Message Boards vs Social Media

[Roy Focker]

I'm aware of how tacky it looks for a Moderator to make a "look how cool our place is" post. I still have to make a post about it. With the rise of social media, we saw the decline of many traditional methods of online fan gatherings. Like forums. While useful most forums are very subject specific. Many fans have multiple interests.Those who wanted to be well informed would have to visit multiple forums a day. Social media made being a fan of multiple interests more convenient. Just visit Facebook, join a bunch of Groups and read all the news about your hobby fed directly to your timeline.

Then came the enshittification, AI Slop, scammers and the meme spammers. Way too much clutter. You can't keep track of things. I now find myself starting to lurk old forums of the past. Wondering if I can remember my old login information. Social media has been helpful finding locals who share the same interests but for day-to-day online interactions to learn something new and share opinions I'm seeing forums as the superior method. 

Anyone else feeling nostalgic for the days of online fan communities before the age of social media?

[mikeszekely]

I mean, I've been hanging out at MW since I was in college, like 25 years now.  I haven't met a single person from these boards in real life, but there are people that I interact with enough that I like some of them better than the friends I do have IRL.

As for social media, I used Twitter mostly to keep up on sports and news that I might not see otherwise.  And I seriously just started using Facebook this year to get in touch with an old high school friend.  So I guess it's a little hard for me to feel nostalgic for something I never stopped using because the thing I never used got crappier.

Still, cheers bud, we definitely agree on one thing.  We got a relatively small community compared to some other forums and junk, but frankly, I think we're a tighter knit for it.  Kudos to @Shawn for keeping the lights on all these years.

[myk]

What a coincidence. I came here tonight seeking the same thing that you're talking about: a sense of community without the superfluous nonsense and garbage that social media invariably has.  

Yeah, it's easy to open up my IG and Facebook and have the latest developments spoon fed to me, but i don't feel as connected or focused on what we're talking about like I did during the heyday of forums like this one in the early 00's.  The quality of information and posts by members doesn't match the quality of the forum posts from BITD.  I would rate the quality of posts on social media as I would a post count whore from BITD. 

Progress comes, and we can't do anything about it as things change.  Nevertheless, nothing is perfect, and the sincerity and better focus of the forums will never be matched my social media, in my opinion.   

I miss you guys, I miss this place, I miss those times.  

 

 

 

Edited 18 hours ago by myk

[sh9000]

Thanks to this forum I've met some cool people in real life and attended some of the best Macross conventions.  Thanks to Shawn and Graham for starting it all.

[myk]

Lol.  Look at all of us old-timers in here, lamenting the relentless march of time.  I'll never forget my first post on macrossworld, asking about the tail fins on my V1 Yamato YF-21.  I would spend HOURS on here for the next decade or so...

[myk]

14 minutes ago, mikeszekely said:

I mean, I've been hanging out at MW since I was in college, like 25 years now.  I haven't met a single person from these boards in real life, but there are people that I interact with enough that I like some of them better than the friends I do have IRL.

As for social media, I used Twitter mostly to keep up on sports and news that I might not see otherwise.  And I seriously just started using Facebook this year to get in touch with an old high school friend.  So I guess it's a little hard for me to feel nostalgic for something I never stopped using because the thing I never used got crappier.

Still, cheers bud, we definitely agree on one thing.  We got a relatively small community compared to some other forums and junk, but frankly, I think we're a tighter knit for it.  Kudos to @Shawn for keeping the lights on all these years.

I feel now as I did then: I'd rather talk to some of you guys on here, or maybe even on social media, than the people I have to face in every day life.  How's the family, Mike?  

[TangledThorns]

You know you're getting old when you prefer forums to Discord, lol. That being said, I stay on forums because going to Discord feels like starting over in a community. 

Reddit is different as I go there more for help and advice rather than discussions. Facebook groups are mostly derp, even for my local community groups (eg cars, town). 

I also see this old vs young age related tech issue with gaming too. Interesting times. 

[Dynaman]

The problem with discord is the lack of threaded conversations.  It all ends up in one big jumble.  I hate that.  Old message boards could get away with that since there were far fewer people on them.  (I think there was an option to view conversations in a threaded manner but I don't remember it doing much)

The problem with social media sites (all of them I am aware of) is they work best by fueling anger - things that make you angry get pumped to your feed in ever greater numbers.  Unlike the old days of mass media the companies doing this are not held responsible for content that appears on their site.  Partly due to the laws shielding them early in the nineties and partly due to claiming it is just an "algorithm".

Edited 13 hours ago by Dynaman

[mikeszekely]

8 hours ago, myk said:

How's the family, Mike? 

Good, thanks for asking. My daughter's at a point where I have to watch YouTube videos about how to do math just to help her with her homework...😆

[Morgen Black]

I am new to this forum and wish I had discovered it sooner.  I don't use social media for communication because it just isn't my cup of tea, especially the younger generation and their "Say anything and get away with it" mindset.  I remember the days of 1200 baud modems, running a BBS and early forums.  I do appreciate the adult conversation on this forum about movies, toys and models.  Thank you to all the original members for creating a place of knowledge and insight about a topic of my childhood.  Have a great weekend and be safe.

MB

Edited 7 hours ago by Morgen Black

[Big s]

5 hours ago, Dynaman said:

The problem with discord is the lack of threaded conversations.  It all ends up in one big jumble.  I hate that.  Old message boards could get away with that since there were far fewer people on them.  (I think there was an option to view conversations in a threaded manner but I don't remember it doing much)

The problem with social media sites (all of them I am aware of) is they work best by fueling anger - things that make you angry get pumped to your feed in ever greater numbers.  Unlike the old days of mass media the companies doing this are not held responsible for content that appears on their site.  Partly due to the laws shielding them early in the nineties and partly due to claiming it is just an "algorithm".

Anger makes people more engaged unfortunately. You could be checking on something about wholesome animals, then they start feeding you clips of goats getting knocked off a cliff by an eagle when all you really wanted to see was a cow playing soccer with a bale of hay

[505thAirborne]

I prefer forums, especially this one. I've never met any of you in person but oddly enough, just about all of you feel like people I'd hang out with.

Social media like FB was kind of cool in the beginning, now it's just a black hole of weirdos, bots, AI trolls doing their best to stir up anger & political division no matter what you post. I used FB for years for my Helmet business but deleted the entire account a few years ago, the SPAM and troll/bot accounts became more that I wanted to deal with. Twitter (not calling it the current name) was a dumpster fire by 2020, I can't imagine what it's like now. Instagram is decent but I pretty much avoid that one too. 

This forum and a few others have felt like a home away from home for years now, a major thank you to @Shawn for keeping MW alive & well. 

In the end this Forum rules, we're all a bunch of Macross, Anime, Sci-Fi, fantasy, toy collecting, model building, art loving fans, dorks, nerds and some cool kids mixed together. I'll take this every day over a social media site with billions of strangers and bots. 

Stay classy everyone!! 

[Roy Focker]

6 hours ago, Dynaman said:

The problem with discord is the lack of threaded conversations.  It all ends up in one big jumble.  I hate that.  Old message boards could get away with that since there were far fewer people on them.  (I think there was an option to view conversations in a threaded manner but I don't remember it doing much).

Much of social media is one big jumble. You can't return to a conversation because it gets buried under a ton of other stuff or doesn't get seen at all because the algorithm isn't sharing it. Many people just post to please the algorithm by sharing to get likes or incite anger. 

28 minutes ago, 505thAirborne said:

Social media like FB was kind of cool in the beginning, now it's just a black hole of weirdos, bots, AI trolls doing their best to stir up anger & political division no matter what you post.

That what Enshittification is about. In the beginning social media is very cool. It is more convenient and has a bunch of features. Once they get everyone onboard, they turn the place to shit on purpose. 

[Valkyrie Hunter D]

I have no social media presence whatsoever, and what little time I have online I spend a good chunk of it here on MW.  I do have several nerdy hobbies and I get plenty of info for each one on the MW forums.  Social media sources just seem bloated with a lot of ads and trash.  With that being said, I have enjoyed my time here, even during the old forum days.  Thank you Shawn and Graham for letting me play in your backyard, and kudos to all the mods past and present for keeping it clean.  Viva MW!

[azrael]

As another old-timer, yes I do find myself enjoying forums more than any other social media platform. I haven't used Twitter in ages. Beyond checking a few accounts, I stopped posting there. Facebook? Stopped posting ages ago. Only check for occasional posts from family but otherwise dormant. Every social media platform is in one form or another, slop. The closest I can get to a forum is Reddit and even that has slop to the point where I don't engage beyond reading and going 🤨. Every platform, save for good olde forums, has been enshittified.

Bots, spam, AI slop, are all manageable, but it's that damn "For You"-algorithm. Nothing screams enshittification louder than "For You". Just because I look up one recipe video, does not mean I want to see 10 other videos on the same thing. Just because I see one video on current news, DOES NOT mean I want to watch more or heck, an opposing viewpoint. I also don't want to see ads littered all over my screen or 2 minutes worth of UNSKIPABLE ads to watch a 3 minute music video. 

52 minutes ago, Roy Focker said:

Many people just post to please the algorithm by sharing to get likes or incite anger. 

That's the problem with this enshittification. Almost every content creator I watch has posted about "pleasing the algorithm". Flair-Rage-bait-titles? Check. Meme-Seizure-inducing-thumbnail? Check. Second seizure-inducing thumbnail for A-B testing? Check. All this just to encourage engagement. Just to get more clicks. If they don't do it, the algorithm punishes you for not "driving up engagement". You have to watch everything in incognito-mode if you don't want to be tracked.

[Duke Togo]

There aren't many traditional forums left out there, and too often I find garbage and nonsense from social media and platforms like YouTube and TikTok creeping into them. And gate keeping. Oh man, the gate keeping (I'm looking at you, Blu-ray.com). I find interaction online these days to be pretty rough in most corners of the internet.

That said, I wish we had some actual Macross to talk about. Even though I suspect whatever comes next will be crafted for the tastes of an audience that is definitely not me.

Edited 5 hours ago by Duke Togo

[guyxxed]

Forums all the way.  It's the closest to an actual conversation you can get online without direct messaging.  Sometimes the communities are a little too closed, but the signal to noise ratio is always way favorable over social media.  

[Dynaman]

3 hours ago, Big s said:

Anger makes people more engaged unfortunately. You could be checking on something about wholesome animals, then they start feeding you clips of goats getting knocked off a cliff by an eagle when all you really wanted to see was a cow playing soccer with a bale of hay

THAT is exactly what I am talking about.

[Bolt]

6 hours ago, 505thAirborne said:

In the end this Forum rules, we're all a bunch of Macross, Anime, Sci-Fi, fantasy, toy collecting, model building, art loving fans, dorks, nerds and some cool kids mixed together. I'll take this every day over a social media site with billions of strangers and bots. 

Here , Here!
I have been on Instagram for about 2 years but haven't been on for about 4 months now. I've found that it just sucks so much time and I really want to be producing more content (models , art , costumes, electronics and building projects ) than I'm consuming. There are a lot of cool, funny, awesome things going on Instagram but also a ton of garbage and crap.

This forum is literally the only thing i do now. And i am eternally grateful to have such a resource .
And i know i could hang out with any of you just based on our common interests. 

 

[Seto Kaiba]

Eh... the different flavors of social media all have their own ideal use-cases.

Message boards are definitely the superior option when it comes to building a community around a single specific topic or an interrelated group of topics like a specific hobby, special interest, skill, or fandom.  It's easier to share large volumes of information on a message board and they're more searchable than successor formats like subreddits.

The one area where the message board is still alive and well is the corporate world.  So many companies with multiple internal message board systems for different operating areas... so much so that Microsoft Teams even built a message board system into itself for corporate/professional users.  

Facebook, Twitter, and their various imitators are mainly for online small talk and are terrible venues to try and have an in-depth discussion of anything.  They're good for advertising, for gossip, and for incidental daily life nonsense but not much else.  Interactions there, and on video-centric options like Instagram, Tiktok, YouTube, etc. are structured around reacting rather than discussing, so they don't really encourage conversation.