My third place was on message boards. I loved message board culture because you could say or do anything and you felt like you were having real conversations with people. All that got blown up because of social media, which is far less social than the boards every were. You don't even get cool signatures anymore.
Just last year I got curious and decided to go out looking what was around where I lived. No clubs, no hobby groups, no gatherings, not even any classes. There is nothing in meat space anymore, and it feels as if there is somewhere around 1/3 of the people out in public there used to be. No one is interested in social interaction. Really don't know what they're doing instead, but they are definitely not doing it public anymore.
I wasn't on them, but I did read them. Always thought it was a really bad idea to get rid of that section, and it really was. Made the site far too corporate. Felt the same about the degradation of TV Tome. The message boards as they were, to this day, remain the highlight of a lot of those old sites. Once they were purged a large chunk of what made the old internet what is was died.
I used to post a lot on the IMDb boards, starting soon after I first got Internet access (2008 or so). A lot of my most formative early experiences with the Internet were there.
When they announced in February 2017 that they were getting rid of them (with only two weeks' notice), I didn't understand why. If I recall right, their excuse was that they didn't have enough volunteer moderators and didn't want to pay for hired ones. I might be misremembering, but whatever their explanation was always seemed a little fishy.
In the years since, I have come to believe that the real reason was that it was part of the crackdown on free discussion of entertainment and politics that started around that time. It happened right when Hollywood had gone full TDS-mode and started pushing propaganda harder than ever before and their cronies running news and entertainment websites (Rotten Tomatoes, etc) started cracking down as hard as they could on any dissent. The timing of IMDb closing their boards (which happened after "Ghostbusters" (2016) but before "The Last Jedi") seems a little too close to all of this to be coincidental.
I just now found a February 3, 2017 article from The Verge that said this:
"The decision appears to mark the latest website to question the value of forums and comments, which can require heavy moderation. Other major websites, such as National Public Radio and Popular Science, have closed their own commenting sections because patrolling them for toxic users became a costly and time-consuming chore."
I met some people through the IMDb forums that I still keep in touch with to this day (one through Facebook and the other mostly through email).
Fortunately for me, a different forum that I joined back then (one devoted to fanediting movies) is still alive and thriving, and many of the same people are still there. It's still a very positive and helpful place, where there are plenty of people happy to help others with their projects and to teach editing skills. But that's because it's privately owned by hobbyists. The IMDb forums were unfortunately at the mercy of the Amazon corporation.
Great insight into the collapse of WoW. I played vanilla, loved it, and tried picking it up again years down the road. It was fun when I got to play with people I knew, but solo became maddeningly boring after a while. I think another Blizzard property, Overwatch, also represents another facet that killed the social gaming scene, which was a shift in focus of a lot of popular games to e-sports and competitive gaming. Overwatch was a great game to just sit back and relax with some friends and play some casual games, but as the game was continually "readjusted" (read: broken) to balance some sort of esoteric competitive meta to satisfy a very small fraction of the player base, they effectively chased off anyone who wasn't a hardcore e-sports enthusiast, which clearly hasn't panned out to the great success they were expecting. That's just one example - there's a lot of online multiplayer games that had pretty robust communities that chased off the crowds by taking that path.
Agreed that the digital 3rd spaces are dead. I believe a different explanation for their decline though. I think that the digital 3rd spaces thrived when it was primarily Millenials on them and the camaraderie and social aspect declined as they phased out of it. X'ers had malls and as soon as X'ers were done with them they faded, Y'ers had mmos and as soon as Y'ers were done with them they faded. No matter how terribly suited WoW is for being a 3rd space now Y'ers made it work when games were as crummy as Ragnarok Online or Runescape.
My third place was on message boards. I loved message board culture because you could say or do anything and you felt like you were having real conversations with people. All that got blown up because of social media, which is far less social than the boards every were. You don't even get cool signatures anymore.
Just last year I got curious and decided to go out looking what was around where I lived. No clubs, no hobby groups, no gatherings, not even any classes. There is nothing in meat space anymore, and it feels as if there is somewhere around 1/3 of the people out in public there used to be. No one is interested in social interaction. Really don't know what they're doing instead, but they are definitely not doing it public anymore.
Were you ever on the IMDb message boards? I have very fond memories of them.
I wasn't on them, but I did read them. Always thought it was a really bad idea to get rid of that section, and it really was. Made the site far too corporate. Felt the same about the degradation of TV Tome. The message boards as they were, to this day, remain the highlight of a lot of those old sites. Once they were purged a large chunk of what made the old internet what is was died.
I used to post a lot on the IMDb boards, starting soon after I first got Internet access (2008 or so). A lot of my most formative early experiences with the Internet were there.
When they announced in February 2017 that they were getting rid of them (with only two weeks' notice), I didn't understand why. If I recall right, their excuse was that they didn't have enough volunteer moderators and didn't want to pay for hired ones. I might be misremembering, but whatever their explanation was always seemed a little fishy.
In the years since, I have come to believe that the real reason was that it was part of the crackdown on free discussion of entertainment and politics that started around that time. It happened right when Hollywood had gone full TDS-mode and started pushing propaganda harder than ever before and their cronies running news and entertainment websites (Rotten Tomatoes, etc) started cracking down as hard as they could on any dissent. The timing of IMDb closing their boards (which happened after "Ghostbusters" (2016) but before "The Last Jedi") seems a little too close to all of this to be coincidental.
I just now found a February 3, 2017 article from The Verge that said this:
"The decision appears to mark the latest website to question the value of forums and comments, which can require heavy moderation. Other major websites, such as National Public Radio and Popular Science, have closed their own commenting sections because patrolling them for toxic users became a costly and time-consuming chore."
https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/3/14501390/imdb-closing-user-forums-comments
If you read between the lines (particularly the "toxic users" bit), this seems to confirm my suspicions.
Forums were internet 1.0 and I miss them. Social media before there was social media -- and it was anonymous (if you wanted)!
I met some people through the IMDb forums that I still keep in touch with to this day (one through Facebook and the other mostly through email).
Fortunately for me, a different forum that I joined back then (one devoted to fanediting movies) is still alive and thriving, and many of the same people are still there. It's still a very positive and helpful place, where there are plenty of people happy to help others with their projects and to teach editing skills. But that's because it's privately owned by hobbyists. The IMDb forums were unfortunately at the mercy of the Amazon corporation.
Great insight into the collapse of WoW. I played vanilla, loved it, and tried picking it up again years down the road. It was fun when I got to play with people I knew, but solo became maddeningly boring after a while. I think another Blizzard property, Overwatch, also represents another facet that killed the social gaming scene, which was a shift in focus of a lot of popular games to e-sports and competitive gaming. Overwatch was a great game to just sit back and relax with some friends and play some casual games, but as the game was continually "readjusted" (read: broken) to balance some sort of esoteric competitive meta to satisfy a very small fraction of the player base, they effectively chased off anyone who wasn't a hardcore e-sports enthusiast, which clearly hasn't panned out to the great success they were expecting. That's just one example - there's a lot of online multiplayer games that had pretty robust communities that chased off the crowds by taking that path.
Agreed that the digital 3rd spaces are dead. I believe a different explanation for their decline though. I think that the digital 3rd spaces thrived when it was primarily Millenials on them and the camaraderie and social aspect declined as they phased out of it. X'ers had malls and as soon as X'ers were done with them they faded, Y'ers had mmos and as soon as Y'ers were done with them they faded. No matter how terribly suited WoW is for being a 3rd space now Y'ers made it work when games were as crummy as Ragnarok Online or Runescape.