Quote:
Originally Posted by Paulina
I’ll be honest, a forum like this existing today is a rarity. And I really don’t know how it can compete for attention spans and focus of today’s phone user base especially younger users (Gen-Z, Gen-Alpha). Most internet users today have short attention spans and don’t want to actually read or discuss anything on a deeper level. If your posts aren’t less than five sentences the users will just close their tab and move on to the next shortly gratifying piece of entertainment.
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100% correct. I see this is real life everywhere. Go into any waiting room and everybody is looking at their phone. Short attention spans and lack of depth equals minds that can easily be influenced and controlled. Try to start a real conversation and you get funny looks, and that includes family, especially the younger family members. Maybe the younger set are afraid of saying anything against the approved narrative or utter a banned word and be canceled.
Because of this and other reasons, I have pretty much zero social media participation. I have an FB account like everybody but rarely go on. I have an IG account and I only follow Alizee and a few other accounts associated with Alizee.
The chat box on this site used to be used often up to 2018. The admin at that time liked to small talk and he drew an audience. The problem was that we were hurting for new threads and posts and some of the chats could have made great threads. Scruffy and I started encouraging members to post instead and we had some success at the expense of the admin. He got mad about it and left the forum.
We've had some threads on giving the forum a makeover, and one of the topics was the need for a chat box because removing it altogether was a thought. The younger members liked the chat feature. In fact, some suggested moving the site to Discord and one created a channel already. I have never been on Discord or plan to. Chatting takes your full attention to participate and would be a nightmare to moderate. Plus there was only so much going on in Alizee's life at that time to talk about, so either there would be little to no chatting or members would find something to argue about.
This forum is full of great threads and well thought out posts. I spent a LOT of time reading through the history and got to "know" members that I never directly interacted with since they left before I joined. Since I've joined, many of the members that are still here or have come and gone I would consider as friends. It's pretty crazy to think about that, but that is the power of forums and the written word. On FB, the meaning of "friends" mean little. A few of my FB friends have THOUSANDS of friends. How is that even possible? It takes time to make a friend and more time to keep a friend.
I really would like to see this forum keep going. Shutting it down would be like closing a chapter in my life that I don't want to finish.