I have a theory that says your IRL circle of people you can know is around 150 people, online forums depending on content vary from 100-1000. If you get to be the size of talkbass you have continuous breakdown not unlike a soccer mob. You either have utter lawlessness or you have a bunch of autocratic pricks and both cases are miserable. We're a little bit too small for a full up musician forum - It's fine for a social club. Too small to be a usable what talkbass started out to be, but far more enjoyable. But we don't have pacman and that's good. I think it's one reason why TDPRI is slightly better than Strattalk - just too many people for the dynamic to work. Or the Marshall forums, or TGP. One of the cooler forums for a while was Unofficial Warmoth - mostly because it was small and specialized enough to be fun. But the old crew no longer hangs around and the new crew isn't as fun. A couple of em downright rude.
I'd love to see an experiment that shadow segmented a massive forum so you generally only interact with a 1k people or so. But that could also be bad like when you move into middle school and instead of being the guy picked last on the team you get to be the captain of the team of all the other guys picked last in their elementary schools. This place runs on OT. I think reigning in OT is key to making a "real" forum run well. You can have OT with 100 people and 12 active and gripe about your wife and post cat pictures. If you were to try it on talkbass you'd have Ford/Chevy wars breaking out constantly. Also - in the name of ads all the megahuge forums actually promote their spammiest threads - if it's on the Frontpage at any place run by the conglomerate that runs all the musician forums these days - that's like a list of the threads I do not want to ever see.
Im sure that there's a ton of truth and wisdom there... I've grappled with it for years, and this place is a collective, like the Borg, so anyone is allowed (and encouraged) to come up with ideas, and I'll happily institute them. Here are some of the facts, at least, to my recollection/ belief.
- Talkbass if a forum about bass, The Corvette Forum is about Corvettes, and the SCTMMC is a forum about Off Topic.
- All Forums are filled with OT, how much is allowed is based on who's saying it, and how far off it is.
- This forum is fully capable of the professional feel and content that the other forums are, and there's limitless room for anything at all, however, while I can create it in moments, running it and stocking it are far too involved for me. So, the entire SCTMMC and all of its topics, can all be moved into an "Off Topic" section, and the home page can easily be made about music and instruments.
- Of the two forums that I'm run, both are consistently hailed as uniquely the best forums on the web, so while we may lack volume, the atmosphere is unparalleled. There's zero stress here, no anger, no feuding.
So which is a better format?
- Finding good people and discussing anything.
- Picking a topic, and allowing not discriminating against assholes.
Tough to say. Facebook is wildly popular, but it's riddled with drawbacks, which have destroyed society. Talkbass is only about bass, but somehow, the concept became that the better you played, the higher your rank on the forum was. Unfortunately, great players dont always make great people.
