Forum vs facebook

[rcteem]

I've noticed something here recently and curious if anyone else has as well. I'm a fish and dart frog enthusiast and it seems like forums are dying and Facebook is thriving. Anyone else seen that?

[Philsuma]

viewtopic.php?f=63&t=7712&hilit=facebook

[Philsuma]

I see you are selling Broms and Frogs on facebook Chris...

[rudy]

A poll about forums on a forum shows forums win, surprising!

Facebook is becoming more and more of a place to do stuff IMO people can interact with a lot more casual users on facebook than forums and this opens up a lot of big dart froggers to increased sales and they aren't going to ignore that. You can only sell to the same old dart froggers on dendroboard so many times. On top of that all forums are pretty much run by Nazis, no offense but its just the way it is and sooner or later these Nazis piss to many people off. I was stunned at the total lack of any forum activity by many vendors at many forums around NARBC many major frog venders didn't even post at all, others didn't do so till a week before these same vendors were decently active on facebook. In facebook if you hate the way some forum Nazi has banned you, you can just create your own group in about 4 clicks. I think this keeps more people around even though it sort of fragments the community a lot the community is still somewhat unified under the one facebook house. I think that a lot of dart froggers hate dendroboard because of the sellout, high and mighty crowd, and increased prices for sponsors. And I know a lot of dart froggers hate this place too. So I think facebook has become sort of the default alternative since so many of them use it.

I think that forums have not done a good job modernizing either. A big draw to facebook is the simple fact that once you are logged in joining a group which is something like a forum is just 1 click. Where joining a forum requires you to register, and then wait for some admin who requires approval to bother to approve you (why they do this no one knows because they constantly approve bots and allow them to spam) then you have to login. By the time most casual people get to the point they dont find it worth it to bother posting. You see in many other industries such as news, they have seen this as a major problem and they have attempted to correct it by allowing people to register with their sites through other major accounts such as facebook, google, etc.. On top of all that I will simply say that the dart frog specific forums have not done enough in recent years to keep up so there is a lack of reasons to come here. One day 5 years ago or whatever pretty much all development stopped at all forums. Forums are going to have to work harder and restart development if they want a place.

All that said facebook sucks and is easily the worst format on earth for discussing dart frogs or doing anything we do on forums. millions of words of information are not searchable on the internet, millions of posts cannot even be found again. Everything on facebook seems to be about this instance and there is almost no archiving and referencing of old information. If you write a long post on facebook its pretty much useless it will be gone never to be seen again in a month flat no matter how good it is. Even though this forum wastes half my monitor I think facebook wastes 75% of my monitor. Doing the most simple things like trying to post a for sale ad is like pulling teeth on facebook.

[Dan1990]

I think taptalk and the expanding number of apps for fourms as been a significant step forward. I never used forums until I got a new smart phone and got the taptalk app. Its now as you say just a click away. And while taptalk is not in any way perfect I find it to meet my requirements.
I also hate Facebook and never use it so my experience may be due to personal bias.