Why has WotC stopped posting on ENWorld?

[Morrus]

You continue to say "suffer", here, and I really think you'll find that, if that change was made, many people, especially younger people, and "cooler" people, would move away from those services, if they haven't already.

You misunderstand me; we're talking different (though overlapping) purposes for different platforms. I'm not talking about personal info; I'm talking about generic information. Right now, if you Google something (say something silly like "How do you pronounce drow?") the search results turn up forum threads. EN World is 4th on the front page of Google for that. That's how 90% of EN World's traffic arrives here - someone Googles for a piece of information, and it's in a forum thread. Your Facebook group doesn't appear. Same sort of thing if you Google how to fix the speaker on your iPhone or what folks think about a new washing powder. A forum becomes an information repository, whereas a scial network becomes a conversation. They start to diverge in function. That said, as I mentioned earlier, forum software companies are working hard to integrate the software with the social networks so forums themselves are changing in nature.

 

[am181d]

I think a lot of forum posters would actually be a lot more reasonable, too, and less dogmatic, if their posts of a year, or five or ten or twenty years ago could not be dug up in seconds. We seem to sneer at people who change their minds, learn from arguments and so on, and the nigh-permanence of forums tends to reinforce this tendency, I feel.

So you're saying that people are more reasonable when they DON'T have to account for past actions?

Maybe that's true, but it sure SOUNDS wrong.

 

[DMZ2112]

This is really the root of it - Twitter and Facebook are designed for sharing.

The essential difference between social networks and forums - and Google or Facebook could do this in a heartbeat, and probably will at some point, which is when places like this will go away forever - is archive-ability.

I think there's also an accessibility aspect in play. On a discussion forum, you come to the content. In social media (read: Soviet discussion forum), the content comes to you. Tapatalk is great for reading but it doesn't really reach the same level of personalized experience or interactability (not a word) that Facebook and Twitter and G+ offer. These services are /easy/, which is a big part of why they've achieved such penetration.

This will all change, of course. Web pages as we know them won't be around in ten years.

It could already be said that if you're Facebooking or tweeting from the website you're not doing it right. I think part of what is holding G+ back is that the website still feels like the most efficient way to use the service. Given Google's suite of applications I don't think that's an accident.

Forums won't be, either. Or rather, forum software will evolve to integrate social networks as much as those corporations will allow it to. Forum topics these days are fairly easily shareable on the social networks, and that will become easier, automated, and more integrated. Eventually, they'll be hard to separate.

I hope that the result will be a compromise form of collaborative media somewhere between Facebook and ENWorld rather than something 'beyond' Facebook. I don't "do" Facebook, and I've got my account locked down pretty tight, and it still gets all privacy-invadey about once a year.

We're all customers of Twitter, FB, and Google these days, whether we want to be or not.

This sentiment makes me want to sad face, but honestly my problem is not how ubiquitous these services are, but rather how we use them. If my friends would stop posting stupid involving me my attitude toward Facebook would be far more neutral.

 

[Sadras]

.... but honestly my problem is not how ubiquitous these services are, but rather how we use them. If my friends would stop posting stupid involving me my attitude toward Facebook would be far more neutral.

We have similar friends

 

[Umbran]

G+ and FB are very good at instant communities - you can create a community/group on either with a click or two and get thousands of people to hit "join".

It sounds like you're talking in a computer/technical sense of being able to form a group. I'm talking in the human emotional sense, of becoming part of a group. G+ and FB can give you groups of people, but I don't see* those people as having a sense of "belonging", in the more psychological sense of the term.



*And, my understanding is that psychologists don't see it either. It seems that social media's main failing is that while they preach that they bring people together, and people think that, through interaction with social media they are "supposed to" have gotten that feeling of having actual meaningful interactions with humans, we often/generally don't actually have the feeling. Social media is good for communication of short bits of information, but it doesn't seem to bring us together, psychologically speaking.

 

[Morrus]

I think there's also an accessibility aspect in play. On a discussion forum, you come to the content. In social media (read: Soviet discussion forum), the content comes to you. Tapatalk is great for reading but it doesn't really reach the same level of personalized experience or interactability (not a word) that Facebook and Twitter and G+ offer. These services are /easy/, which is a big part of why they've achieved such penetration.

That just takes one software developer to create the right application. I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet. There should be dozens of third party plug in apps for various forum platforms. As it is there's only Tapatalk, which is OK, and Forumrunner, which is a bit crappy. Something like Tapatalk with an interface more like Facebook would make a hell of a difference (of course, users of forums would resist that vociferously, so it may be that the fate of the forum as a platform is to just die rather than adapt, but we'll see).

 

[Morrus]

It sounds like you're talking in a computer/technical sense of being able to form a group. I'm talking in the human emotional sense, of becoming part of a group. G+ and FB can give you groups of people, but I don't see* those people as having a sense of "belonging", in the more psychological sense of the term.

*And, my understanding is that psychologists don't see it either. It seems that social media's main failing is that while they preach that they bring people together, and people think that, through interaction with social media they are "supposed to" have gotten that feeling of having actual meaningful interactions with humans, we often/generally don't actually have the feeling. Social media is good for communication of short bits of information, but it doesn't seem to bring us together, psychologically speaking.

You're right. My theory is that the sheer ease of creating such a community, or of joining one, lowers the buy-in significantly.

 

[Umbran]

So you're saying that people are more reasonable when they DON'T have to account for past actions?

Maybe that's true, but it sure SOUNDS wrong.

There's at least one mechanism for that. If a human takes a position, and has that position challenged, their ego gets involved. They have to defend the stance they took, or be proved wrong, which is a loss in status.

If nobody knows you took that prior position, people often feel more free to change their minds, as they don't feel so much like they are admitting to failure.

 

[SkidAce]

There's at least one mechanism for that. If a human takes a position, and has that position challenged, their ego gets involved. They have to defend the stance they took, or be proved wrong, which is a loss in status.

If nobody knows you took that prior position, people often feel more free to change their minds, as they don't feel so much like they are admitting to failure.

You learn from mistakes and admitting them (failure) while hard, teaches you things.

Does changing your mind without the stigma of failure teach you the same level of things, or different things? Interesting quandary.

 

[tomBitonti]

I'd be careful about services like SnapChat, which may hold content longer than folks presume. Or, the content may simply be held by the recipient. Generally, content put into any public space is outside of one's control, and few assumptions should be made as to how long it will persist. (Or rather, assume that the information persists for a long time.)

While one does not expect the Hasbro CEO to stop by for a chat, that doesn't mean that someone at Hasbro might not do so. The difference in scale puts a different person in the role; the role doesn't disappear. Though, scale does create a problem in that information provided from Hasbro will be subject to many many controls, essentially preventing most employees from saying much of value. The Paizo CEO could have a more or less candid talk. An intermediate employee at Hasbro definitely could not. (That is not to say that the Paizo CEO is not subject to the same controls. Rather, the scale makes it hard to encapsulate enough authority in a single person to provide efficient communication.)

I've found channels such as Twitter to be used to create distance and to limit interactions. This seems to have been done, for example, by Blizzard, to create a (mostly) unidirectional channel for providing information about Warcraft. Twitter can provide short sound bites, but is rather insufficient for detailed information or for much of a dialog.

From what I've seen, companies will have some plan for how they communicate with their customers and the marketplace, and the qualities of the communication follow directly from the plan and its execution. That is, if Hasbro doesn't post on a particular forum, that is by intent. (If it is not by intent, then they are rather failing as an organization.) To be fair, a combination of Twitter (or similar) messaging plus a web page providing announcements, works pretty well for getting out information. The question becomes how and to what degree to be interactive.

Thx!

TomB