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?
