It might just be me, but I feel like the forum is a bit more quiet than it was when I joined. This sucks because our parts classifieds are amazing for locating and buying parts at reasonable prices. Lots of local Subaru owners/enthusiasts are getting sucked into the ****hole that is MnSuBiEzZ. Oregon Subaru Club has "spotted cards" that basically say, "cool car, we like subaru too, join us on facebook". I think this is an awesome way to grow the forum and help me have more parts to buy. If its cool with the mnsubaru gods, one of them can email me a logo and I'll design/buy the first five hundred.
Yes... this is something i have struggled with lately too. It's 2018, and nobody uses forums now, and sadly most forums have died. Honestly, this one is the most active of all the forums that I still visit. We still meet in person, weekly with @Kneel Weiß 's Tuesday meet which took the place of Calhoun, and monthly with my MOA/Rosedale Friday meets. I do not see the other subaru groups, even the ones on facebook, doing anything like this... and most of the OGs from this site's heyday show up for one (if not both) of these every time. With all that said, I fully support your effort to try to bring more people in, and yes, MNS has a facebook page that is never updated and a twitter which is also never updated. But if you can figure out a way to bring in new people using twitter and FB, please ... do. However, I will advise you to proceed with caution and ......expect disappointment. "Hand raising" around here is not just a joke on the forum (even though it's an old, funny one)... Most people do not want to join any forum these days, they just want to click "like" and move on... unfortunately. While I'm at it, I just want to point out that we are still the only subaru site in MN to be able to boast an event like @tangledupinblu 's LAX cruise, which still brings in a TON of people every single year, no matter how dead the site has been prior to it. Kudos everywhere in here haha
I have also noticed a decline and figured that it’s partially because of the “zero tolerance” for stanced cars.(amongst other things). Either way, i was literally talking to my coworker today about this very topic and he said that the Toyota forum has been the same. It’s sad to say, but car forums are slowly dying. With that said, i’m not going anywhere and still enjoy spending time with you guys in person when i can! And on here when i can’t
That business card idea is pretty solid. Only downside is caliber of people. Because people suck. But yea, the site has gotten pretty quiet. Which is a blessing and a curse. It's nice that the knobbery is down and mods don't need to settle disputes. Most of it is because all the dumb kids left to drool on MNSubies. Which is cancer...I've been to two of their events and the level of put downs is worse than the shoutbox.
I think the sticker revival will help more than cards, but its a solid idea. As a non-facebook user, I too am saddened by the decline of forums.
I think the best way to get attention is to pass out business cards via stickered up hookers and prostitutes.
I think something like this would be cool to put in goodie bags that we (ambassadors) hand out to people. Could at least steer them in the right direction. I know I'm not hanging bags on any stanced out crap boxes, so not really worried about that so much.
The influx of vapid douchebaggery and low effort ****posting in our facebook group immediately killed my motivation to try and grow it. If we get less traffic because we tolerate less bull****, so be it. I don't think the issue is people not knowing we exist.
I sent a co-worker here once a while back. After a few months I got around to asking him what his username was and he told me he decided not to. He got the impression that everyone just made fun of everyone else and in Subaru in particular. That he struggled to see it as a pro-Subaru forum and the he would most likely be too shy to ask any questions. I told him that was pretty much any Subaru forum and that tough skin is needed for some of the keyboard warriors on here but when we get together in person there are good times to be had.
^the sad thing is, this place is *nicer* now than it ever was in the past. Good lord wtf did he read?! haha
You're not missing a thing. Not only is **** posting rampant, but how facebook shuffles postings doesnt allow for any organization. Its a pain in the ass to buy and sell on there.
Facebook killed forums, and it's destroyed tons of car "communities". It's a platform for the lowest common denominator to get visibility and gives them a podium to espouse their garbage. It propagates magnetic toxicity and chokes out the idea of having a documented, deliberate message repository in favor of in-the-moment, instant gratification style social media dick swinging. And it's working on killing society as a whole.
^^^all of what @derp said. There's a reason I only use mine to talk about video games and post dumb crap now. It's completely useless otherwise.
I wish Facebook didn't have a stock. Anyone who thinks that fb has their privacy and/or best interests in mind would do well to remember that they are a publicly traded company now.
I was here when this site was first launched and will be here until its last breath. although I don't post much anymore. I browse and read threads. There are still a lot of OG's in this forum and a lot of them have moved on from owning Subarus but they are still family regardless of what they drive. I'm about to stance the **** out of my wrx and spam this forum just to get it alive again.
FB is great for keeping in touch with my out of state/country friends and family. For local stuff beyond event notifications... No thanks. Speaking of which we should probably link the lax cruise. Also, goatse spotted cards.
I’m pretty sure that someone drew one up a while back? Wasn’t it of a Subaru driving out of the a-noose? With a rainbow or something? Pretty awesome...should have become a thing!
Sounds like Readymix's entry in my drawing contest. Also, I strongly dislike Farcebook and like that this forum has less dillhole activity than it used to.
I'm in for the biz card idea. Anyone have a lead on sourcing some, then perhaps handing them out at the LAX cruise and/or meets? Anyone interested could grab a stack and pitch in. I'm in for $10 for the idea.
It doesn't even have anything to do with them being publicly traded. From the very beginning the product that Facebook was selling was the user data, not the experience. The experience was there to mine more data. What people seem to not realize, after a decade of Facebook, is that they are not the consumer or the customer of Facebook, they are the product. The customer for Facebook is advertisers and people that buy aggregate data for data mining of personal information/attributes. It is why, when Facebook makes a change to the user interface, all the stupid assholes threaten to boycott Facebook and accomplish nothing. They don't give a **** that you don't like some new aspect of Facebook, because they know your knuckledragging ass will continue to use their service and post inane bull**** about yourself. Inane bull**** that their advertising and marketing customers will love to see for a nominal fee. Facebook killed internet forums, because internet forums are hard, and you have to actually interact with real people on someone else's terms. When a forum community makes a point of ****ting on your bad taste and bad habits and horrid views and values, you can either stick around and try to win your opinion war through intelligent discourse....or you can go to facebook where there are plenty of groups ready to pat you on the ass for your poor taste, choices in life, or personal views and values.
People know. They just don't give a ****. Or two. Or even half of one. Fb succeeds because everyone is in need of instant gratification. As long as it provides this for the vast majority of people, it will never go away and complaining about it is just wasting time and energy, it still controls you that way anyway. The real way to enjoy Facebook at all is to just... Be a troll. On that same note, it's understandable why people would abandon forums in favor of a platform that gives them the sweet attention they crave. (Especially if their favorite forum has issues with creating posts on a mobile platform like this one does but grrrrrrr I digress.) Coming to this realization about it was the best thing I ever did. Hence the post about not really giving a crap what I use it for anymore.
Lol! The OP just wants more car parts. So there really isn’t a solid topic that anyone is talking about here. Except for Faceballs and it’s suckiness of course!
Oh, no, you know better than anyone on here that I get it. I'm still using it, even after twice now walking away from it for various stupid reasons. And you're right, if you approach it from the "I control what goes on here, and what I put on here, I don't care if people see it" mindset, it works fine for what it is in a "friends and family" sense. My biggest gripe with Facebook is it breaks the main personality hardening factor that forums used to provide for the most part. Up until Facebook, starting and maintaining a forum was hard work. You also know that rather well, as you've been with me through t3hw00t's ups and downs. With that said, typically when you made a fool of yourself on a forum, especially a specialized forum like one for Subaru owners in the state of Minnesota, you don't have a lot of options if you don't like the place. It isn't like there is another Minnesota Subaru forum to run off to when you've burned all your bridges. So, for a time, there was incentive to correct your own behaviors and learn the social skills necessary for interacting with other car guys. I believe this is what drove alot of the high turn out meets back in the day. This WAS where you went for Subaru related social interaction in Minnesota. And people made, for the most part, a concerted effort to get along and figure out how to interact with eachother, and I think that made the community relatively strong and colorful. But like any relationship, it requires work and effort to maintain. You had to visit to see what everyone was doing, and you had to figure out how to interact in that model by learning about other members through what they post here. And if you wanted to be more involved, you had to respond to posts in kind, and in a manner that was at least somewhat agreeable to the people that were talking. It was healthy social interaction mostly. Then car clubs started popping up on Facebook, where the average interaction was a single sentence or simply clicking a "like" button on a post. People got lazy, and they liked it. If they didn't want to interact with people, or be part of something larger, they could simply click "like" and move on, or do nothing at all. And when it came to posting abhorrent, stupid, or ignorant nonsense, there was always someone to come along and "like" it. And the lazy, that don't wish to change their points of view on the topic, now had a place to continue to be the same socially inept assholes that they couldn't be on forums. Facebook isn't going to ban them for posting clapped out stance-tard stuff, or street racing stuff, or ignorant and racist things, and if the group they are in kicks them out, it's a single click to create a community for people that like the stupid **** that got them banned from the previous group. So, instead of working and communicating with a group of people to build a strong relationship, they can simply click a button and invite the ****heels to their group to discuss ****heel things, and it costs them nothing to set up. What was once bad behavior that got stomped out by the community at large and made us all closer as a group, is now easily splintered off into a free group page on Facebook, like that fetid ****-hole MNSubiez. Instead of all those people hanging out and figuring out how to interact in a large group, they found a large contingent of ignorant ****lords to pat them on the ass all the time, or at least click that "like" button for their street racing threads and stance pics...or they just get ignored, and only a few likes are clicked. Which works out about as well as patting your puppy on the head when it jumps up on you and scratches your chest, you've just enabled and encouraged that behavior. Sure, it didn't get 1000 likes on a group with 5000 people, but there are plenty of ways you can reason-away the 5 "likes" you got for your stanced out car. There's no "thumbs down" button, so it isn't like there is a quick way to let someone know "hey, that looks stupid." I've scanned through that place, and there's really no cohesion. I guess it is neat that you can buy up a ton of used parts because there's a lot of people selling used parts on there, but in my time scanning that group, I never saw anything resembling a weekly or monthly meet up. Facebook groups don't work well for 'build threads' or whatever. I guess my point is, Facebook killed car community forums because it is emotionally and socially lazy, and people don't like to be challenged. In personal stuff like "here's a pic of my backyard" and "yay, I got a promotion" or "here's a video game I'm playing!" posts, it works fine, because those things are meant for you, your friends and family, so you can expect positive responses to them. Your personal page on FB is a nice quiet place to be yourself. But as far as interacting with groups of people with similar interests, it is a lazy echo-chamber for people that can't be bothered to co-exist for a better experience. And since you can spin up those echo-chambers with the click of your mouse, it becomes too easy to splinter everyone off into smaller groups that don't go anywhere, rather than put in the effort and empathy that is required to interact with a larger group.
