"let us all leave this place and go to FB"

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"let us all leave this place and go to FB"

Postby Jeroen Speybroeck » Sun Sep 20, 2015 9:22 pm

I am launching a (hopefully obviously) apparently cheeky debate. Last Friday, we discussed on how to promote our local herpetofauna conservation group. The general consent was that forums, pardonnez moi: fora, are dead and Facebook is the way to go.

Now, for a decent investigation, I suppose I should create a FB account and ask the same thing there, but what do you guys think? Is this forum an anachronism? What are the pros/cons of both media, in view of our goal (and what is our goal anyway???)? Do I have to overcome my reluctance to embrace FB and its corporate flair of minimal socialising? Help!

I guess this is a tedious debate with a predictable outcome, but still I'd love to see many of you take part :P
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Re: let us all leave this place and go to FB

Postby Kristian Munkholm » Sun Sep 20, 2015 10:30 pm

Generally speaking, I'm afraid the diagnosis is correct, fora are dying as traffic moves to facebook.

Activity here has probably gone down due to fb but not by all that much - yet. fhf has suffered greatly but is still big enough to be reasonably active. There are no longer any local Danish fora with a decent level of activity so for the local stuff I have already moved to fb. This is pretty much all I use fb for.

Like you, the move saddens me and I hope this community stays active here. Facebook is good for short remarks, single pics, quick comments and the like - stuff you ususally wouldn't write a forum post for. Another plus is that uploading of pictures is nice and easy since you don't have to host them elsewhere.

That said,though quick and easy to use I find facebook inferior for longer reports and extended discussions. I prefer reading reports in a forum layout with inline pictures and I hate reading long arguments in small fb comment boxes. Furthermore, structure and history is lost as posts just disappear down the timeline. I find this very sad. Finally, in its current state fb seems a mess of terribly many groups where it is difficult to find the good ones. This forces you to either waste your time following and posting in way too many groups or just do without the groups altogether, befriend everyone and use your general timeline. I, however, like to compartmentalize and keep my nerdy interests separate from the other stuff. I don't enjoy sharing everything with everyone and I'm not interested in reading about what everyone has to say about everything either.

All in all, facebook is in many ways easier but I think a lot of depth, history and community is lost in the transition so for me this forum definitely should still have a place in the future.
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Re: let us all leave this place and go to FB

Postby Berislav Horvatic » Sun Sep 20, 2015 11:57 pm

All in all, facebook is in many ways easier but I think a lot of depth, history and community is lost
in the transition so for me this forum definitely should still have a place in the future.

Agreed.
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Re: let us all leave this place and go to FB

Postby Peter Oefinger » Mon Sep 21, 2015 7:10 am

To say it in business terms: FB is a good additional marketing channel, but it's not "the shop". You never should rely on social media only for your communication & socialization: In a forum, the admin is the boss, in Fb, Fb is the boss. You always should be prepared for the rules to change or you account to be closed down...

Fazit: fb is good for promotion - you should think about this for your local herpetofauna group - but it's the wrong platform for the "product" itself. With regard to this forum, the question should be, what do we want to achieve? more traffic? more quality? for the latter criteria, fb will not be the adequate medium...

Kristian Munkholm wrote: facebook is in many ways easier but I think a lot of depth, history and community is lost
Agreed: the "fieldherping Europe" group is a collection of nice pictures and the comments usually are "Wow", "great" - but no real discussions. The "Field Herpetology" group is full of pornographic spam (which makes it somehow interesting ;-))
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Re: let us all leave this place and go to FB

Postby Mario Schweiger » Mon Sep 21, 2015 10:10 am

Peter Oefinger wrote:To say it in business terms: FB is a good additional marketing channel, but it's not "the shop". You never should rely on social media only for your communication & socialization: In a forum, the admin is the boss, in Fb, Fb is the boss. You always should be prepared for the rules to change or you account to be closed down...

Fazit: fb is good for promotion - you should think about this for your local herpetofauna group - but it's the wrong platform for the "product" itself. With regard to this forum, the question should be, what do we want to achieve? more traffic? more quality? for the latter criteria, fb will not be the adequate medium...
Agree

Kristian Munkholm wrote: facebook is in many ways easier but I think a lot of depth, history and community is lost
Agree

Peter Oefinger wrote:You always should be prepared for the rules to change or you account to be closed down...
same here :lol:
Kristian Munkholm wrote:Another plus is that uploading of pictures is nice and easy since you don't have to host them elsewhere.
same here! you may uopload up to 30 pictures at each posting - and don't have to host them somewhere else ;)

I'm not really the person to discuss this a lot - that's not the admins work.
It's up to you to post your opinions/comments.
Although I would be sad, if "our" forum will go down and everybody is changing to FB

Mario :(
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Please visit also my personal Herp-site vipersgarden.at
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Re: let us all leave this place and go to FB

Postby Peter Oefinger » Mon Sep 21, 2015 11:47 am

Mario Schweiger wrote:Peter Oefinger wrote:You always should be prepared for the rules to change or you account to be closed down... same here

This was meant from the admin's perspective, not from the user perspective... ;)
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Re: let us all leave this place and go to FB

Postby Jeroen Speybroeck » Mon Sep 21, 2015 1:24 pm

Mario Schweiger wrote:if "our" forum will go down and everybody is changing to FB

That's of course NOT going to happen :!:
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Re: let us all leave this place and go to FB

Postby Ronald Zimmerman » Mon Sep 21, 2015 4:44 pm

I agree with Kristian and Peter..

One more disadvantage is that on Facebook there is an algorithm that decides who can see what on their timeline. That could mean that some people will, and some people won't see certain things. I can see it with my Facebook Page. If you have a 10% reach it is very high. Your Facebook message stays on top of the timeline and then disappears all the way down. You need the perfect timing when many of your followers are online. When they like/respond/share the 'value' of the message goes up and the message appears again. Also people who like/respond/share can see your messages more often.
If people decide to go to our group and scroll through the messages it is not a problem. Then comes another problem. Facebook is not that much organized ( in subfora) with a search engine within the group. Another thing is that some very old messages disappear. So people who don't visit often can not see everything.
This forum is also a great trip database. :)
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Re: let us all leave this place and go to FB

Postby Martti Niskanen » Mon Sep 21, 2015 6:46 pm

I'm along the same lines as everyone else. Good forums for marginal hobbies are rare, and this is a good forum with a good community with great knowledge and trip report history (and future). I don't think there's any substitute for a proper forum providing field herping reports with proper narrative as long as people keep on reading and contributing (also see for example FHF: http://www.fieldherpforum.com/forum/index.php who also publish a magazine). All of us probably know the aforementioned forum, but most of their readers don't know fieldherping.eu. A Fb group might be a good way to get more non-european members and vice versa with some cross-posting.

I say keep this forum as it is, start a Fb-group and use it for random photo posting and maybe species ID requests and to spread info about the forum itself. If you don't get members or the group dies, then just get rid of it.

This reminded me to delete my Finnish field herping group on Fb. No one cares about field herping, just keeping corn snakes and bearded dragons.

edit: Did a search on Fb and it seems you're there already. Request sent.
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Re: let us all leave this place and go to FB

Postby Frédéric Seyffarth » Mon Sep 21, 2015 8:22 pm

Hey,

FB is like the whole world, becoming superficial and boring. FB makes me sad, and that's why i do not have any FB account! If it is just for posting pics, saying "Woahou!, Great!, Speechless!" etc...what's the interest? Here, we can read nice reports, have help for ID, ideas for up coming trips, and as i cannot travel a lot, it helps me dream...it is my window to field...it is my motivation for better learn and work my poor English, expand my geographics, photographics and general knowledges, and as many have already wrote, we can have deep discussions about our interests:
All in all, facebook is in many ways easier but I think a lot of depth, history and community is lost
in the transition so for me this forum definitely should still have a place in the future.

Right!!
Please don't stop Fieldherping.eu, i would feel so alone...
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