Quote:
Originally Posted by SATCHMO
Here's the deal. everbody who's been a member of this site for at least the past 2-3 years has noticed a significant drop in the quality of the forum. There's been multiple threads created on the subject with everyone giving there own two cents as to what they believe the reason is. More theories have been postulated about this than theories about what killed the dinosaurs. The truth of the matter is that the amount of active members on the site has grown immensely, yet the proportion of people who actively engage in intelligent, respectful discussion regarding music (of all things) has not grown commensurately. The sense of community and unified purpose used to be the hallmark of this place. For my own part, it's the reason why I was once very active on here.
Part of the problem of this is the way that mods are chosen. In one sense it's a great thing that mods are elected by other mods, because we're able to see first hand whether or not a member will be an appropriate fit for the position, but sometimes it doesn't quite work out that way. When a mod comes into their position having already developed relationships with some of the members, there is a hesitancy to to their job with any sort of impartiality. It's difficult to effectively be in a position of power while still desiring to be respected and well-liked by one's peers. The result of trying to balance both is a hesitancy to take action when action is necessary, as well as favoritism, which clouds judgement. In the end, what you have is no longer a unified sense of community, but a collection of cliques, and on the mod side, a bureaucracy that impedes progress.
When I was given my first tenure as moderator, it was very controversial because I hadn't been a member for very long at all, but as people got to know me they discovered that I was genuinely interested in the community and really knew my stuff. Perhaps the best thing to do with Jayshredzz is give him the benefit of the doubt. It's understandable that as a new member he's testing out some of his more unpopular opinions and realizing the power to provoke others to strongly disagree with him. That'll mellow out as he becomes more acclimated to engaging in discussion on here, and as he's called to make impartial decisions as a moderator. I honestly think that this may be exactly what MB needs to become a better forum and I look forward to being more active here than I have been in quite some time.
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Anyone who's been on a forum for 2-3 years has seen this. It's the unfortunate reality of the cyclical nature of webforums. This is the 4th 'community' I've been involved in and the 4th time this EXACT same line of discussion and issues came up. Every place goes through some sort of golden age when all the most active posters are great and everything is super awesome and then it falls apart. Either people get bored or real life issues take precedence, whatever.
I also think a major factor in the diminishing quality is a result of the popularity of the ancillary subforums that aren't specific to particular styles or core purpose of the site. Look at the amount of views for The Lounge compared to the rest, only 1 subforum even comes close (within 100 000 - 99 000 to be exact).
People are not joining this site to talk about music. They're joining a social club that
ends up talking about music (like it's a unique topic of discussion) as opposed to the intended role of those subforums as a place to discuss randoms things
after having discussed music.
The other problem is subjective vs. objective discussion. Subjective discussion is passionate and emotional, filled with drama and personal opinions. It's ultimately baseless if you want to participate in a thread that reaches a conclusion truly worth reading, but it's generally a whole hell of a lot more entertaining than a scholarly discussion (which tends to be super clique-ish).
I'm hoping Jayshreddz is a techhead and was made a mod so that he can work within the guts of this forum and whatever others owned by its parent company to modernize it (and not someone's little brother). The worse thing the owners of this place could do is try polling and satisfying the community prior to revamping the site. Someone like JS who doesn't seem to care about anyone and vice versa is probably the best candidate to spot areas of improvement for the owners.
None of the changes need to satisfy existing members, we ARE the reason the site is in its current state, they need to attract the right kind of future users. Otherwise, this is just a glorified Facebook group page.
03-28-2012, 07:48 AM
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