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