Yet Another Cycling Forum
General Category => Freewheeling => The Dark Side => Topic started by: fd3 on 14 April, 2021, 05:57:40 pm
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I'm reading some old BHPC mags (~10 years old) which talk about a vibrant forum with 1000s of posters that's full of content. What's happened since then to make it so quiet? (Yes, I could ask there, but I thought it might be an ACF/YACF or other sore point that would best be raised elsewhere).
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I'm reading some old BHPC mags (~10 years old) which talk about a vibrant forum with 1000s of posters that's full of content. What's happened since then to make it so quiet?
Facebook, mostly.
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Ah, the same thing that happened to the vibrant LFGSS forum. Fucking facebook.
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^^^ Ditto RSF forum. anonanonanon ::-)
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Facebook, and people being too young to remember RSS.
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I think I'm too old to remember RSS...
It annoys me as FB != to a message board and doesn't work for multiple people talking about multiple things at the same time - or in fact work as a way to discuss or share worthwhile ideas (as it's all about the latest post, not the ease of finding old ones). I fail to understand why people would make the choice to migrate to something so vastly inferior.
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Facebook makes it attractive and easy for people to use Facebook as much as possible, for all the you-are-the-product reasons ranted about in the generic Facebook thread.
The major loss in this context is, as you say, the difficulty in dredging up older posts about specific subjects. That and a significant minority of people don't use Facebook for whatever reason, which means everything's now hidden behind a login screen (or at least peeking out from behind an annoying popup) and they don't hear about things.
The BHPC's forum is pretty creaky by modern standards, but it does the job, and - crucially - all the data belongs to the BHPC.
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also FB is 24/7 instant. True forums are 24/7 but not everyone looks every day, or every week. Most peeps have a FB account, and will visit at LEAST once a day, and any notifications, comments and messages , from a multitude of different clubs, or groups is instantly to hand , a 'one stop shop' if you like. I have taken myself off FB (4 months ago) and don't miss it a jot. (Too many w*nkers on there)
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also FB is 24/7 instant. True forums are 24/7 but not everyone looks every day, or every week. Most peeps have a FB account, and will visit at LEAST once a day, and any notifications, comments and messages , from a multitude of different clubs, or groups is instantly to hand , a 'one stop shop' if you like.
This is the problem that RSS solved. Remember RSS?
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Yes, too many flankers on Facebook.
I seem to remember something about RSS about 15-20 years ago. It was new then but I missed it.
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also FB is 24/7 instant. True forums are 24/7 but not everyone looks every day, or every week. Most peeps have a FB account, and will visit at LEAST once a day, and any notifications, comments and messages , from a multitude of different clubs, or groups is instantly to hand , a 'one stop shop' if you like.
This is the problem that RSS solved. Remember RSS?
Nope never heard of it, what is/was it?
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See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS
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See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS
Ok, thanks , that's cleared that up........................... ??? :facepalm:
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RSS passed me by too.
It appeared at some point, and I was vaguely aware of the abbreviation, but never used it.
Now I never hear about it anymore.
That wiki article leaves you none the wiser.
It uses a lot of words to say that some people dreamed something up, and then dropped it. Then other people picked it up and ran with it for a bit.
Without any clear example of what 'the something' actually is.
<shrug>
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It means you can bung, say https://yacf.co.uk/forum/index.php?action=.xml;type=rss;limit=50 or indeed http://forum.bhpc.org.uk/RSS_topic_feed.asp?title=bhpc-forum into your RSS reader and have new threads appear there automagically:
(https://www.ductilebiscuit.net/gallery_albums/random/Screenshot_at_2021_04_15_21_00_18.sized.png)
If it were 2005, there would be a big friendly RSS button in the corner of the forum advertising this functionality, and plenty of RSS reader software to chose from. It was a great way of keeping up with what was going on when everyone was writing blogs on their own websites. Then someone realised it was better to persuade everyone else to write content on their website, so they could advertise at whoever wanted to read it, and it all fell apart. Many of the good reader clients fell by the wayside, and what remains is largely because it's a minor feature of something like Thunderbollocks (above) or because it happens to be useful for automating things. Many CMSish things (including this forum software) still provide a RSS feed if you can work out the URL, but nobody bothers to make noise about it any more.
(This concept of publishing a XML feed of recent articles is also how podcasting was invented.)
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Roughly speaking RSS was a way of subscribing to websites so when they posted a new entry or a new event of whatever it showed up in your RSS reader without you having to visit each site in turn.
Problem being (a) to get started you needed to download/sign up to an RSS reader and (b) it was a decentralised technology so their was no one to push it and every incentive for big companies to bury it and (c) it got bogged down in factional nerdy wibble due its incredibly vague technical specs, not helped by its original inventor being an egotistical bozo who wasn't interested in tidying them up.
It was sunk by Twitter as much as anything else. The kind of nerds that were big on RSS just subscribed to their sites/companies/blogs' Twitter feeds and without those nerdy influencer types it lost its original momentum.
(Though you may have used RSS without knowing it. All podcasts are really just RSS feeds with audio files attached, which is a slightly more widespread adoption of the technology)
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your RSS reader
Well, what the heck would that be?
That's the problem: it was never clearly enough explained what you had to install / do.
I didn't care enough to find out.
Pop Quiz:
Name your 5 favorite RRS readers for your preferred OS.
If you Can BA, list the number of downloads it has. You can round to the nearest 10.
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*shrug*
I've only ever used what was just there in my mail/news client or web browser, because life's too short for learning some new software in the same way that it's too short for going and checking a dozen websites to see if they've updated.
Lots of people I know highly rated Google Reader. Unfortunately, not enough of them were in positions to make executive decisions at Google.
Anyway, the decline of RSS isn't really a technology problem. It's that it's hard to monetise interoperability.
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I dunno, how many web forums does one have the time to haunt? I can manage a glance at new topics on some yacf sub-forae, relevant CTC sub-forae and the same at BHPC. I can manage all three because two of them change once a week or month (respectively).
I was never an RSS customer because I didn't have enough spaces I wanted to monitor, nor did I want all that info to sort through.
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I dunno, how many web forums does one have the time to haunt?
Approximately one.
I have a couple of infrequently updated ones (like the BHPC) subscribed to by RSS, where they pop up alongside people's blogs and the remains of once-glorious newgroups. Otherwise I'd probably just forget about them, like a Facebook user.
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Well, what the heck would that be?
It's no different from needing a LaserDisc player to play your favourite LaserVision movie titles.
Most people do check in with what's functionally an RSS reader every day - just on sites called Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and publishers (including yr mates) are forced to post their content to those sites rather than the sites pulling it in from the publisher's platform.
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An RSS reader was built into Outlook. Depending on your version of Outlook it’s still there. It appears just like an inbox of an email account. Browsers also used to highlight if an RSS feed was available for a web site or sub section of it and allow you to subscribe.
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RSS feeds you whatever appears on the site you are following, according to your filters, in the order it appeared.
Facebook feeds you whatever it thinks you might be interested in, along with a bunch of adverts, loosely based on stuff you might have clicked on once.
Twitter feeds you everything, all of the time, in an order that they change randomly every so often.
I've stepped off twitter because the signal to noise was just too low (and the volume was insane to try to filter). I'm on Facebook because the cycling club I belong to organise stuff on there, but every time I use it I remember how much I hate it (and I can never find a post a second time). I should probably give RSS another go, because I usually have 3 forums open in chrome tabs and bounce between them when I should be working!
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I can see the point/advantage of RSS - but, to me, it seems like push notification on *phones - I am happy to catch up and miss out on forum posts if it means that I have less noise, more signal and less forums demanding my time (I probably spend too much time here anyway).
* I was going to say modern phones.
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We used it for a while to push notifications to our users that updates were available to our software. Internet explorer would pop up a notification and they would click on it and it would run the installer. But that was back in the day when people didn’t lock their front doors and we lived in a crime free utopia.
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You used to live in Canada?
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I can see the point/advantage of RSS - but, to me, it seems like push notification on *phones - I am happy to catch up and miss out on forum posts if it means that I have less noise, more signal and less forums demanding my time (I probably spend too much time here anyway).
I think of it as more like a way of de-webifying things into your mail client, so you can access them on your own terms. But that's just another way of looking at the same thing.
Not that it matters, the future is barely-usable algorithmic timelines. I'm just waiting for Twitter to properly kill off the API and force us all to use the official app or website. :hand:
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Facebook can fuck off. Twitter can ... hope to one day rise in my esteem to the level of Facebook. I think it's quite telling that a number of posters on this site refuse to click on any links to twitter.
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Twitter was fine as a broadcast SMS service for telling your friends what's going on. Some still use it that way, and it's almost manageable if you carefully curate who you follow. The rot set in with retweets and engagement and the usual pain that comes from a tech startup with a useful tool trying to pivot it to something that's worth (if not actually able to make) money.
I have a no-images-of-text rule, which serves to neatly avoid the worst of it.
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Ok, BIG question???????????????? why is this forum so successsful, it had a wee FB stint, when thing went a bit T.U., but that was closed down.
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Forum active membership is above critical mass with a good signal to noise ratio.
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Back to RSS for a second, I use NetNewsWire to keep track of a large number of blogs, plus things like the Guardian obits page. Seems to work fine, although the target websites do have to have set up an RSS feed.
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Forum active membership is above critical mass with a good signal to noise ratio.
This. YACF is so much better than any other forum I've used over the years.
I would also add that the membership is knowledgeable, and not just about bikes. You wouldn't believe the naive responses to some questions I've asked on other specialist forums, and that was very much on topic stuff.
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I think you can judge a forum by the quality of its off-topic section(s).
Vaguely on topic, Feedly is a reasonably good replacement for Google Reader when I remember to check it.
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Ok, BIG question???????????????? why is this forum so successsful, it had a wee FB stint, when thing went a bit T.U., but that was closed down.
I think ...
There is a shared vision/expectation RE the forum.
There is a good mix of established users but also welcoming to new people.
Generally the forum benefits from being a forum used by people who already have experience of forums and other cycling forums. You get very few "this is my first time here" people and hence you don't have the reams of "what should my first bike be?" type posts (that has a whole sub-forum to itself on the CTC forum).
It has good design, if you want to get ranty there's a space for that, if you want to get in-your-face or political there's a space for that. There's also a space where that won't happen and you can just talk about hub gears, heat pumps, or whatever.
It's also maybe worth thinking of other cycling forums that did not do well
The CTC forum was much better than it is now because half the established crowd left when they became CUK and then more left because it was empty.
The C+ forum fell apart when they rebranded to bikeradar, which I think was a loss of identity issue.
LFGSS and BHPC went facebook, which suited their users.
BROL is still going strong (I think, I could just be looking at archived posts though as I mostly use it for reference not discussion).
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I ent even poked my head around the door of BROL for years, and the recumbents.com forum seems pretty moribund too. Although the main reason for going there was the Battle Mountain board, 99.9% of which has gone to Farcebok too.
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LFGSS and BHPC went facebook, which suited their users.
It really hasn't
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^? I may be only looking at our local page (Birmingham LFGSS, irony much? I know) but the most recent posts are 4 months, 4 months, 9 months and 2 years old.
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RSF went FB, then in a fit of guilt, later on then asked its FB uses whether it should re instate it’s members only website forum. YES! Was the answer, and they did, but it’s as dead as a dead thing.