SIMON SAYS

by Simon Hastelow

The power of the written word

I’m not sure if they appealed to us because we didn’t have anything else, or whether they really were better back in the day, but I really miss Forums.

I remember spending literally hours every day on the Difflock Forum. I used to excuse it by saying it was my job, but I think I would have spent just as much time on there regardless, just as a lot of other people did.

There are still a few oldstyle forums around, but almost all of the good ones have died a death and switched to social media groups instead.

But Facebook Groups just don’t work the same do they?

They are a great place to congregate, share memes and ask questions, but I just don’t see the long, in-depth discussions going on, the way they used to on forums, and if you’ve ever tried to use a search function on a group chat you’ll just become deeply frustrated.

Which leads to another issue: The Newbies.

This is not a new phenomena, Noobs have been around since the first forum went online. Someone, new to whatever ‘scene’ or subject the forum caters to, asks the same questions that have been asked, and answered, numerous times. We shouldn’t criticise, it is partly that lack of usable archive and search of previous posts which causes the issue. However my other main gripe is that the attitude and temperament of the average social media user nowadays can be characterised as constantly short-tempered, quick to criticise and just lazy.

Some wouldn’t use a search function if their life depended on it, going by the ridiculous regularity of people asking “What time does Morrison’s close?” on my local area Facebook Group.

You’d think people had never heard of Google nor had any knowledge of how to research such basic information for themselves, so when Noobs do rock up and ask daft or previously asked questions, the regulars can be prone to sarcasm and shorttempered responses which ultimately drives the new-blood away. Then the same ‘regulars’ can be seen moaning that their particular ‘scene’ is dying - Catch 22.

People see the content from their Facebook groups in the same timeline as photos of their aunty Beryl’s Sunday Roast, a mate going off on Boris, even though he previously said he never votes, a daft advert for funeral planning and unfunny memes. They scroll and scroll and scroll through endless crap before they get to a sensible question that they could easily and helpfully answer, but by then they’re just not in the mood for it anymore.

Forums, on the other hand, were useful, walled-off communities where everyone knew the secret handshake, and learned to respect the flavour of the place. Sure you still had to deal with Noobs, dickheads and gatekeepers who criticised everything but you were all part of the same group.

Another element to the forum landscape back in the day was cost. Someone had to pay to set it up and host it. There were free facilities but they were rarely nice to use. Hosting costs alone for the Difflock forum ran into the hundreds each month, just because of the traffic and data bandwidth it consumed. I think the highest invoice we received was a little over £400 for a single month.

Overheads like these meant that only the serious forums grew in size, or the ones which were subsidised from other side projects, or revenue generating activities. Difflock had the shop and we ran Google ads on the forum which covered the costs.

With Facebook groups there is no such barrier in place, anyone can set up a group with no cost involved. Facebook encourage people to do it as it just drives more traffic to their service.

The problem with this is that if you’ve ever found yourself researching something you’ll be presented with a number of seemingly similar groups. Which do you join? You probably cannot see the content until you’ve been allowed access, so you have to join them all to see which one suits you, and offers the information or support that you need.

This leads to multiple people joining multiple groups and posting the same stuff to all of them. I’m in a few photography groups and I see the same suspects posting the same content to all of the groups they are in. After you’ve seen the same photos for the fourth time you start to get pissed off and engage less with the group or just leave it completely.

There are a couple of groups which are expertly managed and operated. I’m in one hiking group where the Administrator meticulously tags and archives every post that people share if it relate to a specific area, or trail, or recommendation. This makes it all very easy to research and find old posts, but he freely admits that this work takes up 2-3 hours of every day, and he only does it for fun!

Social media now dominates our online lives, and there’s a page or group or app for almost every activity or interest a person could have, but I feel like the usefulness of it all is very minimal and a bit shallow. The long discussions I mentioned earlier are gone, the archive of really useful technical information has largely gone. The collective experience of the users is still there but extracting it from them is near impossible.

I’m as guilty as everyone else. I post random and useless stuff daily, as much to amuse myself as anyone else. I do post things specifically to generate an archive of life, so that I can look back in a few years time and see what I was doing on a particular day. Social media is great for things like that. But I do miss forums…