I’ve been a member of my local motorcycle forum since 2005 and a large, national forum since around the same time. During that time many changes have taken place in the area of social media, the most significant being the arrival of Facebook and Twitter. I became a Facebook member in about 2007 ( I think) and I did so mainly as a means of reestablishing contact with many of my old friends from the racing days. I did so on the advice of several of my friends who said that they had joined for the same reason and had been pleasantly surprised at how many of the old guard were active on the platform. It didn’t take very long to start gathering friends who were, in the first instance, friends of mine in real life as well but the ripples soon spread outwards and my friends list grew and grew.
During this time things were also happening in motorcycle forums as well. While the newer forms of social media were expanding, forums started to show signs of age. The momentum started to slow down and, as most organisations do, the various forums to which I belonged (and there were many), reached critical mass and started to implode. I assumed at the time that this was because, like me, many of the members belonged to many different forums and were finding it increasingly difficult to maintain concentration on a large number of them at the same time.
As well as this, the ease with which one could join Facebook, for example, compared to a forum began to seem much more attractive. The more convoluted and restrictive processes involved with forums was seen to be a bit “Big Brother-ish”. The whole Facebook thing was just much more free and easy. For the more “creative” of my friends, the lack of moderators who could oversee their sometimes less than appropriate postings was an attraction and the immediacy of Facebook compared to the forums was also an attraction. For example, posting up an ad-hoc ride to the Pie Shop was always happening on my local forum under the “Coffee and a pie sounds good” thread, but it did presuppose that numbers of people were logged on to the forum all the time and were watching it all the time.
The arrival of the smartphone probably did more to kill off forums than just about anything else. While some apps (Tapatalk, for example) did make it possible for you to monitor your forum on your phone, the ease at which the other social media platforms integrated with the mobile phone was a most attractive feature.
Of course, now the forum is just about a thing of the past. The large national forum to which I have belonged for over 12 years is still active and still attracts a large membership and activity is still high. That said, the quality of discussion is pretty much the same as it was in 2005 and the questions being asked are still the same ones, they are just being asked by newbies who don’t know that the question they are asking has been asked (and answered) a hundred times before.
So it seems that the advantages of the “new” social media have just about scuttled the forums. However, the forum platform still has two advantages that Facebook does not have and that the creators seem to be in no hurry to add to the features list. Firstly, the forum provides a searchable database of information that can be as old as the forum is. As the forum grows, that repository of information grows with it and an answer to a particular question can be found if one goes looking. Not all forum software provides easy and intuitive searching, however, and, in this days of “I want it and I want it NOW” this can be seen as a major disadvantage. Indeed, it is this perceived difficulty of the user-hostile search engine that causes most forum users to just ask the question again…(“I am sure someone has asked this question before, but….) Nevertheless, Facebook cannot provide this database feature.
The second advantage of the forum also relates to what Facebook doesn’t have and that is date-stamped information. Information on your Facebook page ages…as new information is posted the old information (that was new just a moment ago) slides down the page and off into oblivion. Yes, you can scroll down and find it, but, if you have a lot of friends who post actively, your news feed will be entirely different when you get back from the bike shop to buy a new set of gloves than it was before you left. Finding that information that someone “just” posted is a pain and, the longer you leave it, the more painful it becomes. Let me give you an example. Some months ago someone told me about a lovely old Scottish gentleman in South Australia who has a huge collection of NOS (New Old Stock), genuine Honda Gold Wing parts, so I contacted him with a shopping list of items I was told I would need. I got his contact details and rang him and got prices for all the items which I assiduously wrote down. Unfortunately, I failed to write down his mobile number (yes, stupid, I know) so, when I wanted to order the parts last week, I couldn’t contact him.
NOW, had I done that research on a FORUM, there would have been a thread about it which I could have searched and pulled up the info instantly. But, because it was Facebook, going back through my history and finding that particular post was just impossible. So I had to look like a complete goober, go back to the Gold Wing Facebook group page and ask for the information again. I must say, in conclusion, that I was treated with far more compassion than what I deserved and the information was forthcoming straight away!
The fact is that, by choice, I now spend much of my computer time on Facebook rather than on forums. Its immediacy, its ease of integrating media, pictures, videos, etc, and its wider reach means that it is now more suitable to my needs.
Now this post today was GOING to be about all my Facebook friends, but I see that I am already over a thousand words and I haven’t really got to the meat of the topic yet, so, a quick change of title and a conclusion will mean that I have covered another topic that I have wished to explore for quite a while. Please stay tuned because I DO want to discuss Facebook friends but I will do that another day.
Till next time.