What really goes on in forums
Each forum is different – but rarely are they about the pursuit of the associated topic and always they are about the socializing.
Some examples.
Some months ago I was trying to find some more blogs about Audi for the Audi news channel. Neli and I have owned a lot of Audis, and this seemed like it would be fun. So I posted as much on one of the Audi forums.
First, one of the moderators deleted the link in my signature that I had added a year ago, to the Cool Car Photo Magazine. When I brought up how the Car magazine was just photos of the Denver Auto Show a different moderator said it must have been because we had adds in that magazine [we didn’t], and, then asked ‘What is a Blog?’.
Feeling he wasn’t being existential, I proceeded to check out my previous post about the bumpers on the Audi S8 always getting into trouble. And similarly there an very angry forum member insisted I get rid of my [no deleted] link to the commercial-less magazine 450 photos of the auto show – which happened to focus quite a bit on the Audi TT and R8.
*** Forum Pattern #1: The moderators are assholes and the members are likewise. The topic of the forum is only a lure to get innocent people to venture inside where they can practice their skills at being jerks.
Familiar? You can see a lightweight version of this at Audio Asylum. After about 2003 or 2004, every show report I posted about over there, with great personal trepidation and often to the tune of nasty comments and innuendo, got less than 20 visits from Audio Asylum. Given that the show reports get a lot of traffic, this just reinforced the fact that the Asylum was not about high end audio but about people using audio as an excuse to chat amongst themselves.
Audio Circle is quite a bit different. There I have found the moderators to be quite nice – but the members to be less so. A few examples.
I posed news of the high end audio and audio pages at Mattters late last December:
http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=75761.msg712686#msg712686
The only response was Jeff at Tone Magazine saying we were a clone of the Daily Audiophile. So instead of welcoming a new magazine to the small, friendly hobby we all love, it is instead attacked [and Spintriicty was even worse].
In reality, the Daily Audiophile:
http://www.dailyaudiophile.com/
is a clone of alltop:
http://audio.alltop.com/
which itself is a clone of original signal:
http://gadgets.originalsignal.com/
and who knows about the Daily Reviewer:
http://thedailyreviewer.com/top/audio
Given that the high end audio news on Mattters is WAY different than these, obviously, ‘clonage’ is not what the criticism was about. He did write later in a more agreeable tone but still the public position is still so very indicative of the MO, the standard approach, to new publications and dealers etc. in our hobby.
And another example of just how the people at Audio Circle, even with nice moderators, treat people trying to grow and understand the industry, in this case we can cringe at how people treat the very nice Rachel from Grant Fidelity:
http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=79139.0
*** Forum Pattern #2: Nice moderators, hostile forum members not so interested in the industry the forum is purported to be about.
Recently I posted a question over at AVS Forum look for more blogs for a Home Theater channel. So far so good, the moderators are invisible and people actually try to come up with some blogs.
*** Forum Pattern #3: A real forum with helpful people [at least most of the time :-)].
Here is a thought experiment [we can’t do the experiment in reality because we are in the industry and getting banned from a forum or two would be a real pain].
What if I posted the same question I posted on AVS Forum on all the other forums and compared the responses….
Audiogon?
Asylum? [Deleted for sure]
Audio Circle?
etc.
Anyway, think about it. And as the Audi example showed, perhaps it is not that audiophiles are in general more likely to be assholes, but that certain types of people congregate in various forums who may or may not be civilized. Forums, which are kind of the gateway for both people new to the hobby and people who are trying to get a helpful message out to a wider audience.
Now you wonder why the hobby is not growing?
An addendum.
It appears that after 4 days and 400 visits to the AVS Forum thread, 15 people actually kicked on the link to visit another Home Theater site. QED.
[the only exception to the psychological womb effect of the forums is during the days of a special news event, like a show, at least historically.]
Which leads us to our next post.
So what does this mean for manufacturers and new, less corrupt magazines trying to make themselves known?
The current behavior is for a forum member to post about something and for other forum members to perhaps read what the first forum member posted and then perhaps to search for that thing on Google.
So Search Engine Optimization is very important.
Of course, most of the Social Marketing ‘gurus’ suggestion starting a conversation with your target market, becoming one of the ‘guys’ or gals on the forum, gain their trust in order that you can more easily sell your product to them.
I, personally, find this to be dishonest and unethical – but it is certainly what many very large communities encourage and are designed for, including Facebook and Linked-In.
But if you look at Srajan’s immense success with using this approach on the Asylum to market 6moons [not sure he could get away with such aggressive marketing, even as ‘one of the guys’ anymore (Steven Rochlin – EnjoyTheMusic and even David Robinson – Positive Feedback do not seem to get away with what Srajan had) – you can see that this selling approach works in high-end audio just like they say it would
So, the deeper question: how do audiophiles get their information about products and news in general. Answer: they turn to magazines they know and people they know – no matter how corrupt or inadequate or – often – ridiculous.
And this difference, the difference between, say tech geeks and audio geeks to latch on to newer sources of products and services AND to be able to judge if the new is really better than the old takes place a very different speeds. Ours is an industry in slo-mo and with less common sense judgment [because there are few trust-able pundits in our business and because it is harder to discern the ultimate quality of a digital playback device than the ultimate quality of a computer, for example]
This is all why Audio Federation focuses so hard on service and telling it like it is, and on quality gear that does take a LONG time to understand. There are a few dealers and several manufacturers who take the long term approach – not selling crack, and not manufacturing it either. These more subtle and long term approaches I think are the antidote to a lot of the diseases that have plagued high-end audio and its healthy growth. Kind of feels like a finger in the dike, though. 🙂
To finish up this thread about the dysfunctional relationship between the high-end audio industry and the audiophile community…
Getting clicks is not the only reason to post on a forum, of course, although there are subjects which do generate a lot of clicks [and some forums more than others… foreign forums do well, as does Audio Circle].
The presence of a well-keyworded link will help the search engines – and the audiophiles interested in a product like yours who use search engines – to find your products.
Adding links to forums can be a daunting task. The Audio Asylum, the worst, will usually delete anything you post but they also have the most straight forward solution [but Audio Circle has or will soon have something even better]. For $30 a link can be added on the Asylum News page, which in my experience Google likes much, much better than links in the forums [and this way you avoid being called all sorts of wonderful things by the wonderful inmates there, seeing you as they do someone they can attack with impunity].
It was this frustration of the industry to present their products and ideas to audiophiles, being obstructed by forum admins with strange phobias about commerce on the one hand, and unethical magazine editors on the other, that we created Spintricity – an open magazine for industry to freely present their inventions to those that would be the interested in those inventions.
Unfortunately, the high-end audio industry has its own set of issues – starting with an irrational fear of the internet…
Hmm, interesting. I am fully a layman in these matters but agree that high end seems populated by arrogant people. One only has to read responses to fairly well thought out ideas and/or opinions, and even decent requests a la Rachel, to realize this.
Perhaps it is fear and anger? Fear of being discovered to be an empty vessel and anger at realising they are but an empty vessel. I don’t know, but I belong to some USA high end forums and this is my take on some of the responses presented to me.
It is disheartening, but I also believe some manufacturer arrogance underlies the situation too in that their brand marketing generates a “the rest is rubbish” attitude.
Hi Authur,
Hmmmm…. I am not so sure the ‘rest is rubbish’ attitude by manufacturers is such a bad thing. Certainly manufacturers in other industries feel the same way (autos, toilet paper, etc.) and if the manufacturer didn’t think their product was uniquely ‘great’ and was ‘pretty good just like our competitors’ then one would have to question their dedication and just what they are bringing to the party, if anything.
The real question is… is some of this stuff ACTUALLY rubbish? Adjusting for price, is some stuff just not worth, say, half of what they charge – which might be a good definition for ‘rubbish’ (OK, half of the street price – i.e. what people actually pay for it, as we know some markup their products only to discount by 50%+).
I think there are so many products and so few audiophiles that information about product quality can be A) difficult to come by and B) easily manipulated by unscrupulous reviewers and shills.
I, personally, think that when people talk about the ‘rest being rubbish’ they probably envision several products of brands which may be, or have been, in fact: rubbish.
Then there is ‘absolute’ rubbish – which is rubbish at every level and means of measuring such things, and ‘relative’ rubbish, which is rubbish in the context of someone’s current system or perhaps their current tastes.
I do not like the way BMW auto’s manual shift works… nor the way the car sounds when being driven, and think their cars are wildly over-priced… for me… but can see how other people might love them. So I am mature enough ( :-)) NOT to say they are ‘rubbish’ even though for me they are quite inferior to Audi and Lexus. I think many people on forums enjoy the invective and say everything that is relatively rubbish TO THERM is absolute rubbish.
We are living in very hostile and rude times where it is popular to be as aggressive as possible trying to get people to follow their particular philosophy. This shows up in forums. Luckily in audio it has not come to throwing bricks [prices went up by HOW MUCH? :-)], threatening our congresspeople [high-end audio manufacturers should not have to pay taxes – just like oil and tobacco!!! :-)], and carrying firearms to shows [just to be prepared in case someone tries to force ME to switch to 100% solidstate, or says something bad about Audio Note :-)]
Thanks for posting!
-Mike