@Trash80toG4
I respect you and your option greatly. Please know that. And thank you for making time to express your thoughts in detail here. I read everything you wrote and appreciate your having shared that.
My own opinion is that smilies and emojis have so little to do with the problem that it’s really insignificant. Part of the issue is that apathy and the lack of enthusiasm is a problem everywhere. Getting people motivated as hard. Prying people away from something they are used to is hard.
So why is that the other forum is more effective at keeping a certain category of people motivated? My personal opinion is that the other forum is focused exclusively on its forum. In contrast, we have this forum and a Discord too. Huge difference!
A surprising number of people dwell exclusively in our Discord and not in the main form. I myself am just the opposite. I am exclusively on the main forum here.
Why do I choose the main TD forum over our Discord? My main reason is because I don’t want my posts and projects to go into a black hole ignored by Google search. That is huge for me.
That’s also why I got so upset in the past when they had drive crashes (especially the Tom Levens era) and a huge amount of my time and effort to create countless forum posts was wiped away forever. Not only was my time wasted, but I now have no ability to reference my own past content, which was very important to me because I’m a forgetful person and I would like to link to that content.
I want people to be able to find my content, and Google search is one huge way they do that. When I post in the main forum, it’s picked up on Google and I like that. And avoiding data loss is central to our forum, and so far, since our inception, we’ve not had a data crash resulting in any lost data at all. No major downtime to speak of either.
My second reason for avoiding Discord is generational. I’m 55 years old and I like traditional forums and I’m not into real-time chatty style experiences that are what Discord is all about.
Interestingly, our main forum really doesn’t have a problem with strife or trolls, and more of that happens on the Discord. I can’t help but chuckle at that while pondering the definition of the name “discord“ itself. Think about it. “Harmony” would have been a more positive sound name, perhaps. But that’s just me overthinking names, I guess.
Naturally, people who like Discord are going to disagree with me quite strongly, but that’s okay. Our board made the decision to add a Discord for their own good reasons, and because our board is comprised of community members, I need to accept that and I do. It is possible to respect people and at the same time not agree with them on every single point. No two of us agree on everything. I also realize that not everyone is my clone and that’s a good thing.
Regardless of whether one is for Discord or against, I think it does distract attention from our main forum, and that distraction is perhaps what you’re seeing when you compare our main forum to that other forum.
Again, that other forum doesn’t have a Discord and therefore it’s 100% focused on its main forum. That is going to give people the impression the other forum is more active than ours, even though the total activity on our main forum plus the activity on our Discord may be the same or even more at times.
I personally want more people to use the main forum. I don’t mind if they use Discord, but I think they should participate in the main form too. I don’t want to see a future where a Discord server replaces our main forum. At the same time, I’m not going to be around forever and it’s going to be up to the community in the future (whoever sits on the board) to decide what happens and what doesn’t.
For now, each, and every one of us have the obligation to make the most of what we have. And when the other forum is down, people who use that forum typically just wait around rather than posting on this one, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
To me, it’s not hard to decide to post here, especially because we, unlike the other forum, allow you to EDIT your posts for as long as you like. That too is huge. It’s earth shatteringly huge.
If more people post in our main forum, it makes a huge difference. We have provided the WAY. It’s now a matter of everyone out there to provide the WILL.
