I see the debate is lively again on the dying forums as to why they’re dying. Some of the people complaining the loudest are the same people who have never contributed anything other than harassing beginners or pretending to be experts behind a veil of self-inflicted personal failure of some sort.
What’s not uncommon is the “what’s changing” complaining has been going on for more than a decade and the folks who complain loudly are never the ones who are contributing. But I think at this point, contributing doesn’t matter, anyway. Other mediums do more for peoples’ dopamine, and the reality is that most of the people on forums were there because it felt to them like they were learning something or planning to do, and putting off doing. If most of us who have been around for a while went back to the older forums, the post volume was unreal. Woodcentral, if I recall, had post volumes in the neighborhood of 100 a day on average and gradually got to 100 a month. The other forums whether they moved at the same speed and are dead now or just have 10% of their original traffic, same story, just the details are different.
Group Buying of Forums
The era of cheap interest (now over) and waning forum traffic seems to have been a success for groups like Group Builder, who is tagged at the bottom of the UK forum. What happens to forums like that that continue, but with seeming indifference at the surface always confused me. What I mean by that is the forum gets new ownership, and little seems to change except for some “hey bro” PMs appealing for cash, and the ubiquitous “we’re replacing our server”. I’d ask them for an agreement that you’ll get a picture of the dedicated server after the fact, it looks in my opinion more like an appeal for cash as part of a business plan.
You can belong to forums set up like that to eliminate ads without paying anything. That should be a red flag because it doesn’t make sense.
I browse all of the forums sometimes. There are a few former members i like to observe, and I guess I shouldn’t admit this, but some of them in humor more than seriousness. There isn’t anything I’ve read on the forums in a long time that goes into the “learned” category because that’s just not what happens on forums with buildalongs. Unless you are copying someone building along, you’re looking at something now you might apply 4 years in the future in a different context. It’s kind of pointless except for entertainment.
So, I don’t see the UK forum often because it is abysmal in terms of information level, and the indifference persists.
But someone on there pointed something pretty smart out in the context of private equity or VC or private capital enterprises just buying things up and putting them in a framework. And that is that most of the sites now have economic value not for the current forum members or advertisers to members, but by being set up to attract beginners who are one-offs. What’s a one-off? It’s someone who is looking for information to do something once and then seeks to use google to find instruction. It could be someone who wants to sharpen one thing, or someone who has no exposure to woodwork at all but just had a daughters (or son!) dribble nail polish remover on a lacquered table.
What’s your Value as a Member?
If you’re a long member on a forum, telling people technique with nothing leading to a sale, the value to advertisers is low. Too, let’s be realistic, when people have an issue to solve, their first thought is “how far can buying get me in solving this”, not, I’m willing to try three or four things and they may not work. We all thought we were valuable, but what’s valuable is having a giant database of posts for google to crawl so that someone searching – who knows nothing about the forum – may come across the forum when they search for “ruined table finish” or “table finish repair”. If you’re a member, will you tolerate a 15 second full screen ad every time you log in? You definitely will not – you’ll tolerate appeals for “money for the server” and PMs of the “hey brother, can you spare a dime because our costs have gone up” stuff, but you wouldn’t tolerate an ad. One will drive you away, the other will drive you to complain, which takes no effort to solve. You’ll give up on that if the appeal doesn’t occur too often.
We are worth less than the database of general info at this point, and realistically – if I start posting answers or Derek Cohen starts posting long build threads, the person looking to get information and a link to amazon following what to buy just isn’t going to be interested.
Not encouraging anyone to go to the UK workshop – I have an aversion to the way the site has changed and the strategy in general, but just as a check, I browsed over to the site. As a nonregistered guest, I got a half page banner ad for Ashley furniture, four video ads and two animated perimeter banner ads. Actually, having Ashley pop up for someone looking to fix ruined furniture is pretty smart, even if the furniture itself probably leads to need for repair soon when bought new.
If you see someone complaining about what killed the forums and they are the type who never contributes any legitimate advice or help, ask them what their contribution has been and what they do for a day job. The honest answers probably aren’t continuous employment, lots of woodworking and frustrated by too much success.
Of Making by Hand with Wood and Steel 
It’s not just there. Enthusiast forums, magazines, and the like are drying up across the board.
Why? I think early on, they were much like an enthusiast club. The people there were bound by similar interests in doing things. Then, they grew to include everybody, and then they started going downhill fast. Think of the local car collector club. Membership costs something and usually has to be vetted somehow prior to joining. They don’t just throw their arms open for the entire world at large to show up via proxy and hurl rocks. If you want to join the local MG collector’s club, you gotta have an MG. If you are participating in a judged event, rules and standards are known, judges and participants are vetted, etc.
Then, “The Internet” became a cesspool of horrible between 2010 and almost 2020. Paid domestic and foreign activists flooded even the most friendly enthusiast forums and turned them into vile pits of hate.
Then, forum participation changed. One example from my own experience. Around 10 years ago… On a once popular forum, we drummed up support to do a “guitar build challenge.” The idea was that everybody who signed up would do an amateur build and post it on the website. We got about 20 people involved. I was one of maybe 5 who finished within the time frame. I had over 100 photos and forum posts of the build as it progressed, tons of work, etc. Each of our threads brought in multiple thousand’s of views…. But almost no comments. There were thousands of people looking, but ZERO cheering us on, or thanking us for the work we posted which was keeping the place alive.
I honestly think it killed the place, as those of us creating realized that we were being milked by people who had zero intention of ever offering even a single thanks or comment. This included the site owners and admins. As a result, I decided I would never again share that sort of content with that place. On other sites, the only people really sharing in-depth builds are professionals. In their case, it is free marketing.
Good content takes a lot of work. It takes money and time to create. Worse, 100% of that time and money is fronted by amateurs who receive zero consideration back for their efforts outside of the comments and support. That means cheerleading has to happen. People have to be encouraged to remember that this “Free” content really isn’t free. Somebody put in a lot of time and money, just not the reader… and that their comments and gratitude keep the world turning so to speak.
I know you’ve experienced the same thing. It’s frustrating, especially when you realize that almost 100% of the creative content on a forum comes out of 5-10% of the people posting.
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There’s such a big change in dynamic. the usenet or whatever the mailing list tool folks came from was mostly enthusiasts. Plenty of collectors who didn’t do much, but they had something other than transient whims and youtube videos in mind. But beyond that, we had forum mediums and other things – some basic web pages and so on, guest books, whatever, where people with a lifetime of avid seeking of information could suddenly discuss things. If you came into woodcentral in 2006 as I did on the hand tool side, there were a lot of legit people, and there were a few loonies, but they left before the legit folks did. But it made for an environment where a dummy like me could go in and soak up discussion from people who had done things, learned things and so on.
I’ve always posted, and realized I was posting, because I was interested in posting. That led to discussion more than step by step. But I had the same experience as you did -a group of people say they want to do something, 25 say they will, three do and two don’t finish. Nobody is really interested in that – but I sort of that that – people are bored and using the forums as their social medium and what large numbers of folks want to do is go in, see a question, answer it and not worry about whether or not it has to be perfect or even right. that makes a successful forum.
the thing that got me to youtube was an incident on sawmill creek. There was no publication of making double iron planes, but I figured it out, so I took pictures of steps and described them. it took several hours to get the pictures in order and add the text and show a step by step. And of course a few folks said they would try it. Then a probably – living – off – of – the spouse accountant and someone else who knew pretty much nothing about any of it showed up, made a big stink crabbing among themselves and got the entire thread locked. with no ability for anyone to post, it floated back into obscurity within days. What a waste of time. Something else that I had gone to some trouble to explain at the same time had two idiots fighting with each other – I think the subpar accountant and someone else again – and that one got pulled – thrown into the vault, and I figured it would be a good time to post that stuff on youtube instead. I also figured, and this isn’t an attempt to shame anyone – but with the way the site was run, and the way George was kind of set up by nobodies including Chris Schwarz making a reference to a legitimate master – throngs floated in to see who was criticizing something Chris did (sloppy work clenching nails when barely more effort could’ve been expended) and George was made to apologize publicly. I felt like if that was Keith Outten’s priorities, one thing I had no interest in doing was doing anything that would draw people to the site ( or seeing back now, generate hits on google) and make him any money.
i still bloviate away at people on reddit and here and there post something on a forum, but what pissed off George was that he would go to great lengths to type out advice that someone said they really really needed, and then they’d respond that they changed their mind and followed someone else’s advice.
if you can find better advice than I have, then by all means, but someone who said they were trying to make planes asked me pages of questions on the UK forum and at the time, I realized – they’re probably not going to do it at all. I felt some obligation to tell them what I know, but I hadn’t done the basic thinking of – what’s the odds that someone is really going to do this? I’m sure it was less than 5% – and I just started answering questions without ever factoring that in. it was stupid on my part – and as much as I’m not the most accommodating person in the world, I have a hard time seeing a question that I can answer well and not answering it.
of course I post now, and I really like the back and forth with like-minded folks. it just takes getting away from the forum and setting up a site like this or a limited reach youtube channel that really will bore the April Wilkerson fans to kind of cook off the impurities in attendance, so to speak.
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Oh, to dwell on the value of those folks coming in, though. The folks coming into the hobby – that was a one-time thing. it was golden – they didn’t know they’d get trolled so they didn’t automatically avoid the internet. Unless someone who is a legitimate professional has the internet or social media cohort as a paying customer, there is a danger to conversing with idiots. that is that the search engines will bring your name up to a potential custom along with someone they don’t know saying you don’t know what you’re talking about. Even if you do, the customer probably can’t tell.
There is no reserve at this point of expertise who may transit through again. And that’s a shame. George left a lot of people thinking he was unpleasant, but he wanted to talk about the craft and that doesn’t mean coddling people who want to make the forum something else – or attendees, such as one who attempted to tell everyone he wasn’t able to work any longer. That was false, but I found out that person never did anything but attend conventions or shows and wanted to be able to sit at the table with the big guys and talk like he was one of them – and disagree like he had the same stake. So it made sense that George would probably sooner or later tell him to take a hike.
George made a huge difference in my life – not like he was buddha, but he told me I could do better than I was doing and how. I talk to him often – we don’t often talk about making things. I’m still a rank amateur, but I’m a better amateur because of George and my head is full of things I want to do or try or get better at, which is stimulating. He would never tolerate someone saying paul sellers had a better answer to every response he gave.
Debating stuff with Larry Williams – though I’m sure he didn’t care for it, really sharpened my desire to really understand how planes work, and it’s permanent – it’ll be resident until i die or suffer the same fate that my mother is in (dementia).
it is a shame that the days of legitimate full time makers like larry, and then several notches above true masters of craft in general like george just have no incentive to share their thinking or where they got information or how they solved problems.
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I think there’s at least two parts to it. First is people using Internet as a library (generally speaking) and people that use it for easy entertainment. Thanks to big corps there’s now several orders of magnitude more of the latter, so anything of substance being shared just drowns in crowds noise. Another factor is that personal behavior is now largely motivated by attention seeking. It’s not really new, Eternal September is real, what’s new though is that a connection to the existing corpus of information is being severed. FIDO archives were online in about a year after www become popular, as well as usenet groups, IRC public chat logs, email list archives and so on. Like, people would move to a new thing, but previous conversations were searchable, so in a sense a discussion continued. But not these days: not only search engines drop huge swaths of their indexes, but also this stupid idea of creating walled gardens makes anything of value impossible to access. Now add bit rot to the equation: thousands of little personal sites (like yours) die because their owners of 30years are dead and nobody extended hosting (woodworking history is gone like this, less than a year ago, there are many other examples). This is what makes me worry: as long as there’s a platform there will be a community, but if it continues like that there’s going to be a bunch of little bubbles that pop before they can re-discover proper chip breaker settings, a proper tenon or something basic like this.
And yet another thing is that we collectively lost ability to discern value from junk. There are millions of views for a stupid influencer making a stupid jig or taking a single shaving, and a Korean guy filming 15 hours of traditional grid window making and adding English subtitles to it has like 3k subs and maybe a couple of hundred’s views. This is not just about a creator’s motivation to do make videos, this is also an indication of dwindling interest or perhaps dwindling discoverability (which might be driven by dwindling interest)
We’ll see where it takes us.
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I got on forums when there were a bunch of enthusiastic white collar newbies, but the bulk of people involved had some experience and some long and very legit.
What’s happened now, aside from the attention seeking and running into people who really don’t care if they look stupid as long as a few folks tell them how great they are, is instead of the forums being 10% “greats”, 60% people doing something or with a long time in the hobby and then some newbies, it’s influencers and then almost entirely newbies. Fantastically little is being made, but maybe the hobby is watching James Wright or whoever else and “knowing”. Knowing without doing and comparing leads to thinking that knowing something only is useful, and beyond that, not knowing what you should really know.
I understand what’s happening with forums in terms of their value. I hear that the UK forum (not to me) sent an email to their member list again asking for a 10 quid donation. It’s part of their business plan – just throw the request out there and hope to get whatever you can from people who don’t ask many questions.
I sure do miss the days of getting on a forum and having an odd tool or odd maker and seeing Don McConnell come out of the woodwork with pretty much a perfect answer to the question, though. And without referring me to Paul Sellers or James Wright.
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