> I maintain three forums, and it's harder and harder to get new users and get those new users to post useful stuff. People is getting used to post shallow content that contributes nothing.
>I discussed it with my older users and we tried different strategies, but maybe 1/30 new <30yo users is worth it. I had to ban some of them just because they posted too much noise.
I didn't mention the fact that I was a Admin/Mod in my earlier post, but my biggest issue was fending off being spammed by bots. We had tons of traffic to the site/forum without the need of SEO as we were always on top of the search engines, and member registration was good but like you we had limited 'good' user activity, and the few that was good was hard to filter through at times that I made post approval a thing until we just disbanded the forum as the newsletter and conferences/workshops/irregularly scheduled weekly calls had more impact on the core business.
Ultimately, I think this is a struggle that will only be mitigated by a migration to a new form of the Internet, one in which we are not encumbered by the ad driven, panopticon business model, and shallow click-bait sensationalism to keep it running.
It became clear to me sometime after 2010-11 that Internet culture had entered into an obvious decline to some of the more critical parts of it that made it worth spending time on, I often relate it to how the early monolithic structures of Egypt were far superior to the later versions as it declined: something very critical was lost along the way.
Can it be recovered, with a great deal of sacrifice and hardwork I'm sure it can as HN is a constant reminder that many of those very same people who valued that spirit of the early days entered the Industry and went on be a part to build this system and are equally as disgusted and tired of this perverse abomination, that no amount of viral 4k streaming videos of an influencer showing off on holiday that 'breaks the Internet' was worth what was lost along the way.
I use stopforumspam, and have a little script to deal with spam, that queries a read-only copy of the main DB. Anyway, users report it before I realize someone spammed the forum. Also, if your userbase is not too specialized using a white list of email domains can help. That makes some powerusers angry, so YMMV.
I think that what happened is that Internet got totally democratized, so there's a lot of noise, and valuable people is lost in that noise. Lost in the sense of we have a hard time finding them, and they have a hard time finding us.
I can't compete with the ad budget of all the social media trying to capture eyeballs.
And then you receive a lot of people who back in those times probably was thinking that forums are for nerds, and there you have it, your average idiot who demands to have an equal voice, but refuses to make any effort to contribute.
It may sound like an elitist POV but honestly, this is how it is for me. I praise HN so much just because people here at least makes some effort.
You will be glad to know that I was on newsgroups nearly a decade after 'Eternal September,' but I was eventually there.
2010 was 2 years after the emergence of the Iphone and the shift from the Internet being mainly PC-centric to the massive paradigm shift to mobile. Myspace and facebook were already a thing, but I really think it was that paradigm shift that made the pan-opticon, ad driven system we see now.
>I discussed it with my older users and we tried different strategies, but maybe 1/30 new <30yo users is worth it. I had to ban some of them just because they posted too much noise.
I didn't mention the fact that I was a Admin/Mod in my earlier post, but my biggest issue was fending off being spammed by bots. We had tons of traffic to the site/forum without the need of SEO as we were always on top of the search engines, and member registration was good but like you we had limited 'good' user activity, and the few that was good was hard to filter through at times that I made post approval a thing until we just disbanded the forum as the newsletter and conferences/workshops/irregularly scheduled weekly calls had more impact on the core business.
Ultimately, I think this is a struggle that will only be mitigated by a migration to a new form of the Internet, one in which we are not encumbered by the ad driven, panopticon business model, and shallow click-bait sensationalism to keep it running.
It became clear to me sometime after 2010-11 that Internet culture had entered into an obvious decline to some of the more critical parts of it that made it worth spending time on, I often relate it to how the early monolithic structures of Egypt were far superior to the later versions as it declined: something very critical was lost along the way.
Can it be recovered, with a great deal of sacrifice and hardwork I'm sure it can as HN is a constant reminder that many of those very same people who valued that spirit of the early days entered the Industry and went on be a part to build this system and are equally as disgusted and tired of this perverse abomination, that no amount of viral 4k streaming videos of an influencer showing off on holiday that 'breaks the Internet' was worth what was lost along the way.