There’s been chitchat about
this topic off and on here for several years and just recently on a complete different post which I don’t remember now.
As far as healingwell goes, 75% of it is unused now. This lyme forum is the most common place of this whole website and it’s not very busy here anymore. Go look at the rest of it and the dates posted, you’ll see.
But it’s not just this place, or health forms in general. All different types of forums across the Internet have become desert wastelands like the great shopping malls of the 80s (now deserted places).
Anyway, I was all excited to find an immune forum, which had many rare immune cell conditions that fell under it. That is a closed forum that you can only view if you actually join.
So I joined it, and once I could view postings, I could tell from the dates of posts that it is now a desert, which at one time was a tropical oasis with a lot of traffic for such a small illness group.
There were a couple newbie posts, and their first question was, where is everyone? It looks like a couple of the old timers answered them a day or more later. What a bummer. That same place also has Facebook, which I cannot stand with all of its fluff, and lack of detail, or committed to answers to questions.
They also have zoom meetings I tried to attend two of them. There is a major lack of technical questions and answers. It was mostly a mental support group for their having these immune illnesses. I’m not interested in some stranger holding my hand. I was hoping for some technical people for my questions. That was not going on there. What a waste of time I thought.
Facebook popularity is an odd one. This afternoon I googled “have Internet forums died in 2023”. A lot of other people have Googled that and there were some interesting answers on the Internet about
that.
Phones are a lot more accessible versus a PC since we don’t have to turn them on. We just pull them out of our pocket. Social media platforms work on the phones a lot better.
I’m on my phone right now and healing well actually works pretty easy on a phone versus some other older forums. I don’t even have to login - my phone knows who I am. No one else can do this on my phone. If I have to actually type log in info, then a PC is easier for my fingers.
Even people who had flip phones 15 years ago now with smart phones don’t like to turn their computer on or never bought a new computer to replace the old one that broke.
iPads , which is just a big square Apple phone replaced the home computer. Unless they are a business person working from home, most people are no longer buying computers.
I also have a personal PC, which is built from easily available PC parts, including the case. It was made for the long run and can be changed / mechanically updated with ease. However, it’s still bulky and I have to turn it on and it’s loud. I used to use it a lot. Now it’s like that second old car sitting around you only use it when you need to, since you’re never so sure if it’s going to start or not lol
And as far as young adults today, who were teens 10 years ago, a lot of them never have had and never have any intention of buying a computer …ever. Young people who do have computers are more likely to be online gamers today.
Plus, the attention span of people is much shorter than it used to be. So it seems like quick meaningless phrases that aren’t even in a complete sentence structure on some social media platform is the norm for many people.
As a detailed person who likes to use his time wisely, this social media stuff, seems like complete useless fluff, and something I do not participate in.
The few times, I’ve tried some health Facebook platforms when someone answered my question it really didn’t make much sense because they were probably speaking into the phone at a stoplight. Or else they used a bunch of abbreviations,, which I didn’t understand, and I had to ask them again. At that point they seemed a little bit impatient at my detailed questions. Then a few days later, I went back to try to find my post and good night. So it was not helpful at all and a waste of time 100%.
I’m sure if I was someone who wanted to show off my brand new shoes or a car I would’ve liked it, that’s not me and never will be me.
Basically, Facebook is not a very good way to learn. Yet people continue to use it.
You can tell I am older because I just talk about
social media in the form of Facebook. I have no idea what’s on TikTok or whatever else is out there since I pretty much think it’s for attention needing teenagers or wanna be future **** stars.
As far as people using computers at work for their own personal use well that only works for people that actually have desks with companies that don’t snoop on them.
After googling the subject, I can see there are people out there that wish forms would come back. I even belong to a mountain bike forum. That was excellent one. Great details to riding areas, fixing your bike, whatever now that it’s on Facebook, there’s not much useful information there. Half of the information is bike shops, and manufactures and other completely non-bicycle stuff placing ads in between the posts.
Ads are another thing and that’s how forums used to make money until the invention of ad blockers, which is something I did not think about
. Forums do not make much money on with ads, when 25% of the people use add blockers on their computer and maybe even add blockers on phones.
And of course, there is a subject to that on online forums a good 20% of the users will get to know each other pretty well because they were the ones on there every day. And then that would make occasional squabbles and disagreements. I do remember as close as three or four years ago, this place had at least three people who it seemed intentions were just to get argumentative and tic (pun intended) other people off on purpose. Internet moderators will get burnt out on these arguments. After all they are working for free. Facebook seems to have some sort of automatic censorship, I think, not sure about
that.
Anyway, those are the facts that I gathered. And yes, since I did this on my phone speaking into it on my couch, there’s probably some grammar and spelling errors. Oh well.
I think this is officially the longest post I’ve ever made. 🤔
Post Edited (astroman) : 2/7/2024 8:17:08 PM (GMT-8)