Hello everyone, first post.
I've been lurking on this forum and following this project for about the last 9 months or so and would like to take a moment and acknowledge and congratulate everyone involved for their efforts in developing something as exciting and potentially impactful as Flarum.
I also wanted to share some quick background and provide some food for thought since its still the early days of this project and I feel it couldn't be coming at a better time (well, yeah, I'd love if there was a mature / stable build I could install plus an importer for my current forum system).
I launched my forum in 1998 with what I believe was Ultimate Bulletin Board. Since then, I've run everything I can think of that looked decent, from vBulletin, Xenforo, Invision Community, as well as some cracks at a simple home brew BB system. Honestly, I've run all of these more than once in the years, having jumped between them when a project moved in a direction that I didn't like or a competitor made changes that I felt put them well ahead of the pack. At our peak, we pushed past 8.5 million views a month, would see thousands of logged in users pretty much 24/7 and saw our analytics register average time on site in excess of 22 minutes. Obviously the introduction of social media eroded our community, both between the excitement and novelty of it, as well as the fact that we also got sucked up and largely ignored our own community after way too many years of huge software and hosting bills and an endless list of technical problems that would come and go.
That being said, I sort of woke up and started realizing the consequences and damage of social media a couple years ago, as well as began taking note of certain new changes that I was observing. There's obviously tons of research and critical analysis on how the advent of social media has affected people's ability to digest long form content, as well as the multitude of changes to the way people interact. Ironically, we've seen the world sort of grow more distant as social media has allowed us to become more connected. Now with what's its become with algorithms developed to further exploit certain human tendencies and behaviors, coupled with their pervasiveness in daily life and business as well as the heavily manipulated approach to either showcasing or suppressing certain voices, its sometimes hard to understand how we even got here.
Anyhow, personal opinion and ranting aside, I do believe we are on the downward side of the era of Facebook / Instagram and likely quite a few more social media platforms. I've noted a slow but steady resurgence in our own community that cannot be explained away by simply our renewed efforts at rebuilding it. Likewise, there's been a lot of discussion with colleagues (my professional career is in marketing, mainly for fortune 100 brands and generally in the apparel / footwear industry) that have noted a significant drop in the return on investment in regards to promotion and advertising on social media, as well as an obvious and significant drop in engagement and effectiveness. I've also been involved in some closed door meetings to that end with some pretty influential people at some pretty huge brands and everyone seems to be reaching the consensus that we collectively made a mistake by forfeiting our online properties for the excitement and promise of social media. Now, more than a few of these people are busy trying to figure out how to undo some of this damage and what will eventually replace social media when it comes to an online and / or connected digital experience. Personally I feel we'll see a return to many of the concepts that defined the early online communities, though admittedly I'm unsure what form they'll take for this day and age. So I wanted to take kick this discussion off to mention some of what I'm seeing with the hopes of also hearing if it aligns with what some of you guys might be seeing, and more importantly, as food for thought for the brilliant people in the coding trenches here at Flarum.
Firstly, as touched on, I think there's an unrecognized hunger for longer form interactions. Its easy to see how a steady stream of very easily to digest content would be easily embraced and grow to largely eclipse all else. Likewise, I can also see the fatigue caused by this sort of junk food diet and whether people are conscious or not, I think some are waking up to realizing how we forfeited deeper connections, conversations and online experiences for convenience and simplicity. Admittedly, it took a while for me to realize this, but we've heard over an over again from returning members how difficult it was for them to regain the patience they once had to sit and read a wall of text (like I'm posting now), versus the glimpses of a feed they chase for moments at a time throughout their day. I've spent a lot of time trying to wrap my head around a solution to this, and really the best I've come up with is that really a mobile optimized version (in the generally understood paradigm) is probably not going to cut it. A wall of text is still a wall of text, even if its been reformatted to fit the screen or a smart phone. You can streamline the design, perhaps drop some of the tools in the format bar of the reply field, but in the end, its still seems to be prohibitive to the masses that have essentially consolidated their entire online experience to social media, emails and texting... Which generally consists of a double tap, swipe, perhaps and emoji and occasionally a response that rarely exceeds 240 characters. Obviously there are exceptions, but not many.
In regards to a solution to this, again, I don't have much to offer unfortunately; only some observations and a few opinions for whatever they're worth. I've never been much of a Reddit user, but two things I see being done right is that I do believe that we're seeing a return to directional niche communities, as opposed to these global / universal platforms. Granted, Reddit might be pretty much the same, but its fascinating to see how Reddit is able to cultivate niche cultures and experiences by breaking the masses down to Subreddits that align with their interests. Part of the reason my last move was to Invision Community is because they have a 'groups' feature that sort of mimics that idea where your community can organically segregate into areas of interest and participation that goes well beyond a forum subsection. Another thing I've noted is that Reddit goes far beyond just optimizing their full desktop experience for the limitation that come with mobile. Honestly, its nearly an entire experience that runs parallel versus being a simplified version of the same. For those unfamiliar, on mobile follow up comments to a topic are curated to show the very best (as defined by them) so you get the intro topic and the most compelling replies. You can expand to see all comments chronologically, but what I find to be powerful about the approach is that they seem to have bridged the chasm between the streamlined simplicity and easy to digest stream of content with social AND the long form, in depth conversation that largely defines forum culture. This format also resembles the approach I see on Twitter, though when. you expand conversations, they're still abbreviated responses. In both models, they have the topic, followed by the strongest responses, but an easy option to expand chronologically and a method to go exponentially deeper into content, yet a compelling experience even if you don't. I think this is important because another realization I've had, both via observation and feedback, is that for many years we've been living in an age where almost everything is presented in reverse chronological order. The newest stuff is always at the top / start and you have to dig downwards or backwards to go back into history. Its interesting to see how this method dominates everything from email inboxes to social media, but likewise, it runs counter to how conversations unfold. Naturally a forum mainly represents and provides for online conversation, so conversations start at the top with "now" always at the bottom or end. I'm not proposing Flarum or any forum reverse the ordering of posts (though many have that feature) as it makes little sense in regards to conversation flow, even if the format has grown to be intuitive for most other online experiences. In any case, I believe that Reddit and Twitter have largely mitigated the issue being described here with the way conversation is presented and the methods developed to navigate those conversations. Definitely something to note, when you hear of a younger users describe their confusion at seeing old content presented first.
Anyhow, I've probably already bored you guys to tears, assuming you took the time to read all this. Again, I just wanted to give you guys some feedback and observations based on my own experiences from running a pretty large forum for a pretty long time. I greatly look forward to seeing where this project goes, as well as potentially suffering through the dilemma of having to import 6.5 million comments and tens of millions of photos from Invision Board once you guys have a stable release and an IPB importer.
Cheers and congratulations!
