Save Home of Poi

So, as has been pointed out in the "Is it quieter around here lately?" the boards are kinda dead.

Things really started to turn quiet around April/May of this year and I figured it was just part of the normal cycles that we see here of flurries of activity and then periods of less activity.

It's November and the trend continues. In Social Chat, only six posts were made over a period of four days. I haven't been posting much lately because there haven't been posts to respond to. In seven years as a HoP member, I have never seen anything like it.

Even worse, Josh and Kate were going to have a mini-Doof tomorrow night at their place in my honor and it appears that very few people will be coming. This disappoints me. It means that our community is collapsing and I can't figure out why this is happening.

But more important than the discussion of why is how to fix it. This community was an amazing, active, warm, loving family consisting of tens of thousands of spinners all over the world. I don't think the blame can be placed in the hands of any individual, be it NYC, FireTom, Malcolm, or myself.

Did the community move to Facebook? If so, can we use that to our advantage? Is there something that we can do to make this forum more conducive to gatherings and socialization?

In the mean time, I will ask people posting in this thread to please try to move your posts out into the Discussion forums. We need to jump-start those forums as a start.

So, as has been pointed out in the "Is it quieter around here lately?" the boards are kinda dead.

Things really started to turn quiet around April/May of this year and I figured it was just part of the normal cycles that we see here of flurries of activity and then periods of less activity.

It's November and the trend continues. In Social Chat, only six posts were made over a period of four days. I haven't been posting much lately because there haven't been posts to respond to. In seven years as a HoP member, I have never seen anything like it.

Even worse, Josh and Kate were going to have a mini-Doof tomorrow night at their place in my honor and it appears that very few people will be coming. This disappoints me. It means that our community is collapsing and I can't figure out why this is happening.

But more important than the discussion of why is how to fix it. This community was an amazing, active, warm, loving family consisting of tens of thousands of spinners all over the world. I don't think the blame can be placed in the hands of any individual.

Did the community move to Facebook? If so, can we use that to our advantage? Is there something that we can do to make this forum more conducive to gatherings and socialization?

What are your ideas?

And please, if you know someone who has gone silent, encourage them to come back.

Message heard and responded to...

That's a big 10/4!

Hmm it is really strange.

I am actually finding that i have posted more in recent times than i ever did when i first joined but i'm pretty sure that is just me. Also i have only really ever posted in the tech areas and there still seems to be some good stuff going on over there.

I kind of doubt that people have moved to face book because its group sites are pretty lame and hard to use efficiently. Though i do think that more of the event organization kind of thing has probably moved that direction, just beacuse face book is quite good for event marketing.

One of the things that i have been thinking about as far as a down turn in the number of post is the last few year ago was that really huge peek in the popularity of fire spinning and heaps of new people were picking it up. So although there are still new people learning and still the oldies who will always love it i suppose that those times would have been the peeks in board activity.

Maybe it would help to look at the average post over time and compare our post rates to the time just before that big peek. I'm not sure if it would be more or less but it could provide some insight to the trends.

Oh and i don't feel that the down turn really had much to do with any one person or social 'incedent'. I have always checked in on HOP pretty much every weekday, mostly in tech but browsing the others and i honestly had no idea about any of the dramas re NYC, tom and all that other blah blah blah until there was a thread that summarised it all way after the event.

I'm not sure i have any suggestions on what to do but i do hope things pick up a bit more.

mm doc we are still doing the Mini-Doof...and there will be at least 3 HOPers there. but yeah well you know, HOPers have a reputation for flaking out when under pressure...

:tries not to look at BrettStar, Adya and BenJaMen:

personally, i dont believe there are any valid suggestions on how to 'fix' this 'problem'. we can sit around all day, speculating as to why people are posting less, lack of interest, or higher amounts of interest paid to other areas, but identifying the cause, and finding a remedy are two different concepts.

i can't feasibly see a way of 'fixing' whats 'wrong' with the boards. surely, if HoP is slower than usual, its not broken its just that people are choosing to do different things with their time. i don't see a way in which there can be a quick fix, to make the boards teem with posts again, but it has to happen on its own accord. interesting conversation can't just be sparked at will, it will just happen when it does, and when it happens more and more often, the boards will be back to 'normal'.. whatever that is.

my solution. wait. time works out pretty good for those who get used to it

I've certainly noticed the same, doc... it has been somewhat quiet. I know I don't post nearly as much as I once did in social chat and intro threads, but that's mainly because my work blocked HoP (b*stards) and it isn't till fairly recently that I've started semi-regularly visiting again (via a web proxy, cos our IT dept suck).

I'm one of those who're notoriously bad for not showing up to social occasions; sometimes because I'm slack, sometimes because having 4 kids just does that to you, sometime. but, despite my (not entirely) joking about taking my children out in public, I *will* be at your thanksgiving dinner next week.

I have no suggestions either, really. I've not been interactive enough with the forums of late, to be able to get a good feel for why things may have slowed down. couldn't say re: facebook either, cos although I have an account (after much pestering from my family), I just don't *get* it...

Bring back post counts! How can you complain about low post volume when you removed everything that encouraged post whoring?

oh another note, when everything around is changing toward social networking, what does hop do? Allow youtube video embedding.... hmmmmm. If you don't change you die? Was that a saying?

Message boards like this are probably seen as an 'old school' form of communication on the internet. With oldy world charm, like posting letters, but more lame. If you want more posters, get more young person features attuned to the myspace generation.

But in the end, hop is a forum connected to a company. If the company want to do stuff that's in their interests then... well...

hm, coulda sworn i replied in here, guess it gotten eaten somewhere in the system..

que sera sera, i guess



edit: sorry, i take that back, seems this thread was double posted, and i replied in the other

it sure is quiet! I don't know what's going on either xxx

MCP,

I responded to your post out in Social Discussion where I started an identical topic.

Please try to move the discussion out there where the whole community can participate in it. The only reason I posted it in here was because there are a lot of senior members who don't go out there anymore.

And that might be part of the problem...

Not a bad idea. Fancy an experiment, Malcolm? Can't hurt, and even if it does, then just take them away again.



A very valid observation. Ben and I were talking about this very thing, but I'll leave it up to Ben to talk about his idea.



HoP is connected to a company, but I think that Malcolm has done a very good job of keeping the two just about as separate as practicable. He doesn't advertise on this site and he doesn't allow other advertising. He used the resources that he has from this company to put a lot of time and money into this site and I don't think that the message boards generate a lot of revenue. The revenue comes from the shop and most of his customers aren't avid posters, or so I understand.

For those who are confused, this post is a response to a post under an identical topic that I posted in the "Retired Members" section. However, because I'd like the whole community to see this, I moved my response out to Social Discussion

as posted in the other thread:

personally, i dont believe there are any valid suggestions on how to 'fix' this 'problem'. we can sit around all day, speculating as to why people are posting less, lack of interest, or higher amounts of interest paid to other areas, but identifying the cause, and finding a remedy are two different concepts.

i can't feasibly see a way of 'fixing' whats 'wrong' with the boards. surely, if HoP is slower than usual, its not broken its just that people are choosing to do different things with their time. i don't see a way in which there can be a quick fix, to make the boards teem with posts again, but it has to happen on its own accord. interesting conversation can't just be sparked at will, it will just happen when it does, and when it happens more and more often, the boards will be back to 'normal'.. whatever that is.

my solution. wait. time works out pretty good for those who get used to it

so your solution is do nothing?? Awesome.

Maybe we should try and pinpoint the problem. Instead of just watching the community stagnate (exaggeration) as a spectator sport.

Yeah, I post less.

I read the same amount as I used to, but TBH, I've lost a connection with many people here, so I don't bother posting.

A huge percentage of the people that were around when I joined up, Have lives that take over nowadays. too busy doing other stuff to post on HoP.

Then one day, they might think to look at HoP, and see that they no longer know any active posters. So they go too. kind of like, would a 24 year old with a bit of knowledge and life experience hang out with a naive and immature 12 year old?

New, interesting topics are also hard to come by nowadays. it's boring replying to the same thing for a few years...

The same has happened at Meets. I went to the sheffield birthday party a few weeks back. I only knew the people I had turned up with, and arranged to meet there (a total of about 8, out of a huge group of people), So I ended up shooting off to Hull to visit friends instead.

The meets that have reached notoriety, they've stopped too. No one can be bothered to organise Falmouth anymore, because of the huge amount of people that turn up, and how the intimacy has gone.

SPinjams are getting less people going along. Juggling societies at universities are struggling to keep the non-hardcore manipulators interested. The learning curve that we all experienced at the beginning really kept our attention. the immense self satisfaction at learning new stuff. Now moves take a while to learn because we're left with the ones we skipped because they were too hard, or we have to wait for new discoveries to be made, so of course, our interest in community becomes less and less, because we as an individual get less out of it. Not through anyone's fault but our own. We achieved our goals with our spinning, or realised that they were damn hard...

I've also gone beyond hobbyist level now. I'm too far into this to call it a hobby, more a lifestyle choice. I certainly don't want to discuss fountains and reverse weaves any more. Chances are I'm actually talking in person to my friends about new moves, rather than writing them down in a forum. Talking to Rob directly usually gets me the desired response, plus an extra trick to play with there and then, and all in a much shorter space of time, with tea. He lives down the road.

Make cyber tea tangible, and you might have something...

I'm really into other things as well as poi and staff. I'm mainly a contact juggler, and body popper. Not many people discuss that stuff with enough knowledge to add to a conversation.

Social networking never really appealed to me. Seemed all a bit too much like attention seeking for me. Not what I'm into. Trouble is, EVERYONE is doing it. I often miss events that happen, or don't hear about them until the last minute, because people assume that everybody is on on facebook.

Ok, there's some reasons why I don't post so much anymore. helpful?

-HOP Global Conference.

-HOP Convention 2009.

-Uberevent

-Personalize.

----------------

choose one,

:R

not do simply nothing, that'd just make the problem worse.. talking to friends, engaging in conversation (just like this one), what you would expect from a lively forum.

that said, you are right, assuming its not just a phase of disinterest this site is going through, it is indeed a different matter of affairs, a state in which i personally dont have any ideas for repair.

as far as the cause, assuming not a phase, i do agree with some of your prior coments. myspace, facebook and the similar rubbish seems to have obbliterated the need for the intro threads section, google vids, youtube, and the various knockoffs removes makes a video thread almost unnecessary, and the ways in which these sites interact, link etc, its getting rid of the middle man, namely, HoP..

as for the discussions and chat sections, msn messenger and the likes, allows people to chat one on one, and im sure over time, peoples interest in 'who the last person to post on a certain thread' was, would surely fade..

How much traffic is there in the hidden forum?

I think that killed a lot of conversation. Topics that would have been posted by the more experienced members are now hidden from view. It also means that they are turning their attention away from the other forums. We've already seen in this topic that there is another string of replies elsewhere that is hidden from the rest of the board. It also creates two tiers of members. Especially when it is mentioned publically. That can only make new members feel excluded. As someone who has run forums for years I've seen it happen before.

Also...

In the UK we've been scewed by the weather this year. Our whole festival season has been wet. Where people would normally be spinning things in fields for the first time they have been sat in their tents sheltering from the rain. The cancellation of Play was just a signifier as to how the rest of the summer has been (believe me - I spent a lot of it in the mud).
This will probably be better next year.

The community grew at an amazing rate recently. So much so that it has splintered. There are now many different smaller "more personal" communities. People are tending to find affiliation with their local groups because there are enough people to form such groups (However this has always been the case in Manchester and we're all still pretty active on here - maybe we are just special )

There is more but I have to get on with stuff. I'll try to post more later.

Hmm...It's something I've noticed too, and I know I have posted less this year than last.

I'm personally putting it down to changing life stages: Finishing uni this year, travelling for a chunk of the year, and going corporate have seen me do less poi/fire in general and paying attention to other areas of my life or having the lack of energy or health to do so until my routine settles a bit.

In a way i'm glad I'm not the only one who has stagnated a bit activity-wise, but HoP has been a mainstay for me for years and I'm certain my absence won't be indefinite.

Perhaps others are undergoing life changes currently? I know Brett and Adya have a lot on their plate uni-wise, and several other HoP heavyweights have been travelling and dealing with life changes themselves (Pineapple Pete's travelling and Doc's travelling/med board woes/losingthegame woes) And I know another who is going corporate so it seems a low/erratic year for the HoP collective.

haha *so tempted to merge thread thats double posted on two boards*

i have nothing constructive to add that i feel like writing, kind of the cause of the problem hey?