media forces that are currently in use.
Religion has not had the capability to manipulate people 24/7 unlike the television, only way they could have done it is by feeding your ego stuff that would make it criticize you 24/7 but that does not work all the time. Especially since the indoctrinators would not believe what they we're preaching and pretty much everyone can see if someone is lying to them (even if its just an uneasy feeling in the background).
Meh, its all a bit hodgepodge but it makes sense to me now.
I better catch some Z's
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... A statistical funny fact:
80% of people believe that they are better than the average drivers.
75% of people that have been asked the same question while they are in the hospital after a car crash believe that ...
And 75% of all statistics are made up on the spot!
Source: http://www.bomus.org/index.php
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Just as an aside on the social networking angle. I recently stepped a bit out of my gaming comfort zone to play Don't Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain't Your Story (http://scoutshonour.com/donttakeitpersonallybabeitjustaintyourstory/). I was a bit put off by the manga art style initially, but if you look beyond that (or like that style in any case) you get a surprisingly well-written story with some good insights into the changing ideas of privacy in the modern world. Also, it's free. I enjoyed it enough to go ahead and buy one of Christine Love's other games on Steam.
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Whenever I join a new forum community, I find threads full of long time members getting all nostalgic about better times. I call it late-comer syndrome.
Well, in general, people like to communicate themselves to others, and to hear others communicate. It makes more sense if you realize that the act of communication is often an end in itself, not simply a means.
Very true.
And there's also the fact that - despite the occasional act of bullying or violence - most humans are fairly decent and will happily accept you into their "tribe" if you can relate to their own inner thoughts and desires.
Yes, humans are nice to people who think like they do, we're still learning to deal with the billions of people who don't think like we do.