Hit us with a link homie!
Warning: I was drinking and this was a first take. I found a phone mount in the car and decided to make a video of my latest trick since I never made one before. It’s not very clean.
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Further thoughts on this whole social media thing…I think my favorite way to go is the good old forums…dedicated members, none of this downvoting nonsense, good resource of info. I don’t feel like Reddit is the place, at least for me, to show off the latest trick/combo I cooked up or a place to seek help, unless I want to face the fact of getting no useful feedback, just downvotes. Definitely not very supportive in my opinion, as much as I’ve tried to help others. A little disheartening these kinds of actions happening. I know there’s a few kind souls out there but otherwise…me thinks I’m done there… Home is here.
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Reddit can be nice but you are at the mercy of random users who have full access to downvoting even before confirming the email on their new account… test it yourself if you don’t believe me!
Did not realize that, kind of a poor way to run the site…yet again, bots can upvote sponsored posts (I highly doubt any normal-minded person that hates ads would upvote the same repeating ads that pop up on there).
This thread getting necro’d made me a little sad at how many forums have been closed/abandoned over the past like 5+ years. I was just posting about this last night on another unrelated forum, so it feels like a funny coincidence to see it pop up again.
I miss when you’d have a question or want to get into a new hobby, and a quick Google search would present you with multiple active online communities you could engage with. Now when you search stuff online you’re pretty much getting all sponsored/promoted websites and the niche stuff has fallen so far down nobody ever finds it. Now you’ll just find a lot of Reddit posts/youtube videos, sponsored/promoted store links, and that’s about it. It feels like you don’t really search stuff online to find an active community any more, you’re just searching questions to get answers.
Content on forums felt like you were presented with multiple communities you could engage with at a glance, and information was indexed and easy to search in the future. That information remained public and visible. But now with so much discussion/questions being moved to Facebook/Insta/Discord especially, there’s just a lot of stuff that new people will never be able to search. We’ve gone from publicly visible archived discussions, to glorified IRC conversations in a transient client that will just vanish at some point. It’s so wild that people are effectively trying to replace forums/websites with a glorified IRC client, especially when it’s one that’s not easy to log. A lot of the online communities in the early 2010s were using Skype groups for a lot of stuff, and now all of those conversations and information are just lost which is such a shame.
Maybe I’m just getting too old to keep up with this stuff, and I’m just a grumpy millennial pining for the pre-social media/transient chat client/algorithm based search result internet to come back. Hearing people talk about how there used to be multiple very active yoyo forums makes me wish I was around for that. Now it feels like the bulk of discussion is either happening on Facebook, Insta group DMs, or too many different discord servers to keep track of. I use social media to post tricks, but I feel like I rarely have meaningful/enjoyable yoyo discussion on any of the other platforms.
I just really miss forums lol.
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I’ve only tried Reddit r/throwers for a few days and quit. I made one or two posts (mail days) and without explanations got lots of down votes by probably the same trolls that are on youtube clIcking dislike on classical music and kids talent shows or anything and everything they can find. It was not a friendly environment while I was there. I believe Andre’s idea of no down votes here is far superior. If you don’t like something or are indifferent to it just ignore it. On this Forum things are not buried 5 minutes after being posted.
EDIT: I did not mean to bash r/throwers, I just personally prefer the yye forum because it has been a very happy, welcoming and accepting place and it promotes discussion which is why I have dropped in many times a day every single day for over 4 1/2 yrs.
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Yes and yes. In the 90s we were concerned with corporations using culture to sell stuff. That seems quaint now that we are all effectively helping sell, and being sold, on social media. At least forums seemed a bit closer to IRL community. It was fun while it lasted!
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The youth these days:
“Forums suck. So old-school.”
Me:
“Really, what do you currently use?”
Youth:
“Facebook.”
Me:
“Why?”
Youth:
“Because I want a place where I can post what I think when I think it and be able to communicate with others who like similar things.”
Me:
“So you want a Forum?”
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I mean, that is the point of search engines. They all aim to provide direct and straightforward answers without much digging and their algorithms are optimised in that way.
Another contributing factor to this phenomenon is the web becoming more centralised with huge platforms like YouTube, Reddit, Instagram and Tiktok taking over large portions of the web and becoming the place where most netizens would spend their time, which would inevitably force search engines to optimise and provide results for those sites first since they are so popular (not to mention Google owns YouTube). Nowadays, search engines spend far more time crawling the content of these huge platforms rather than crawling different individual sites, which they used to do almost exclusively in the past, resulting in 1st page search results that are mainly focused on these huge platforms and leaving the niche stuff to the 2nd or 3rd page (or even further down, which is the case for very generic queries like “yoyo”).
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I feel like it’s just personal preference. Whatever you like is what you use. I personally just sporadically browse all of them.
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It might be coming back around:
Earlier this week, Axios ’s Scott Rosenberg put forward an interesting argument . “The era in which social networking served as most users’ primary experience of the internet is moving behind us,” he wrote. “This leaves a vacuum in the middle — the space of forums, ad-hoc group formation and small communities that first drove excitement around internet adoption in the pre-Facebook era.”
That was always the long bet we were making with Discourse, and kudos to @AndreBoulay for seeing the long term value and history in their forums!
(note that one thing we’re adding to close the gap is a real-time chat feature, given the overwhelming dominance of chat in today’s internet… it also provides a healthier outlet for these chat megatopics with 10k+ posts that never really made sense.)
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Time to update this thread, guys. Has anything changed for you?
I still prefer it here in YoyoExpert and local yoyo group.
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A few years have passed since the birth of this thread. Here is my opinion in 2023. I’m old school - I still prefer forums over social media any day. It’s much easier to find things, esp older content I may want to go back to and look up (say, an older trick I wanted to learn or info about an older throw…or just relive old times on the forums). Feed-based content tends to get lost in the abyss. I wanted to look up some of my old tricks to relearn as I had forgotten them. There was no easy way to scroll back to things I posted in 2015 when I was heavily active on Instagram. I just had to keep scrolling. Fortunately I was able to bookmark older things that caught my eye.
But yea, definitely prefer forums over feeds. Things get seen easier, better organized, no pay to win algorithms, no annoying adverts and no automatic prompts to “swipe to see next video” 5 frames into the current video I may be watching (looking at you Meta platforms). I haven’t familiarized myself with the reel format but I feel like that would get lost in the abyss as well as the whole reel format is just an algorithm feeding folks endless content meant to be skipped over.
Doesn’t look like my thoughts have changed much since my last bit of feedback in 2019.
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This is actually a very good thread, at the end I kind of divided the various things:
Forum: is the place where I actually come and speak about yoyos, make some new friends, see the releases, pictures of the yoyos, see what people likes and buy, the offtopic, the jokes, see which yoyo is super good and in general see what happen in this hobby and tricks are just secondary here for the nature of the forum itself.
Instagram: Just pure trick watching and posting and commenting, made some friends over there too but I do not talk or post yoyos, I use it only to watch, comment and post tricks and combos.
I think I would enjoy a discord or something similar but I don’t know if with my timezone different than basically the rest of the world I will ever find someone there
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Discord is fine for daily discussion, but having to be a part of however many servers in order to retain thoughtful conversation in each is just not going to work for me. I use Discord with my friends for coordinating game sessions and related voice calls, and not much else. Maybe in an AOL chat capacity on occasion. Social media otherwise is not a part of my life.
The creation of a good forum post is becoming a lost art. I like Discourse a whole lot for its attempt to blend social media feeds with a forum feel, but I still miss categorized forums.
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Discord seems a tad disjointed. I’m in a server for each boutique company (that has one) the few larger ones like yye and a few specific topic ones. I generally mute them all and only hop in from time to time or to see what’s going on during an event like yoyo day or nats or something. Or if there is a specific drop I’m following from a vendor that happens to be on discord.
Facebook I use only for BST or new players will ask questions and I’ll chime in (mostly about bearings) Reddit is a dumpster fire mostly stuff that’s also elsewhere but occasionally things like a list of all the sales on a holiday pop up snd I’ll add to otherwise it’s mostly chatting with new players about bearing cleaning…
Insta is all tricks or collector collection posts. I’ve seen some cool stuff I’ve added to my own collection list and some cool tricks I’ve started working on and chatted with a few folks there. Insta is also where I often will see drops for some smaller brands or folks like wayne with his 3d printed stuff, mr gates all those cool folks that make amazing things.
Tik tok I’m banned from using as I work for the US government and the whole china spying thing (but it’s okay that Facebook does the same stuff shrugs) I used to watch some specific folks do tricks there before it was removed for me. Special mentions Pinterest, eBay, Etsy are all used for old or handmade yo-yos from time to time. Imgur often is a dumping ground of images and videos linked elsewhere and Patreon is used to follow specific folks like docpop. There’s also yoyo specific apps from a tricky place snd a skillful place I occasionally open up to learn a new trick or something. Ohh also the scourge snd bane of existence Facebook messenger chats. Least organized space not a big fan. Wish Facebook would just chill on pushing those so hard.
Most anti yoyo space I can think of is linkedin rarely hop on there but also no yoyo content I know of.
The forum is my go to place. I chat about looping, I buy stuff, I find out about cool stuff being made, I talk to really cool people in the forums and in individual chats. Only thing I mildly wish I could have on the forum is push notifications for my phone but I would want to limit that really hard to specific threads I’m following and honestly maybe that’s a double edge sword I don’t really want.
If I had to cut it down I would just stick with insta and the forum.
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Sometimes I can barely keep up with this forum. I like to support everyone here even if it’s just clicking the heart. I have no interest in spreading my already limited time amongst any other social media. This Forum is my go-to place for online communication - as well as my Flickr account which is just for posting my artwork.
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Hi. Time to revive the thread. I think both have their pros and cons. Forums, like this one, allow for more in-depth discussions and connecting with like-minded folks. It feels more personal, you know? On the other hand, social media platforms like Reddit offer a ton of topics and a larger community. You can find answers to almost anything you want to know! Oh, and if you’re looking to boost your Reddit presence, I’ve heard you can easily buy Reddit accounts to up your engagement. Actually, I think Reddit is better for promotion than other forums, for sure.