Nostalgia

Thx for topic @sohmageek

Just thoughts:
At a public forum like this one, there is a natural ebb and flow of people and some people stick around for the long term.

If the sales are interesting and good, sale items and mentions on deals sites keep new and infrequent people coming in. Some of those might stick around to enrich the community.

And at this site, staff engagement w community did help keep things going in the early years.

At a small site like this one, the community can dwindle over time as people get burnt out or their lives and free time are taken by other priorities. So some regular fresh faces are needed to keep the forums active.

With less interesting and very repetitive i items for sale here, and less staff engagement, things get stale. How long has it been since anyone cared what the daily item was?
[Also, I miss @JonT, who was here kinda all the time and became as much a known (and very warm) personality as any of the regular members who frequented].

Now altho staff drops in, they do so more irregularly, so many people don’t have a sense of the personality and outlook of each staff person who posts. This is less useful for keeping the forums feeling fresh. It has more if a feel of “new topic from the company” and less of a feel of “new topic from a person we know”.
That’s less compelling to the community.

Also there is the change in atmosphere in the country. The polarization. The topics that used to be ok in public, and that now one mentions only in dedicated places.
The more common social devotion to silo POVs. This doesn’t help.

Also, the internet is just less friendly. FB always seemed entirely lacking in ethics to me, but at least it was a fun way to keep up with family. Now FB just seems so toxic in its influence and policies that I won’t go there.
My objections to FB are about the way that company makes potentially ethics-laden choices.

But other non FB social places and forums suffer as well. Even if there are no probs with the company who hosts the forum, and the community people are fine, people are tired. Burnt out. And somewhat burnt out on internet personal engagement. Far less willingness to trust getting to know people right now, even if one is only getting to know people in this limited forum way.

Also forums can evolve or devolve badly. Individuals can establish niches where they behave in ways that put people off.
Sometimes this is political. Sometimes broken record posting I guess, or not understanding the “tone” that works well at a given forum (which us after all a social place). Sometimes people are habitually, subtly whining, or subtly promoting a weird personal agenda, or a disguised and clever “game for gain”. Or other weird personality traits that don’t play well in public.

“Policing” has to be done carefully. It can help or hurt the forum health. But not policing can also hurt. There are toxic people out there, and some of them are very intelligent about it all.
And with some kinds of potentially manipulative conduct, it can look innocent to some, while driving others away.

And if the company “moves on” to other projects or kinda loses interest, members can pick up on that. And that doesn’t help the forum health.

And it’s 2020.

/image four horsemen of the apocalypse

Altho I’m barely at woot since deals.woot went south, I can see that they do seem to keep a certain level of friendly activity and personal engagement going. It’s moderated in a completely diff way over there and has a very diff feel. I do commend @del for what she does over there. She’s marvelous.

I sure don’t want meh to mirror woot. But some of their controls do seem to help corral potential social toxicity.
Some of the stuff people do here that’s not great wouldn’t fly there I suspect.
Its just a diff way of handling things, and of course the Amazon corp overlord is present to some degree I guess.

Yeah, but ‘To be faaaiiirrrr…’, meh was based on the creation of a Community.
Let’s be honest, have WE been an active, responsible community? A FAMILY?
I know that I could be doing more.

Perhaps I’ll start with a nice BATH.

(Maybe I’ll invite Bonnie McMurray to join me…)

I miss the shenanigans. BRING BACK THE SHENANIGANS!!

Edit: I want to add that I really enjoyed this recent Meh-rathon. It was clever and funny. Good work, meh!

It happens to every site/company. I remember having to have a .edu email address to join Facebook and there weren’t a million ads and fake accounts