Re: It's that time of year again...

Kendrick Kerwin Chua <kendrick@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article <1k0zydp.1vl1me91wxcvm8N%usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Trooper <usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
So... this newsgroup then...
<snip>
However, I can't help but notice, this year more than any other, that we
seem to be losing a lot of the traffic that we used to have.
I'm sure there are lots of good reasons, for me it's that I only really
use usenet while i'm at work, and I have been doing more random project
visits these days so don't have that opportunity.

I struggle with the generalisation. I'm sure that mathematically it's true
that there are fewer posts now than there were six years ago, but it might
also be true there's more substantive conversation now. The creation of a
metric with which to gauge the difference is not something I'm up for.


I can only go by feel, and my feeling is that the quality of the
conversation isn't any better than it used to be (not to say that it was
bad) there are just fewer posts. So I wouldn't say the fewer posts are
countered by more substantiial conversation.

I'm not saying usenet is dead etc... but I don't know where the new
people are going to come from, so as (for whatever reason) each of us
migrate somewhere else, or stop posting, our community gets smaller and
smaller.

A political cartoonist once observed that young women today don't refer to
themselves as feminists, any more than their mothers called themselves
suffragettes. The battles of gender equality aren't quite won yet, but
it's understood that all women are now party to the fight. In the same
way, we as gamers are having children who do not see the need to
distinguish those who don't play video games. They are all immersed it in
all the time, they're carrying the hobby with them to adulthood, and
there's no shame or stigma. It's arguable that the need for a dedicated
gamer community is no longer there.

True, but however this community founded, it is still a community. When
the suffragettes "won" did the women who had met up stop talking to each
other?


I know it is against the charter, and we talked about this also
recently, but is it time to make things a bit more generic and be happy
to allow OT conversations? I fear unless we make some sort of change,
then we will only get smaller and smaller.

I would say that we're already at that point. Cars, opera, cooking and
standards of personal civility are regular topics of conversation at UGVM.
I don't know that it's a method of bringing more people to the group,
though.


Also true, but this is the way the group has always been, OT only
happens within threads as a tangent, rather than intentional. It needs
the catalyst, and my feel is that the catalyst is lessening these days.

I stick around for the PWB and the PWG threads. It's rewarding to report
on what I've played, and it's interesting to see what others are playing.
More importantly, both topics have inspired to me play games that I
otherwise would not have been aware of. I think the secret is in promoting
those two meta-activities. I remember suggesting that someone should track
the games that are reported and graph when they are picked up and put
away, but we don't have enough standardisation or rigor in our posting
method to allow for such a structure. Also, I'm too lazy to make graphs.

This group survives on the PWB and PWG, it is the reduction in posts of
those threads recently, that has got me thinking.

T.
.

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