'Tis awful quite

Edups2.0 · 03-12-2016 2:18am #1

Is it just me or has it been fierce quite in AH lately? Everyone banned or what's happening?

me_irl · 03-12-2016 2:23am

Quite what?

shane9689 · 03-12-2016 2:24am

the amount of heavy handed moderating e.g moving closing threads that seem fine, and competition from reddit and others has kind of killed AH in my opinion

Edups2.0 · 03-12-2016 2:24am

me_irl wrote: »

Quite what?

Bollix anyway. I never even copped the spelling mistake.

riffmongous · 03-12-2016 2:31am

The last wave of gender ****e took a lot of my interest away recently, I'm trying to avoid any of that American Internet crap

tomwaterford · 03-12-2016 2:31am

Could be that it's like 2.30 am???

Fluffy Cat 88 · 03-12-2016 2:35am

Atari Jaguar

Edups2.0 · 03-12-2016 2:53am

tomwaterford wrote: »

Could be that it's like 2.30 am???

I have noticed it seems quieter all day not just late in the night.

Junkyard Tom · 03-12-2016 2:59am

What happened to tinsel? We don't see it these days as much. Political correctness probably deemed it too fabulous or something..

It's a disgrace that they're trying to murder Christmas.

Edups2.0 · 03-12-2016 3:15am

Junkyard Tom wrote: »

What happened to tinsel? We don't see it these days as much. Political correctness probably deemed it too fabulous or something..

It's a disgrace that they're trying to murder Christmas.

Just between you and I, I've got tinsel. Shh.

tomwaterford · 03-12-2016 4:34am

Edups2.0 wrote: »

Just between you and I, I've got tinsel. Shh.

I got white (well silver

) and blue tinsel

DEFTLEFTHAND · 03-12-2016 4:49am

The entire site seems to be slowing down.

AH's is the hub (Times Square) so it's most notable here but other selective forums that I visit are also way down on traffic.

I suppose message boards are not as trendy as they once were. I've younger siblings who are all under 25 and don't even know what Boards.ie is let alone sign up and use it.

They all use Reddit, and all their Social Media BS.

kneemos · 03-12-2016 4:59am

****ed it up with their bull**** rules. Had to switch to Chrome on the phone to make it even work.
Pick your demographic folks and cater for them,catering for everyone pisses everyone off.

****.

Felix Jones is God · 03-12-2016 5:33am

The ddos attacks a few months ago did hit numbers. There are still quite a few issues with the build.tgqt aren't being sorted and people just get sick of a site that doesn't work well

hatrickpatrick · 03-12-2016 6:11am

shane9689 wrote: »

the amount of heavy handed moderating e.g moving closing threads that seem fine, and competition from reddit and others has kind of killed AH in my opinion

To be fair, they actually listened to a feedback thread and stopped doing this a couple of months ago. It could be, however, that the change came too late.

To be honest, and as an early 90s internet adopter it really pains me to say this, but I'm starting to feel like the forum as a concept may be in its twilight years. Forums in general are being taken over by large-scale social media platforms and gigantic, all-encompassing forums like Reddit. I can certainly attest to the fact that where you might have had somebody setting up an individual set of forums for a games console or a particular game, or a movie series, or a band, now people tend to set up either a Facebook group or a sub-Reddit, or something along these lines. It's similar to how the days of companies tending to have their own top-level website seem to be receding in favour of setting up a Facebook or Twitter page and using that as the company's online 'home'.

Personally I don't just regard this as a shame - I regard it as downright dangerous. The awesome power of internet censorship is being concentrated into the hands of a relatively small number of behemoth organisations, where it used to be diluted across thousands of popular websites. If Facebook or Twitter, for instance, decides to censor a particular ideology or political figure, the knock-on effect in terms of how that person's visibility diminishes is gargantuan. To that end, personally, I feel we've entered an age in which the idea of the internet as a sort of wild west where every voice is heard are under an extreme threat from the near-dominance of a small handful of large networks, compared to the internet's heyday in which people congregated in small groups.

I suspect that this trend has far more to do with Boards having fewer users than internal issues to this site. This is not unique to Boards - forum subculture in general across the internet is in serious decline. I'd imagine there is a generation of young people out there who scarcely know the ins and outs of having an anonymous identity with a user name and password for a forum, rather than their own online reality which is logging in to Facebook, and then having their entire internet discussion experience contained entirely within Facebook.

EDIT: A nice analogy I have for this is to compare it to the evolution of the universe. The early universe was totally chaotic with random interactions of matter on wide scales. The universe today is more settled - everything has condensed into gigantic galaxies, with large voids between them. There's not as much individual innovation going on in between galaxies because anything new out there gets ultimately subsumed into an existing galaxy.

The internet has travelled the same path - just substitute large platforms for galaxies in the above description.

shane9689 · 03-12-2016 6:30pm

I tend to partially disagree HatrickPatrick. You are right about what you say about social media and the control over the internet, but i think its having the reverse effect that you are suggesting. facebook has become such an overdoes of ADHD spam fest it feels like im playing the modern call of duty series. In otherwords, its **** and accomodates the mainstream. The mainstream was never on Afterhours or Reddit in the first place, theese sites always have and always been will be fringe sites for computer nerds and people with particular interests. The one area facebook may be taking it away is in closed groups, i find myself using closed private groups alot on facebook instead of forums. But i honestly think the biggest competition comes from Reddit as its the only other big legit site to compete with that isnt covered in obvious advertisement. The only difference is reddit kept its censorship to a minimum whereas After hours upped its censorship. And like you said it migh tbe too late now, they killed off its fan base at the worst time possible, just when social media started to pick up huge steam and were trying to take the viewership from other sites. But i think they wil lcome back if Afterhours proves it has more to offer.

I think part of the illusion of facebook that its taking over is because everyone uses it. But the people who use facebook are people who would never use a computer otherwise, they never would explore boards or other sites in general if it wasnt for everyone telling them to use facebook. true internet users will and have always found sites like boards etc...

SCOOP 64 · 03-12-2016 6:38pm

All family out shopping ,so i just put up all the christmas lights on outside if house.
so nice surprise for them when they get home, told them next week end.

03-12-2016 6:38pm

When you see the same old threads re-appear again and again it doesn't really inspire you to stick around

kneemos · 03-12-2016 7:01pm

shane9689 wrote: »

I tend to partially disagree HatrickPatrick. You are right about what you say about social media and the control over the internet, but i think its having the reverse effect that you are suggesting. facebook has become such an overdoes of ADHD spam fest it feels like im playing the modern call of duty series. In otherwords, its **** and accomodates the mainstream. The mainstream was never on Afterhours or Reddit in the first place, theese sites always have and always been will be fringe sites for computer nerds and people with particular interests. The one area facebook may be taking it away is in closed groups, i find myself using closed private groups alot on facebook instead of forums. But i honestly think the biggest competition comes from Reddit as its the only other big legit site to compete with that isnt covered in obvious advertisement. The only difference is reddit kept its censorship to a minimum whereas After hours upped its censorship. And like you said it migh tbe too late now, they killed off its fan base at the worst time possible, just when social media started to pick up huge steam and were trying to take the viewership from other sites. But i think they wil lcome back if Afterhours proves it has more to offer.

I think part of the illusion of facebook that its taking over is because everyone uses it. But the people who use facebook are people who would never use a computer otherwise, they never would explore boards or other sites in general if it wasnt for everyone telling them to use facebook. true internet users will and have always found sites like boards etc...

****.

Enough said.

Mister Vain · 03-12-2016 7:49pm

We need another strange one night stands thread to liven it up.

andekwarhola · 03-12-2016 8:34pm

At some stage soon, we're going to hit Stage Postmodern, where the majority of posting will be about posting.

NomadicGray · 03-12-2016 8:36pm

everyone is on reddit, come on over

Mech1 · 03-12-2016 8:44pm

As they say "everything in moderation"

They fooked it up bigtime, too late now to fix it.

Birneybau · 03-12-2016 9:52pm

me_irl wrote: »

Quite what?

I mean, seriously.

Fleawuss · 03-12-2016 10:08pm

When offered the choice of Atari Jaguar on a Boards poll I always take it.

That should be a poll.

I might rereg as Atari Jaguar actually.

_Kaiser_ · 03-12-2016 10:40pm

Patrick's summation above is pretty much spot-on IMO. Sites like this are generally on the wane in favour of the more instant Facebook/Twitter alternative, but Boards itself has been declining for a while now while it struggles to decide what it wants to be (having forgotten that people use a site like this for different reasons than the above examples), coupled with attempts to monetise it and bad strategic decisions, coupled with inconsistent and often heavy-handed moderation, and of course the now pretty-much-continuous technical issues ... all of which has driven off significant numbers of the userbase.

However as someone who is here a while and online even longer this leads me to something of a dilemma. I use Boards as a source of information, news and general time-wasting with a distinctly Irish slant, and this does not easily carry over to the likes of Facebook, Twitter or Reddit which are very different sites with different objectives/output. I'm not a big fan of the nonsense that's generally spouted on the first two and the latter is a incomprehensible mess really. As a result it's somewhat ironic that as an early adopter of this new medium, I'm finding myself now left behind in an era where everyone gets to express whatever random thought pops into their heads and competes with each other for the next "viral" craze. The problem is you CAN'T entirely ignore it as, as pointed out, companies and media are increasingly turning it as a primary means of reaching their customers.

Or I could just be getting old!

Atari Jaguar · 04-12-2016 3:25am

Fleawuss wrote: »

When offered the choice of Atari Jaguar on a Boards poll I always take it.

That should be a poll.

I might rereg as Atari Jaguar actually.

What.

magentis · 04-12-2016 5:26am

Atari Jaguer wrote: »

What.

Whats a jaguer a cheap Chinese clone of an Atari Jaguar?

Kinda like a Nintendo Wee?

Mister Vain · 04-12-2016 6:28am

_Kaiser_ wrote: »

Patrick's summation above is pretty much spot-on IMO. Sites like this are generally on the wane in favour of the more instant Facebook/Twitter alternative, but Boards itself has been declining for a while now while it struggles to decide what it wants to be (having forgotten that people use a site like this for different reasons than the above examples), coupled with attempts to monetise it and bad strategic decisions, coupled with inconsistent and often heavy-handed moderation, and of course the now pretty-much-continuous technical issues ... all of which has driven off significant numbers of the userbase.

However as someone who is here a while and online even longer this leads me to something of a dilemma. I use Boards as a source of information, news and general time-wasting with a distinctly Irish slant, and this does not easily carry over to the likes of Facebook, Twitter or Reddit which are very different sites with different objectives/output. I'm not a big fan of the nonsense that's generally spouted on the first two and the latter is a incomprehensible mess really. As a result it's somewhat ironic that as an early adopter of this new medium, I'm finding myself now left behind in an era where everyone gets to express whatever random thought pops into their heads and competes with each other for the next "viral" craze. The problem is you CAN'T entirely ignore it as, as pointed out, companies and media are increasingly turning it as a primary means of reaching their customers.

Or I could just be getting old!

Well said. I find reddit really difficult to read. The layout is terrible. I only use facebook for the photography groups. Its a good place to meet people with similar interests but other than that its muck.

The flying mouse · 04-12-2016 6:41am

I don't use Facebook or Reddit, I just use here & occaionally politics.ie. Sometimes modding can be a bit extreme but overall I like here & this where it starts usually for me getting my news for the day in Ireland .dont know whether it's going down or not maybe mods or someone can jet us know the statistics ?