Post by Fraze on May 19, 2012 2:38:11 GMT -5
This will be a difficult topic to discuss, since it is so emotionally charged. The NTWF is very dear to many of us, and the thought of it slowly fizzling out is something none of us would like to consider. However, I urge everyone to look at the situation objectively, and try to formulate an opinion based on that.
I will try to provide evidence for both possibilities, using both circumstantial evidence and concrete numbers.
First of all, posting has slowed dramatically in the past months. Of course, it's easy to pass this off as bleary-eyed nostalgia, so I compiled hard numbers. I took count of the number of posts made each month and plotted these numbers on a chart.
(For those wondering how I compiled the numbers: I took a look at long-running threads and noted the overall forum post number of the first post made on the first day of each month. By taking the difference between the two numbers in consecutive months, I could make a fairly decent estimate of the number of posts made in a month.)
The result doesn't look good.
This graph shows, roughly, the number of posts made per month for every month from May 2008 through April 2012, a period of four years.1 I note several major things here:
There are many possible ways to read these trends. First of all, maybe our beloved forum is fizzling out. Many of our members have grown quite a bit since they joined the site. As people age, their priorities change--for this and a myriad of other reasons, established members sometimes decide to leave.
This on its own would not affect forum activity, though, since we also have a consistent influx of new members. However, there has also been a decline in the number of new members joining, since TNT has made it clear that we are not allowed to link to the NTWF on Neopets. This means that people can only find the forum by word of mouth or dumb luck. (I have been unable to gather numerical data on the number of new accounts being made; however, I do believe that this decrease is in fact occurring.)
On the other hand, this seems response seems somewhat reactionary. 10000 posts per month would still mean that 80 people actively contributing to the site would need to make 4-5 posts per day to keep up the volume of posts that we observe here. This is still quite a respectable volume, albeit much lower than it has been in the past.
A large issue, as I see it, is how the posts are distributed. In days gone by, the Bloids were far more active than they are currently. The Superbloid reached 9001 pages in not quite 13 months, running from August 1, 2009 to August 21, 2010. From the end of the Superbloid until the present time, the bloids have accumulated 5120 pages in 21 months--three times as slow as things were during the Superbloid.2
Now, some may consider the Bloids dying to be not too much of an issue. After all, it could be argued that they were a major hub of activity for such a long time, and pulled interest away from other sections of the forum. But on the other hand, in a less eccentric forum, the Bloids would be called "General Chat." They used to be the primary medium for unstructured social interaction between members--also known as "chatting."
Of course, a large part of the Bloids dying out can be attributed to the rise of the Taco. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, since focus was being redistributed and the social aspect still remained in a different sense. However, the Taco has begun running more slowly as well, and nothing new is gaining speed. This decline of the two major hubs of forum activity could mean one (or both) of two things: activity as a whole is dying out, or it is moving elsewhere.
This brings me to the forum Skype chat. While I have not participated in it before, I have been assured that it gets a great deal of activity. It has some very clear benefits--comments can be seen and responded to immediately, multiple people can carry on multiple conversations at once, and people may jump in whenever they please: a more fully interactive generation of the Bloids.
However, activity on Skype does not equate to forum activity. Members (especially newbies) may not hear about it, or may not have access to Skype--and even if they do, the chat requires a user to be invited into it. Moving the "General Chat" segment of the NTWF away from the forum itself in this manner can easily lead to isolationism and social stagnation in the forum itself.
Please understand that I am NOT trying to rag on any group of people or any segment of the forum. I do not want this to become a fight or a reason to dig up old grudges. I simply want to encourage open discussion. This should all hopefully become clear in the next few paragraphs.
On the other hand, all of these things do not necessarily mean that the forum is dying. It could, as I implied, simply be changing. The shifting of interest from one segment of the forum to another dates back even further back than I mapped out--the Splatterboard itself was once far more active and creative than it is now, but the Bloids slowly took prominence, and the Splatterboard became an appendix of its own sub-board. And even before the Splatterboard, in the distant past of the forum, there were the Insanity threads in Off Topic. This is not a new process by any means. It is possible that moving activity off of the forum is simply the next step in this process. I see some very notable problems with this, as mentioned above, but it does not necessarily mean that our beloved forum will die out.
Furthermore, as I said before, our long-term members are growing up. This does not necessarily mean that the old fogeys are bound to leave the community; in fact, quite the opposite. We have become connected in other ways outside of the forum--through Facebook, various online games and MMOs, and even meeting in real life. However, these sorts of interaction are not possible for all of the members.
...I think I had a point in here somewhere, but it got lost. I urge anyone who reads this to consider the evidence and the arguments for each possibility that I have presented. If you have more information beyond what I have collected, please share it. I would like to hear the opinions of as many people as possible. I would particularly welcome things people have to say about particular boards and how their activity has changed (or stayed steady) over the years. Just be careful about the "good ol' days" syndrome I spoke of at the beginning of this post.
1I put the raw data in an Excel file, which I have attached to this post. To find this data, I looked through threads that got regular activity over a long period of time--namely, Mini-Comments and the current and previous Mini-Rants threads. I would locate the first post made on the first day of each month, and by using the "Link to post" function, determine the number of that post. (Which is to say, post 2475243 is the 2475243th post ever made on the entire forum.) By doing this, I could roughly determine the number of posts made per month.
Note that post numbers found this way do not necessarily agree with the current listed number of posts on the forum. This is because the post numbers that I found also accounted for posts that were deleted/asploded.
2Roughly 708 pages per month as opposed to 244.)
3I may gather more specific data on activity in the Bloids and the Taco sometime later. For now, I can't be bothered.
I will try to provide evidence for both possibilities, using both circumstantial evidence and concrete numbers.
First of all, posting has slowed dramatically in the past months. Of course, it's easy to pass this off as bleary-eyed nostalgia, so I compiled hard numbers. I took count of the number of posts made each month and plotted these numbers on a chart.
(For those wondering how I compiled the numbers: I took a look at long-running threads and noted the overall forum post number of the first post made on the first day of each month. By taking the difference between the two numbers in consecutive months, I could make a fairly decent estimate of the number of posts made in a month.)
The result doesn't look good.
This graph shows, roughly, the number of posts made per month for every month from May 2008 through April 2012, a period of four years.1 I note several major things here:
- The volume of posts for each month of the past 8 months was lower than for any month before that, within the range of the chart.
- Historically, there's a big peak of activity in the summer and winter months, especially centered around January and June. However, January 2012 did not have this peak.
- The usual wild variation in post numbers does not show up in the recent past. Instead, we seem to have a more steady, but much lower than normal volume of posts.
- This gradual decrease in posting is not just limited to the past 8 months. Note that the overall post volume for 2009 and earlier is quite a bit higher than for 2010 onward (pay particular note to the height of the annual peaks.)
There are many possible ways to read these trends. First of all, maybe our beloved forum is fizzling out. Many of our members have grown quite a bit since they joined the site. As people age, their priorities change--for this and a myriad of other reasons, established members sometimes decide to leave.
This on its own would not affect forum activity, though, since we also have a consistent influx of new members. However, there has also been a decline in the number of new members joining, since TNT has made it clear that we are not allowed to link to the NTWF on Neopets. This means that people can only find the forum by word of mouth or dumb luck. (I have been unable to gather numerical data on the number of new accounts being made; however, I do believe that this decrease is in fact occurring.)
On the other hand, this seems response seems somewhat reactionary. 10000 posts per month would still mean that 80 people actively contributing to the site would need to make 4-5 posts per day to keep up the volume of posts that we observe here. This is still quite a respectable volume, albeit much lower than it has been in the past.
A large issue, as I see it, is how the posts are distributed. In days gone by, the Bloids were far more active than they are currently. The Superbloid reached 9001 pages in not quite 13 months, running from August 1, 2009 to August 21, 2010. From the end of the Superbloid until the present time, the bloids have accumulated 5120 pages in 21 months--three times as slow as things were during the Superbloid.2
Now, some may consider the Bloids dying to be not too much of an issue. After all, it could be argued that they were a major hub of activity for such a long time, and pulled interest away from other sections of the forum. But on the other hand, in a less eccentric forum, the Bloids would be called "General Chat." They used to be the primary medium for unstructured social interaction between members--also known as "chatting."
Of course, a large part of the Bloids dying out can be attributed to the rise of the Taco. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, since focus was being redistributed and the social aspect still remained in a different sense. However, the Taco has begun running more slowly as well, and nothing new is gaining speed. This decline of the two major hubs of forum activity could mean one (or both) of two things: activity as a whole is dying out, or it is moving elsewhere.
This brings me to the forum Skype chat. While I have not participated in it before, I have been assured that it gets a great deal of activity. It has some very clear benefits--comments can be seen and responded to immediately, multiple people can carry on multiple conversations at once, and people may jump in whenever they please: a more fully interactive generation of the Bloids.
However, activity on Skype does not equate to forum activity. Members (especially newbies) may not hear about it, or may not have access to Skype--and even if they do, the chat requires a user to be invited into it. Moving the "General Chat" segment of the NTWF away from the forum itself in this manner can easily lead to isolationism and social stagnation in the forum itself.
Please understand that I am NOT trying to rag on any group of people or any segment of the forum. I do not want this to become a fight or a reason to dig up old grudges. I simply want to encourage open discussion. This should all hopefully become clear in the next few paragraphs.
On the other hand, all of these things do not necessarily mean that the forum is dying. It could, as I implied, simply be changing. The shifting of interest from one segment of the forum to another dates back even further back than I mapped out--the Splatterboard itself was once far more active and creative than it is now, but the Bloids slowly took prominence, and the Splatterboard became an appendix of its own sub-board. And even before the Splatterboard, in the distant past of the forum, there were the Insanity threads in Off Topic. This is not a new process by any means. It is possible that moving activity off of the forum is simply the next step in this process. I see some very notable problems with this, as mentioned above, but it does not necessarily mean that our beloved forum will die out.
Furthermore, as I said before, our long-term members are growing up. This does not necessarily mean that the old fogeys are bound to leave the community; in fact, quite the opposite. We have become connected in other ways outside of the forum--through Facebook, various online games and MMOs, and even meeting in real life. However, these sorts of interaction are not possible for all of the members.
...I think I had a point in here somewhere, but it got lost. I urge anyone who reads this to consider the evidence and the arguments for each possibility that I have presented. If you have more information beyond what I have collected, please share it. I would like to hear the opinions of as many people as possible. I would particularly welcome things people have to say about particular boards and how their activity has changed (or stayed steady) over the years. Just be careful about the "good ol' days" syndrome I spoke of at the beginning of this post.
1I put the raw data in an Excel file, which I have attached to this post. To find this data, I looked through threads that got regular activity over a long period of time--namely, Mini-Comments and the current and previous Mini-Rants threads. I would locate the first post made on the first day of each month, and by using the "Link to post" function, determine the number of that post. (Which is to say, post 2475243 is the 2475243th post ever made on the entire forum.) By doing this, I could roughly determine the number of posts made per month.
Note that post numbers found this way do not necessarily agree with the current listed number of posts on the forum. This is because the post numbers that I found also accounted for posts that were deleted/asploded.
2Roughly 708 pages per month as opposed to 244.)
3I may gather more specific data on activity in the Bloids and the Taco sometime later. For now, I can't be bothered.