State of the BeerLeg 2023
Well, a majority of social media consumption is 1-way, including this forum.
I would assert that this forum would lose much of it's value/benefit without 2-way interaction.
It all boils down to this: is SC a hobby, or a business?
If it's a hobby, then Wendell will continue to wrangle his brain to find a way to make it work for free, or next to nothing. (Hard work, headache, and charity.)
If it's a business, then he has customers. If the business provides value to the customers, then the customers will pay. And then it boils down to what is the right amount of revenue to make it work with/without subsidy (adverts), etc.
Sometimes the business model that works mathematically, isn't the one that works in reality.
A lot of folks join this forum, and I've asked before, is this SurveyorConnect, or GIS-Connect, or I-Just-Set-Up-An-LLC-And-Don't-Know-What-I'm-DoingConnect?
The bigger you are, the harder it is please everyone.
And recent "marketing hiccups" have shown that when you don't know your customers and/or willfully neglect your primary existing customer base, then you will get your Bud Light moment.
Pivot if it means keeping this forum going...
Pivot.
Change is inevitable.
My SWMBOAWD always asks me if "I'm on that Facebook thing for surveyors " which generates an eyebrow lift from me and my standard response, " this is way better than Facebook, don't say that..."
I may be biased, but this is indeed WAY better than Facebook, especially when you consider that we don't violate your privacy here.
Have you considered a subscription?
Thank you for the suggestion. I have, indeed, considered this, but I feel it would stifle forum activity. There likely wouldn't be many subscribers, so it wouldn't amount to much. The whole reason the forum is incredibly busy is because of Google search rankings, which would decrease immensely if activity was stifled. It's unfortunate, as I thought of this years ago, but I just don't see it working in our favor.
I've recently seen what happens when a web site doesn't make money. The geocaching site dumped all their bench mark data--recovery and photo info for tens of thousands of PIDs: some suspect reports, but some good info not in NGS.
To be blatantly clear about all this, I don't think most people owning/running a site like this would still keep the site going. It's been in the red since inception and has never had a moment in time where it would be considered profitable or breaking even by any stretch of the imagination. But I'm not ready to give up, even after almost 13 years.
I'm a member of a few forum support forums (LOL, how's that for inception) and I see posts about giving up all the time. It's usually about money.
Maybe young surveyors will TikTok/Shorts their way into the future, but the more "traditional" forms of social media (text based) seem to be only for "older folks". (Look at the decline of Twitter and Facebook with young people.)
Not sure how you bridge the gap between the old and the new as far as making money, but social media isn't free. And if the advertisers are out, then the subscribers are stuck footing the bill, unless you turn it into a free-for-all by selling our subscriber info.
Just come up with a completely new revenue model that works across all ages/demographics and platforms, and then you won't need to bother anymore...
I know some of this is sarcasm, but you make some really great points!
The goal of adding social features is not so much to keep up with Facebook or any of the others, it's more about trying to make this site more inviting to all ages/types of surveyors. The forum can still be the forum and we can add other great features in hopes of attracting young'ns. I don't see adding a TikTok-like feature in the near future, but if I did, it would be it's own feature and not a replacement for the forum. It would just be another feature. Use it if you want, but certainly there'd be no requirement and you could still use legacy features. 🙂
But yes, the goal is to implement our own stuff that can potentially raise funds and keep things going. Maybe we'll end up developing our own model that works for us and shake things up a bit. Whatever, I just want to keep the site online and relevant.
which generates an eyebrow lift
I told my wife she was drawing her eyebrows on to high...
She looked surprised
TikTok is such a powerful medium
"Powerful" only in the sense that a whole lot of folks watch it. It's just television, but even less useful from an intellectual standpoint (and television barely registers on that scale). Like @bill93 points out, videos are not discussions.
If we have to incorporate more "social media"-like content in addition to these forums, fine. But I would hope that the forums are kept at least somewhat separate from the social media aspects. Because if this forum content goes away, or social media bleeds over, I'm fairly certain that it will lose much of what makes it attractive to those who contribute here.
This seems like it would be a great discussion for a summer forum Meetup preferably somewhere where it's not super hot maybe say the Oregon coast or Salem if you know you want to go out by I-5 and stay away from the ocean crowds.
I had a webGIS development class and we discussed that conceptually the largest sites are free because the users don't have any skin in the game.
they create user IDs etc and they can go about it as they want. That was designed and implemented way back in the day, like when web crawler etc were existent and Google became the next winning version of that.
Gmail and all ll the things that followed behind it essentially took advantage of the fact that free is fast and easy, so people want that and because they took all of our data and turn free into a multi trillion dollar industry of what they do now we pay the consequences for not having regulated it from the get-go...
anyway, LinkedIn is morphed into too much like Facebook, and can't survive unless it's allowed to be like that. Sucks.
Have you considered working with the state boards/societies to find out if this could be an additional platform to get out their quarterly or monthly or once a year because they don't have people that are capable willing to do so or even have the wherewithal to put together those types of things, and this could be a platform so then maybe they could have more information being sent out locally regionally and this could be a form that could help them and it doesn't take a ton of buying for them because most of the people that support that stuff probably participate here at some level.
the majority of state board society newsletters suck because someone that was engaged left and they're left holding this not very useful circumstance of what used to be something great and by having a centralized location I don't know if that's a good option or not I'm I'm just speaking while I drive to a job site.
just free associating while driving.....
I'll throw some more concrete ideas down and send it to you in an email.
