Are we losing it?

[Haywire1]

^Did you see the mankini in the Walmart thread? It was glorious.

WTF?

[Strewth]

WTF?

[Haywire1]

[Strewth]

[Haywire1]

I didnt want to do this Strewth. I really didnt, but your mocking me has left me no choice.....

[Strewth]

[Foxer]

Struth, did you not just get a job offer recently to model the new "bacc-ini", made entirely of bacon and bacon flavored string? Post a few pictures of that.

[Strewth]

^Oh no, you're not goading me into posting those!

Why must you always derail threads, Foxer?

[Haywire1]

Yeah we are way way off topic. Lets get back to the op shall we? And yes I am just as guilty lol

[Grey_Wolf]

Yeah we are way way off topic. Lets get back to the op shall we? And yes I am just as guilty lol

So. What exactly was the topic? I sorta got lost after reading the teaser line about a bee kee knee and Candy and a monkey. Then it sorta spiraled down from there, the bacc-ini got me thinking about the bacon bra that was posted somewhere .... and ...... what was this about?

[riderrick]

I don't contribute a lot and I know that's what it takes to keep a forum useable, but I used to hang around more when there was less posting but each post was fresh. Now there are just a few names that start most threads and reply to every post, the rhetoric is the same in every thread now so I spend seconds here.

[Looky]

Dream on I learned my lesson well with the infamous monkey picture.

Muhnkie in a bee kee nee?
Oh bouy...........................oh boy ohboy..........

[hercster]

Here's another angle to this story. I have no financial interest in this site or any other. However all of us have an interest in the financial success of the forum and that involves satisfying the sponsors' interests. In a former life, I learned that the most important people to attract to my business were beginners. Newbies may not know it but they have a world of spending ahead of them if they get hooked on firearms and the shooting thereof. So newbs are very important to all of us including the site owners and their sponsors. Why do new shooters join a firearms forum and stay? One answer is to learn about and talk about firearms and the gazillions of accessories. Get my drift?

[Strewth]

^Yes, good thread, and good post Mr. hercster. The amount of drek being thrown up as supposedly relevant would be very off-putting to me as a new firearms owner that has clicked on Gun Owners of Canada looking for information on guns, and their owner's experiences, in Canada.

[Foxer]

However all of us have an interest in the financial success of the forum and that involves satisfying the sponsors' interests.

Well, here's the challenge.

What satisfies the sponsors? Traffic to their sites from their target market. And how does this forum generate that? Traffic to the forum. The more people who come here who are the type likely to spend money with the sponsors and the more often they come, the happier the sponsors are and the more sponsors you can support.

That's basic advertising math - it's been that way since the first radio shows.

So how does this site generate traffic? Content. People will come to read the content.

There's three ways to create content - you self produce it (at your own cost), you buy it from someone else, or you have people donate it for free as part of their activities on the site.

This type of forum's economic model is based entirely on number three. The content comes from those people willing to create it and post it here.

The PROBLEM with that is it's very difficult to control exactly WHAT content they are going to produce. You can't ORDER them to produce specifically what you want because they're volunteers and unpaid. You can put rules in place to limit what content they produce, but that also winds up limiting your content overall and that's something you have to be careful about.

And thus we reach the point we are now.

To be honest, the forum has changed even since i joined. We used to do some political stories, and there was a lot more rational discussion about them, but it was only a smaller percent of what was posted. I deliberately didn't post large numbers of 'gun stories' here like I used to back at cgn because the flavour here was different. I did encourage letter writing campaigns and even went to great lengths to write up a 'how to' for members who might be interested in starting that up if the ownership was cool with it, but I didn't do it because inevitably my name tends to draw some people who simply like to fight with me. I also was very careful to not post a lot of political stories, just a few for discussion.

We spent most of our time joking and punning about bacon and talking guns and talking politics rationally.

Now - we see a tonne of those kinds of stories, and generally the same theme over and over. We're seeing people's posts from other forums posted as 'new threads' here. A LITTLE of that kind of stuff is entertaining, but it gets to be that every second thread is about it, or becomes about it.

Now i'm the first to admit that generally i'm going to reply to that kind of thread. It pains me to see some of the 'less factual' posts made by those who aren't working in the best interests of firearms owners. But even I have to admit it's come to the point where half the threads are basically the same thread. And I didn't go back to CGN for that very reason.

I dunno. I guess there's really only a couple of ways to change it. 1) - either pay or recruit volunteers who will specifically make a point of generating the specific kind of content that will appeal to the new shooters or the like to make sure there's a healthy supply of it, 2) - put rules in place to reduce or eliminate the kind of threads that won't appeal to new people, 3) accept it for what it is and just make peace with it.

I kind of like some political talk, and some off topic stuff like the stuff about cars and such and whether scientists are being muzzled etc etc. There's only so much to talk about with regards to guns on a daily basis. But - i agree that it's getting to the point now where it's just too much. But - if you rely on others to create the content, then unfortunately you're kind of stuck with what content they bring. I'm not sure how to bring that back to a better balance.