TCH & Fun - A personal observation

[Moonshroom]

This has been on my mind a while...

You might remember that I brought around 23 people to the forum.

You might have also noticed that none of them have stuck around.

All while it IS true that a lot of them were older teenagers ready to jump into adulthood (and their commitment declined as a result), that always puzzled me... I mean, a 100% kill rate is unheard-of. I have been doing the street-team thing for a long time and never once had I have this happen before.

Very recently I managed to catch up with one of my favorites I decided to ask them about it... they said that TCH doesn't really lend itself to craziness and that they felt blocked at every turn whenever they tried to start some funny, harmless nonsense (they also provided links to topics where they felt that this happened and I had no choice but to agree with what they said).

It is actually quite impressive in a way... the older teenagers / young adults were always here on borrowed time, but a sizable number of the others included highly-energic tweens, IRL friends, people who had been posting together since they were old enough to be on the internet, and even some couple of siblings, so it just strikes me as very odd that none of the decided to keep it up here, considering how active this forum is and how positive my own personal experience has been (which is why I decided to introduce all of them to the board in the first place).

Perhaps none of this makes any sense... maybe even perhaps you don't think it's a big deal, and I respect that. But I really felt the need to bring this up to your attention.

I really hope that this doesn't come across as an attack on a community that I have called home for years now.

[slooroo]

Without context to this part

Very recently I managed to catch up with one of my favorites I decided to ask them about it... they said that TCH doesn't really lend itself to craziness and that they felt blocked at every turn whenever they tried to start some funny, harmless nonsense (they also provided links to topics where they felt that this happened and I had no choice but to agree with what they said).

It'd be kinda hard to gauge what "funny, harmless nonsense" is and why it flopped.


A few other thoughts:

1. Fun is a really subjective term. Obviously TCH (or really any forum) is incapable of catering to all tastes and some people may just find they don't mesh with the community that well. There's no sin in that. I've joined a lot of forums over the years and some forums I didn't really fit in with either. Similarly sometimes you're interested in a topic and try to get something going only to find out the rest of the forum just doesn't share that interest. I've had it happen across multiple forums but sometimes you just don't know until you give it a shot.

2. Forums in general are on the decline and member retention isn't that great. TCH would be far from the only forum with this issue and I wouldn't take a 100% failure rate as a particularly shocking thing. Between real life, social media, gaming, and other things people do a lot of people just won't prioritize forums unless said forum is providing something to make people want to come back. It's nothing for me to be on forums with huge membership lists but with an active userbase in the single digits with half of those active only posting once a week at best. If anything TCH is one of the more active forums I'm on and there's actually some quality threads getting posted in and not just quick forum games and such.

3. That said if you're trying to study why your friends aren't sticking around you might try another route. What are they interested in? What kind of communities are they active in? Does TCH have active threads that cater to the kind of things they're interested in? Would active members post in threads on the same subjects? That said I would only consider the 100% rate BAD if you're getting reports like "The members are stuck up and won't talk to me" or "The moderation harasses me" or something like that. If you got THOSE kind of reports I'm sure Kyng and Nilla would definitely want to hear about that.

That said I'm a regular (and still relatively newer) member so I'll leave any more observations to older members of the site who might have more insight.

[Moonshroom]

Without context to this part

Very recently I managed to catch up with one of my favorites I decided to ask them about it... they said that TCH doesn't really lend itself to craziness and that they felt blocked at every turn whenever they tried to start some funny, harmless nonsense (they also provided links to topics where they felt that this happened and I had no choice but to agree with what they said).

It'd be kinda hard to gauge what "funny, harmless nonsense" is and why it flopped.


A few other thoughts:

1. Fun is a really subjective term. Obviously TCH (or really any forum) is incapable of catering to all tastes and some people may just find they don't mesh with the community that well. There's no sin in that. I've joined a lot of forums over the years and some forums I didn't really fit in with either. Similarly sometimes you're interested in a topic and try to get something going only to find out the rest of the forum just doesn't share that interest. I've had it happen across multiple forums but sometimes you just don't know until you give it a shot.

2. Forums in general are on the decline and member retention isn't that great. TCH would be far from the only forum with this issue and I wouldn't take a 100% failure rate as a particularly shocking thing. Between real life, social media, gaming, and other things people do a lot of people just won't prioritize forums unless said forum is providing something to make people want to come back. It's nothing for me to be on forums with huge membership lists but with an active userbase in the single digits with half of those active only posting once a week at best. If anything TCH is one of the more active forums I'm on and there's actually some quality threads getting posted in and not just quick forum games and such.

3. That said if you're trying to study why your friends aren't sticking around you might try another route. What are they interested in? What kind of communities are they active in? Does TCH have active threads that cater to the kind of things they're interested in? Would active members post in threads on the same subjects? That said I would only consider the 100% rate BAD if you're getting reports like "The members are stuck up and won't talk to me" or "The moderation harasses me" or something like that. If you got THOSE kind of reports I'm sure Kyng and Nilla would definitely want to hear about that.

That said I'm a regular (and still relatively newer) member so I'll leave any more observations to older members of the site who might have more insight.

I can't provide context without also giving away who mentioned that... So I'll just say that they did have a point and what they were trying to do was silly and fun. In fact, I had forgotten about that whole thing before it got brought up again, but that was basically what drove them away.

I think part of the problem was that a lot of them were far younger than your usual TCH-goer, but the 0/23 thing will never stop shocking me.

[Bryn]

You might remember that I brought around 23 people to the forum.

You might have also noticed that none of them have stuck around.

Well according to your list of referrals, one has stayed active, and that's Opal Fruit. So, that's better than nothing... although I suppose the 23 from before were over at the original forum.
 

Forums in general are on the decline and member retention isn't that great.

Unfortunately, that is the honest truth... although one other I'm at it still going strong and is very active. It's a statement I've been seeing quite often recently... and could be why people nowadays favour social media and/or Discord for communication.

[Moonshroom]

I had forgotten about Opal... Huh.

The 23 are from TCH, but a couple of them forgot to use the referral.

[Kyng]

I think slooroo's points are good - but I have a few more to add:

1. While "0 out of 23" doesn't sound good on the face of it, it needs to be remembered that these aren't 23 independent events. Friendship groups often stick together - so, if a group of 10 friends joins, it'll likely end up with either 10 out of 10 staying, or 0 out of 10 staying (it's very unlikely to end up with 5 out of 10 staying). Also, the more that those 23 people have in common, the less surprising a "0 out of 23" rate becomes: for example, if 23 meat-lovers are invited to a vegan forum, then a 0 out of 23 success rate would be entirely unsurprising!
   
   
2. I have heard the feedback from some of these people before, and some of them said they wanted a place to "just talk". And that's understandable - but unfortunately, forums just aren't the place for that any more - and haven't been for over a decade. Social media and Discord are far better-equipped for those forms of conversations these days (which is partly way TCH is geared away from that kind of discussion, and towards more subject-specific discussions that a forum is better suited to).
   
   
3. About the "TCH doesn't lend itself to craziness" point... yes, that's true, but I'm afraid it's not possible to cater to all personal tastes: a move towards craziness would likely turn off as many people as it turned on. And without knowing what the "funny, harmless nonsense" incident was... it's entirely possible that some of our members found it objectionable, even if it seemed funny and harmless to the person doing it. But even if it was genuinely funny and harmless: it's possible that it was started in a thread that simply wasn't the place for it. There are parts of the board that are geared towards fun - and there are parts that are geared towards more serious discussions.
   

Now, could we have more 'fun' stuff on here? I'm sure we could - and I am always open to suggestions . However, do bear in mind that we are constrained by: a) what can be done on a forum (or perhaps Discord), and b) the availability of other members (who are spread across multiple different time zones).

So yeah - while we certainly don't like turning people off, we have to accept that we'll never be able to please everybody - and anything we do to attract one group is likely to repel another. But I hope this qt least offers some explanation .

[Cool Cory]

This has been on my mind a while...

You might remember that I brought around 23 people to the forum.

You might have also noticed that none of them have stuck around.

Actually, one of those has stuck around,  Opal Fruit . And you found Kyng a girlfriend to by recruiting her.


And some of the people on your referal list stayed for several months. So, it was sort of sucessful.

Sometimes people leave forums due to getting busy with real life and other stuff, then forget about the forum. Another reason is if a couple of people from a friend group leave, then often the while group goes with them.

Some people get bored of forums and then forget about them.

And some people prefer Discord-style conversations and chats over forum ones.

[Moonshroom]

You all make good points, for sure.

I guess I'm sad because that was truly the last time "JoJo's Wrecking Crew™" stuck together as a unit, before RL and other things took over... Now I don't even see most of these guys anymore. It feels like an anticlimactic ending to such a storied saga that spanned at least a decade, particularly considering that the pandemic had lined us a last shot at having fun together.

[Bryn]

Are you still in touch with some of these people Moonshroom? Even if they're now more occupied with real-life things and such, I don't think it'd hurt to give them a wee nudge and get them back here, even for them to just say "hi" or whatever. Your call, though.

[Moonshroom]

Are you still in touch with some of these people Moonshroom? Even if they're now more occupied with real-life things and such, I don't think it'd hurt to give them a wee nudge and get them back here, even for them to just say "hi" or whatever. Your call, though.

With only about six.

They all said "no", except for one that was like "might be fun".

It's actually kinda funny, considering that the only one who stayed is the only one I don't talk to anymore XD