Jiggy
07-01-2009, 11:35 PM
With all the feedback so far, both public and private, I'm pretty sure by now that I haven't been clear enough in explaining what I'm aiming for.
In short, I'm concerned with pulling in people who don't think they have a place elsewhere--who want to be on the fringe, but can't find a fringe to begin with. To explain, let me break people down into a few broad groups:
1) Posting on many gaming forums
2) Posting on a few gaming forums
3) Occasionally posting or not posting, but interested
4) Occasionally posting or not posting, and not interested
Group 1 people aren't likely to care what our rules are, because they've already adapted to several forums and would be fine adapting again. Group 2 people have found a few select places they're probably loyal to, and pulling them away would take a lot of time and effort. Group 4 people won't be affected by our rules because they don't want to post anyway.
That leaves group 3 people, who try tracking down forums to post on but end up never satisfied with whatever they find--either because of the rules, the mods, the general population, the colors, or some other issue. We can directly affect this group depending on where we go with our rules, guidelines, and philosophies.
So, while I admit I might be predisposed toward them because I consider myself one of them, I can't help thinking this is the most important group we can consider. If you want IGN rules, IGN isn't going anywhere; if you want GameFAQs rules, GameFAQs is still out there. What can we uniquely do? We're a small site, and uniqueness is the only thing we can offer. How can we achieve it?
Basically, this is the blue ocean strategy applied to a gaming forum. (Albeit without Nintendo's infinite resources.) Forum environments that are liked already exist--and they'll continue existing because, unlike games, a forum only needs to be created once, with nothing holding it back economically. Instead of trying to pull in a smaller subset of people who already like some of those existing forums, we can try to shoot for people who don't.
That's my main thought, and it's why I can push aside all kinds of personal preferences if I have to. If having intelligent and mature discussion and average post lengths of 120 words is what people want because they can't find it elsewhere, great. If having a lot of gaming celebration with five-word-long posts saying "title here is so fun" is what would differentiate us, then cool.
Again, this has probably been my failure to communicate since even Canadian didn't pick up on what I was going for despite being with me for the whole six months of planning. But when I'm asking for your thoughts, I'm not asking what you think we should do in order to conform with a fairly agreed-upon standard.
I'm asking the opposite. What did you wish you could find on a forum, but never did? How can we entirely break away from the standard? Those are my questions and considerations.
Of course, if you think this whole idea is silly and I should just talk to Canadian and Prax one night and say "hey, let's decide rules" and then show up with a list two hours later and say that's it, let me know. That's not in my current plan, but I'm aware that I'm asking very possibly the biggest forum-related question anybody could ever read.
In short, I'm concerned with pulling in people who don't think they have a place elsewhere--who want to be on the fringe, but can't find a fringe to begin with. To explain, let me break people down into a few broad groups:
1) Posting on many gaming forums
2) Posting on a few gaming forums
3) Occasionally posting or not posting, but interested
4) Occasionally posting or not posting, and not interested
Group 1 people aren't likely to care what our rules are, because they've already adapted to several forums and would be fine adapting again. Group 2 people have found a few select places they're probably loyal to, and pulling them away would take a lot of time and effort. Group 4 people won't be affected by our rules because they don't want to post anyway.
That leaves group 3 people, who try tracking down forums to post on but end up never satisfied with whatever they find--either because of the rules, the mods, the general population, the colors, or some other issue. We can directly affect this group depending on where we go with our rules, guidelines, and philosophies.
So, while I admit I might be predisposed toward them because I consider myself one of them, I can't help thinking this is the most important group we can consider. If you want IGN rules, IGN isn't going anywhere; if you want GameFAQs rules, GameFAQs is still out there. What can we uniquely do? We're a small site, and uniqueness is the only thing we can offer. How can we achieve it?
Basically, this is the blue ocean strategy applied to a gaming forum. (Albeit without Nintendo's infinite resources.) Forum environments that are liked already exist--and they'll continue existing because, unlike games, a forum only needs to be created once, with nothing holding it back economically. Instead of trying to pull in a smaller subset of people who already like some of those existing forums, we can try to shoot for people who don't.
That's my main thought, and it's why I can push aside all kinds of personal preferences if I have to. If having intelligent and mature discussion and average post lengths of 120 words is what people want because they can't find it elsewhere, great. If having a lot of gaming celebration with five-word-long posts saying "title here is so fun" is what would differentiate us, then cool.
Again, this has probably been my failure to communicate since even Canadian didn't pick up on what I was going for despite being with me for the whole six months of planning. But when I'm asking for your thoughts, I'm not asking what you think we should do in order to conform with a fairly agreed-upon standard.
I'm asking the opposite. What did you wish you could find on a forum, but never did? How can we entirely break away from the standard? Those are my questions and considerations.
Of course, if you think this whole idea is silly and I should just talk to Canadian and Prax one night and say "hey, let's decide rules" and then show up with a list two hours later and say that's it, let me know. That's not in my current plan, but I'm aware that I'm asking very possibly the biggest forum-related question anybody could ever read.