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[Magmacube_tr]

To answer the Bay12 activity thing...

The forum I came here from, SALRE forums is in a catatonic state as we speak. No new posts are made, and its activity, while was as half as much as here, kept going until late 2020, when it stopped.

It was created in 2012, so not as ancient as this place, but still quite old. It too had its high moments, small community things, plenty of forum games...

I think it is the fate of forums like ours. As the world becomes faster, Internet clusters into fewer platforms, and people move simply on, forums die. Two people leave, one joins in.

One day, Bay12 too will enter its last age and its long story will finally be over.

If the Steam release fuels enough interest back to this forum and put more users to the system, then so be it. All who can coexist is welcome.

But if it doesn't, well, then we will share a red dwarfs fate. Slowly fizzling out, until nothing.

[dragdeler]

It depends. If the queen of britain dies before Jifodus disconnects, then bay12 shall outlive human history, with or without members.

[Great Order]

Might have to give the bay12 Discord (I think there's one, I'll need to hunt around) a look at then, if only as a contingency for if this place properly dies and I want to keep up with the folks here.

I mean, I'm not surprised, I was more looking for confirmation it was happening. There's definitely something sad about seeing an old regular's profile and a "Last online 05/07/2020" or the like on it, but that's the way it goes.

[King Zultan]

I have a feeling that I won't be on the internet as much as I am now when Bay12 goes down.

[Magmacube_tr]

I have a feeling that I won't be on the internet as much as I am now when Bay12 goes down.

Lol I guarantee there is still a long time for that. At least 7 years, like said. I'd say a decade, the core fizzles out the last.

And there really doesn't have to be large amounts of people for a forum to still be fun. A large majority of the time at SALRE forums twilight, there was only me and Naturegirl. And I still had fun. Even if it was lonely, kind of unnerving and definitely spooky.

[McTraveller]

I don't think this is going "downhill" - maybe less populated, but I think the conversation is generally pretty robust.

Personally I prefer the more sustained conversation over the short popcorn conversation style of micro-topics, but even with that personal preference I still find this community engaging and generally pretty insightful.

[delphonso]

Yeah, I - and I expect most of the members who are 30+ - find the constant pace of Discord exhausting and the stackoverflow model of Reddit to not be conducive to conversation. I'll browse reddit's DF board occasionally just to see more screenshots of the game, and I occasionally dip into Discord rooms for direct advice or active entertainment/conversation, but generally prefer the forum model. It helps that Bay12 forums have a good crowd. I used to post around the Linus Tech Tips forums and found it toxic as fuck.

[dragdeler]

In many regards forums (fori?) are the superior format.

Chat is super archaic, you got emjois but all the other formatting options aren't there, also it's realtime and spammy.

Social media feeds are toxic skinner boxes, anybody who listens inwards will notice after a few years how they breed dissatisfaction, and that's just the subjective part. When it comes to each SMP individually there is more problems:

reddit model (sort by popular items) = refresh site and we will show you the same shit oh also our site works bad so you might wanna refresh regularly.

facebook model (sort by popular feeds) = congratulations you just missed your friends' post because we decided that showing you influencers instead is better for our bottom line



I had a forum where I went when I was like 13y.o. at some point I just forgot about them... Checked them out in the wayback like less than a year ago, and they where offline for less than 5 years iirc... but not a lot had happened in the last decade. About 6-7 years ago I noticed how much modern social media plattforms suck and I had an account here because of the game... so eventually I just went to general discussions whenever I felt like opening social media. Now I open facebook like once every 3 weeks, reddit only when there is nothing left to read here.

[Magmacube_tr]

I mean, yes. Discussion forums like this are special in the environments they support.

I'd bet the 1 lira I found in the couch that if this forum had a like/dislike system, it would be long since dead.

The biggest factor in Bay12's survival is the simple fact that things are more real than lets say, Twitter. A five paragraph mini-essay on how you disagree on a particular economic model is objectively more personal and characterising than a simple, abstract, meaningless dislike. This makes our discussions engaging. It forces them to be more engaging. If you want to give your opinion, you better be able to formulate what you are going to say and actually think about it. And be readily accepting of civil disagreements.

On twitter the discussion may last a day or two and the character limit makes it so that only the wittiest may dominate the discussion, who is not necessarily smart or knowledgable.

Or Reddit, where what you say is either high up in the sky, in Earth's core, or invisible to the naked eye. And the discussion never last for more than a week.

Or on Tiktok. Where nothing has a simdge of meaning.

You get it.

This place will most likely survive for a decade more before the activity shrieks to a halt. If the Steam release garners a wave, then maybe two decades more.

Future will tell.

[dragdeler]

Agreed just an analogy I didn't think to mention earlier:

In a forum you write texts very akin to letters and essays, you have a lot of litterary headroom so to say in those formats, and to this day they are still selling collections of letters sent between historic people. Social media is more like an sms, it's much closer to spoken word.

[Frumple]

I mean, yes. Discussion forums like this are special in the environments they support.

I'd bet the 1 lira I found in the couch that if this forum had a like/dislike system, it would be long since dead.

I'unno, spacebattles has been around since at least '01 and is going plenty strong, even after having a few splinter forums pop up (one of which, SV, is also doing pretty okay, the rest I'm aware of have... issues), though it doesn't have a dislike system, just a small selection of reaction things.

I don't think it's necessarily a like/dislike system that's a problem, just how it's implemented and allowed to be used. Moderation (from admin, or via the members) does a lot more to maintain communities than any single aspect of the design.

... with possible exception of character limits ala twitter. I think that's just the overt and inevitable death knell of discussion, if not activity, in just about every formulation you could conceive, ha.

[McTraveller]

Yes that's a key feature of forums like this: they encourage discussion, not merely just word vomit in a 100-character pithy statement.

[King Zultan]

Why would anyone want to use those crappy ass social media things when forums like this exist?

[Uthimienure]

Why would anyone want to use those crappy ass social media things when forums like this exist?

Beats the crap outta me!

[delphonso]

Now that Scoops is up to their Scooping, we've got everything we could need here! Endless content to keep scrolling through!