A recent thread on a message board I frequent had me thinking about…well, message boards. The thread in question was called ‘How Can We Revive the Board?’ and the responses to it raised a number of questions about why it’s dying, whether it can be fixed, and whether message boards, as a thing, have had their day. Here were the reasons various members gave for why their participation in the board had dropped off:
1) They preferred Facebook. The group has a companion Facebook community, which began as a way for members to keep in touch during the increasingly frequent ‘board outages.’ It seems many members preferred to stay there. It was more immediate. They could access it through their phones. They liked seeing all the pictures, and getting a fuller view of people’s lives. The conversations were shorter and easier to dive into. Several people left during the last board outage and simply never returned.
2) They were online less than they used to be. There were a few reasons for this. Some people found that they had gotten into some bad Internet Time Suck habits, and when the board returned after its outage, they found they did not miss it. Others had joined it to seek advice that they no longer needed; I know my own participation in the Video Fitness board has dropped off in recent years for the same reason. I know what I like now, and no longer need advice about what to buy, which was main reason for visiting there.
3) The board had some politics and posting rules that Facebook didn’t. For example, one member said that she felt like it was frowned upon to revive old topics, but she also found she got chastised for ‘spamming’ the board by creating too many NEW topics. Others felt that the board tended to be too politically homogenous for them. When people have come in with wildly divergent politics or lifestyles, they get slammed for posting anything controversial. So people either don’t share the provocative sides of themselves, or they go elsewhere. It’s like that first season of the US version of Big Brother, there they let the audience have a vote in who got sent home every week. The audience tended to vote against the annoying people who did not ‘deserve’ to be there, and what resulted was an extremely boring season of television. Nice people just aren’t as interesting to watch.
4) The board was old enough that some people had histories or habits they had grown out of. I myself have learned—through painful experience—that I tend to get jumped on when I post about certain topics. So I don’t post about them anymore, and that leaves me less to post about in general, and makes for a less active board. Others had simply outgrown the type of participation they were best at. Several members joined for parenting advice when their now-grown kids were young. No more kids, no more need for that sort of community…
On the other hand, a few people—old fogey me included—will miss the board when it inevitably goes. I am not allowed to access Facebook from work, for instance. So if it goes all-Facebook, I’m out whether I want to be or not. I also find that on Facebook, I miss things because they drop off the news feed so quickly. It’s why I have never gotten the hang of Twitter; I want to be able to log in and see a list of everything I missed since my last visit, go through them one by one and check them off. Social media doesn’t work that way, to my eternal annoyance. People keep telling me I really ought to use Twitter better. I just can’t get the hang of it.
So, is my cozy little message board doomed? Probably. I imagine it is a hassle, both time and money-wise, for the largely absentee owner to maintain it when there are other options now that people seem to prefer. I suspect that one day, it will have an outage and simply never come back. I suspect that when it does go, I won’t much miss it. But a small part of me will lament the passing of an era. I did my internet growing-up on boards like this one, and have seen a few of them come and go already. When the last one dies, it will be the end of my internet youth.
Image credit: “Phpbb 3.0 prosilver” by Meow – Own work. Licensed under GPL via Wikimedia Commons.
So, what happens to the community when Facebook changes its algorithm again and the community members have to pay bribes — er, “boost” — their messages to get in contact with anyone.
Anyone putting all your eggs in the Facebook basket shows a tremendous lack of foresight.
Sounds like the issues you mention could largely be fixed with appropriate moderation. As for reading on one’s phone, I gotta think that is a code-able fix.
You won’t get my message boards until you pry them out of my cold, dead fingers.
I prefer message board because I don’t need to use my real name there. Of course, it is also okay to use a fake name on Facebook (I think it is against its terms), I don’t bother to have another account.