What Social Media do you see as your opposition?

[DigNap15]

What social media do you see as opposition to your forum
That is which social media types are the biggest threat to your forum, losing members and input etc

This is not about which is the best forum software
Its your forum versus the rest of social media

 

[Joel R]

All of them are a threat for attention.

Facebook and Reddit are a threat for general news, social, lifestyle, and interest-based conversation.

Youtube is probably the least overlap because it's video, so it's also the most complementary.

It's definitely become challenging for community managers to navigate through a crowded web and to find areas where they can build an impenetrable moat that those social media networks can't or won't want to penetrate.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

Used to be Facebook until I crossed over to that side. Took me years to get 1,000 members on a forum that I routinely marketed. Took me maybe 2 years to get 8,200+ members on a Facebook group that I really let naturally grow on it's own. My YouTube subscriber count is slow but I get a lot of non-subscriber views so I am game with it.

 

[DigNap15]

Here in my country I also have a few blogs that are also my opposition

 

[DigNap15]

Used to be Facebook until I crossed over to that side. Took me years to get 1,000 members on a forum that I routinely marketed. Took me maybe 2 years to get 8,200+ members on a Facebook group that I really let naturally grow on it's own. My YouTube subscriber count is slow but I get a lot of non-subscriber views so I am game with it.

So you are saying your forum has 1,000 members and your Facebook group has 8,000.
That is very sad

 

[Shawn Gossman]

So you are saying your forum has 1,000 members and your Facebook group has 8,000.
That is very sad

Back when I had a forum, it took me a long time to get 1K members but not so long to get 8K on a Facebook group, that is how I meant that.

 

[Nev_Dull]

I guess it depends on how you look at it. I don't consider any other social media site as competition to my forum. Perhaps it's different because I'm not interested in making money from my forum, but I prefer to think of it as a symbiotic relationship.

I consider any of those sites that cover the same subject as my forum as part of the whole picture for my users. They provide a different perspective of the topics. Additionally, they very often provide good starting points for discussion. Someone will point to a facebook post or a YouTube video in a post and that will generate a whole discussion about it.

 

[NYCGuy76]

Facebook groups for sure. They’re definitely the pointiest thorn in my side.

 

[martin smith]

Facebook groups.

 

[Blanco]

Yea I think the user base who are using FB groups have little or zero experience of forums, i.e. the masses who came kind of last to the net back in days, 2007/2008 onwards, FB was their first and last port of call in many regards!

All the traffic, it's a lot like a lost decade of traffic!

The big move away from social media like twitter for political censorship reasons and data/tracking reason, sees the refugees hold up in Telegram app of all places! Maybe one day they will stumble into a forum and realise what they have been missing.

Has anyone else noticed this telegram trend over the last year or so? I like the app but the channels thing is the new groups but it's not a good experience, or something the app does well, then of course as an anti censorship move, there are story Apple App Store and Google Play have intervened in the app at times to hide or block replies. I have not dug into it but I seem comments about it online.

Maybe that list needs to expand out to WhatsApp and Telegram and more?

Maybe GAB should be in there too?

 

[DigNap15]

I'd say its Facebook groups, its so easy to start one (compared to all the hassles and expense to setting up a forum)

But I am getting a few members joining my forum as they say they find the layout and slower pace more suiting their style

You also have to have a lot of activity on your forum, or people wil stop visiting

Eg my forum is quite busy in General and Politics, annd I have a computer/technology category. But its very slow.
If someone asks a question on a technical matter on my forum they might get one or two replies in a week.
Whereas on a specialised Computer/gaming forum they might get ten replies on the first day

 

[Uncrowned]

I don't really view most social media as a direct threat. Ya, it has taken away a lot of forum users and keeps people from getting into forums, but honestly many people are focused on the past when forums had zero alternatives and enjoyed nearly a complete dominance on online communication. People using most social media are simply using an alternative platform for communicating.

I'd love to see some data, but I am fairly confident that a vast amount of people on social media are there as it is their preferred system and don't use forums simply due to not wanting to use that kind of a system. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc. are nothing like forums in nearly every category and function. I'm not by any means saying that Forums are "old school" or outdated, but they are simply different and fall into their own market with people who want to use them as the internet finally has numerous choices for how people communicate instead of the old Forum vs IRC vs IM.

Reddit does pose a fairly direct threat as they are very "forum-like" in many ways, but are always quite different in many ways.

Overall the enemy is often found in the forum struggling to survive as it fails to set an identity for itself and blames other resources for its lack of success. The people who use forums are out there and they are in mass, but the days of people screaming around the web looking for the next forum they want to join are very limited and forums need to fall into the same system everything else does... finding its customers.

 

[Fait]

People that make Facebook groups and are not sure what a forum is are missing out, You can’t customise a group like you can with a forum and they’re always under Facebook TOS.

 

[DigNap15]

People that make Facebook groups and are not sure what a forum is are missing out, You can’t customise a group like you can with a forum and they’re always under Facebook TOS

You make a good point
Try starting an anti vax Facebook Group!

 

[Pete]

Well, Facebook do - whether they like it or not - have a duty of care not to allow misleading or harmful information to be disseminated. They aren’t always good at it but the reality is they do need to do it.

And whatever your personal views on the matter, there is so much documented evidence that vaccines work, that anti-vaccine propaganda is provably damaging to life at this point. Diseases once considered at the edge of being wiped out are coming back.

 

[Pete]

Well... duty of care is (somewhat) defined in some jurisdictions as a legal obligation placed upon an entity to ensure that a reasonable standard of care is employed while performing services and so on.

For example, a restaurant has a duty of care to not give you food that will poison you. Yes, sometimes unfortunate things happen where people have allergies they don't know about - but restaurants do have a legal and societal responsibility to give you food that they have reasonable belief will not make you unwell.

Communities, though, are a bit more nebulous, especially if you start invoking the many-headed dragon that is S230. I have run forums over the years, and I have always believed that I as a forum owner, if I am setting out a space for other people, I have a responsibility - morally if not legally - to protect these people that come into my space from harm.

The obvious example: I create a forum, people register, then I find out that one of the members is talking to another in a fashion that could be called grooming. I have a duty of care to take action to protect the person being groomed in that situation.

That doesn't automatically mean I could or should read all the PMs (because there is also a reasonable expectation of some level of privacy), but if I get a report about a member suggesting they are carrying out such things, I have a responsibility to investigate and take action, up to and including involving law enforcement where appropriate.

The whole anti-vax thing is hugely complicated, no doubt, but there is a whole lot of scientific evidence showing the general benefits of vaccines (and there has been supporting evidence and documentation for 200+ years on the concept, ever since the whole origin of smallpox vs cowpox stemming from 1796). And as such, discussions involving and proliferating anti-vax doctrines should be very, very carefully monitored. Yes, in your own community you may decide to allow the discussion in the spirit of freedom of speech, and you may argue that anti-vax people have just as much right to their opinions as pro-vax people. But at the end of the day I believe you as a community owner/maintainer would have a duty of care to the members to prevent dissemination of material that is provably false.

For example there are various memes and images and other media being circulated at present on how to 'remove the vaccine from your body'. They are medically, demonstrably false. Some of them are potentially hazardous (e.g. bathing in Borax) and to allow these to remain unchallenged (or in some cases to remain at all) is potentially putting people in harm's way.

Are we saying that such views should remain uncontested in the honest and sincere promotion of freedom of speech? Because I don't see how that would ever fly, especially if someone actually died as a result - it would be quite a potential lawsuit, no?

 

[Blanco]

Oh right I see 1 or maybe 2 posts have been deleted.. cause no politics, surely the mods and admin of TAZ have a bit more tolerance, modding a bunch of forum admins is the hardest job? this thread has hardly been controversial or ungainly.

TBH I don't think I can't even see what I posted that was deleted. Can you not just hide the content so I can review?

That is somewhat frustrating, but anyhow, there have been some really go responses here too. Frank and open discourse is more important than ever, especially for admins, admins safe space matters too!

If people mix in a bit of their viewsas they go, so what. I don't agree with all users, so what, I don't expect to, if I did it woudl be boring, but I think they have excellent points of view and are able to article very well that makes me stop and think more. If it also keeps it colourful, it keeps it frank and open, and we all learn things along the way.

I've found the last few days very enjoyable, until now, and yes we all hate to have posts deleted, but we're admin, and our time is precious and our insight valuable.

I know I'm not power user but if the mods people that easily triggered, it was mention in this or another thread. Maybe discussion of mod policy isn't allowed. I dog that so I will not labour the point.

I'm not posting on this forum to be on a forum and have flame wars and shyte post. Seriously. If TAZ can't handle hard discussion, what's the point?

On that note, Moderation policy is a thing that also drive traffic to a forum or away. Ic make or break a forum. I'm not particularly precious I don't believe I posted anything OTT and sure it was intertwined with the topic not derailing or intentionally so. That's it mainly.