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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Morrus" data-source="post: 6061189" data-attributes="member: 1">It's definitely a different environment now. I don't know if it's better or worse, but it's different.  A news page like this can't compete directly - in terms of speed of news proliferation - with social networking; and companies interact with sites like this in a very different way to 10 years ago (in WotC's case, for example, everything is in the form of press releases which have been through legal and a PR agency and released simultaneously to a thousand media outlets -- the concept of a "scoop" doesn't really exist now, though it might for other RPG companies).And, indeed, the information curation aspect to, say the new D&D edition, became redundant the moment the playtest packets started to go out.  If someone wants to know about D&D Next, they can go and physically look at it.   The source material is a far more valuable source of information than a third party telling you what's in the source material, especially when that material is literally a click or so away.So the role of sites like this have to change, I think.  They're unlikely to be the place to get a scoop these days (although we can still be the place to find a collection of recent news nicely summarised in one place - that's a definite strength that social media aren't quite so good at doing); and info curation is harder to find a place for in face of publicly accessible original source material. They need to rediscover their strengths, work out which ones are still relevant, and try to focus on those.  The article above makes for good thinking - a forum being a construct based around ideas (threads) rather than people.  It's quite perceptive, I think, and I'd not really looked at it like that before.  A forum isn't likely to be the first to mention something these days - Twitter and Facebook will have already done so a thousand times each before you can even get to your computer - but a forum will definitely delve into those ideas in detail, in a slower but less transitional fashion, in a way that those two don't.  So both have their role. Oh, for sure.  It's vital.  I've had Facebook and Twitter stuff linking back here for a year or so now, though I think I was very, very slow off the mark there.  I should have been doing that sort of thing three years ago.It is better, you're right.  It makes for a more attractive, approachable, inviting website if done well (conversely, if done badly, it makes for a truly ugly experience!)You had a knack there that I don't have.  An eye for layout which made your site very approachable.  On the other hand, though, the workload with such a thing is much higher.  I am tempted sometimes, though.</blockquote>

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