Why has WotC stopped posting on ENWorld?

[Blackbrrd]

Nowadays I see messageboard posting as its own hobby, separate from the hobbies which are the objects of messageboard discussion.

Sounds about right to me. I enjoy discussing things on forums.

 

[Deuce Traveler]

I think that ENWorld's support of multiple rulesets has done much to alleviate edition wars. I can come here and play the editions I want to play, and read about the rulesets I care about. If someone prefers something different from me, they have their own places to go inside ENWorld that do not effect me.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

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. You can't stumble across a Facebook conversation from a week ago and contribute to it, let along a month or a year ago.

This an interesting point, but as I was recently at a conference listening to Cory Doctrow, Jimmy Wales and a number of others, and they illustrated that this sort of thing cuts both ways in terms of appeal.

Not everyone wants everything they've said archived in a very accessible way, and publicly analyzed to pieces. With Twitter, if you say a dumb thing, whilst it may still be accessible, it will be reasonably hard to find, and people simply can't analyze it to pieces due to the 140 character length, and so you will just have simple, largely contemporaneous responses.

That's not a bad thing for someone like a game designer, particularly, who doesn't necessarily want to deal with "OMG BUT WHAT DOES THIS MEAN!?" (followed by hundreds or thousands of words of guessing!) being attached to his every announcement.

So I'm not sure that future social networks and so on are going to really want to increase the ease of access to archived/non-contemporary material. On the contrary, I think we may well see more putting it into some kind of "deep storage" (which it is invisible to search engines), or even deleting it outright. Annoying as that is for studying the history of something, I think it better reflects how humans want to operate (this is particularly shown by young people today, who eschew services with strong archiving and so on, and prefer more ephemeral ones).

Which is not to say ENWorld should change. Forums are a cool thing and serve a purposes, but I think there's value in weaker archiving (or deeper/hard-to-access archiving) and even deletion of older stuff.

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.

 

[Morrus]

Which is not to say ENWorld should change. Forums are a cool thing and serve a purposes, but I think there's value in weaker archiving (or deeper/hard-to-access archiving) and even deletion of older stuff.

Indeed one of the biggest social photo services (I forget which - snapchat?) deletes photos immediately after they're posted. You see it when it's posted, or you never see it.

In that way it's more like real life. If I do or say something and you aren't looking or listening right then, you'll miss it. You can't rewind time to watch me do it.

Then again, wearable tech like Google Glass is the opposite of that. Anything you see or hear might be recorded. There's some interesting discussion on how that will change behaviour if the concept of privacy kinda disappears. If you know anything you say or do might be on FutureFacebookGlassTwit for all to see, do you behave differently? What if that's the norm for everyone?

 

[Plaguescarred]

Just seeing Mike posting in this thread is a clear indication that they pay attention to forums!

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Indeed one of the biggest social photo services (I forget which - snapchat?) deletes photos immediately after they're posted. You see it when it's posted, or you never see it.

In that way it's more like real life. If I do or say something and you aren't looking or listening right then, you'll miss it. You can't rewind time to watch me do it.

Then again, wearable tech like Google Glass is the opposite of that. Anything you see or hear might be recorded. There's some interesting discussion on how that will change behaviour if the concept of privacy kinda disappears. If you know anything you say or do might be on FutureFacebookGlassTwit for all to see, do you behave differently? What if that's the norm for everyone?

I think that, extrapolating from this, you can see why Google Glass is really unpopular with younger people (the niche it is popular in is older - 25-45 - and very culturally specific), even though it's potentially a status symbol and so on. Nobody wants their friends or frenemies or rivals potentially recording them *all the time*. That's what creepy authority figures like the cops or shop owners do. Cool kids send you temporary pictures or tweets or texts (though the latter are becoming a tad retro).

The point is, I guess, that there was a lot of "Oh no-one cares about privacy, look at the kids and their Facebooking and so on!" a year or three ago, but that phase is over, and it was a technological issue, not a matter of something young people wanted. As soon as stuff like Snapchat came out, it saw massive use, especially from young people. We saw younger people deleting Facebook accounts entirely, or keeping them in semi-resigned status, too. Whereas mom and granddad love theirs.

So I anticipate a cultural split as some older people really like Google Glass and the like (and no doubt use it to harass actual young people, recording their inevitable misdeeds and failings - because what is youth if not a period of learning/failure/mistakes? - and embarrassing them or even getting them in legal trouble), but younger ones reject it. I expect to see a big legal debate on whether we control information about ourselves, and what information, too (the first shots have already been fired, here).

 

[Umbran]

It's about community.

Morrus, you just hit on the other difference between Twitter and forums 0 one that I think is pretty important, and that I'm not sure the standard social media venues won't be emulating. Those huge environments do "community" poorly, as compared to forums.

 

[Halivar]

Morrus, you just hit on the other difference between Twitter and forums 0 one that I think is pretty important, and that I'm not sure the standard social media venues won't be emulating. Those huge environments do "community" poorly, as compared to forums.

Twitter DOES have community; it's just that the walls between affinity clusters is more porous and overlapping. A Twitter user mentally organizes their feed by these affinities. My feed had politics, gaming, software development, and the Washington Redskins. The only thing those affinity groups have in common is me, but each of them is a cohesive community where people exchange ideas freely, just like a forum thread; albeit with less verbosity. The real difference is that it isn't walled off like a forum. EnWorld is for one thing: gaming. Now, I have some use for the walled-off approach, which is why I actually have a separate Twitter account for politics.

 

[Morrus]

Morrus, you just hit on the other difference between Twitter and forums 0 one that I think is pretty important, and that I'm not sure the standard social media venues won't be emulating. Those huge environments do "community" poorly, as compared to forums.

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". They're not exactly like a forum, but they aren't exactly different to one, either. They still - for the moment - suffer from that non-archiveability factor, and you can't customize or organize it well, but it only takes a new code modification from Google and that disadvantage goes away. It's the preferred method to create communities online these days; it does suffer from the fact that because it's so easy, *everybody* does it, diluting the effect somewhat.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

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". They're not exactly like a forum, but they aren't exactly different to one, either. They still - for the moment - suffer from that non-archiveability factor, and you can't customize or organize it well, but it only takes a new code modification from Google and that disadvantage goes away. It's the preferred method to create communities online these days; it does suffer from the fact that because it's so easy, *everybody* does it, diluting the effect somewhat.

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.

As for community - sure, but that too can be a double-edged sword, and with something like Twitter, I can re-tweet exciting stuff about RPGs to casually-involved friends, where pointing them to a forum post would seem... inappropriate, and probably just make them go "What the HELL was that place all about?" (even about ENWorld), rather than focusing on the information.