So, the real problem forums and message boards face in competing with LJ for users is that joining the former is generally harder than joining the latter. The reasons joining a message board is usually hard for new people to do include:
Actually joining is difficult to do, because all message boards don’t run on the same software or come under the same hat of website styles. If you’re logged in on LJ, you can participate in any smaller community on LJ. If you’re logged in on Wordpress.com, you can participate in pretty much any Wordpress blog, anywhere. But if you’re logged in at FictionAlley.org, you have to log in at Mugglenet to participate there as well.
Actually joining isn’t an easy decision to make, especially when the prospective user is new to fandom or new to the web or new to anything important about the community. Because the usual basis for such decisions is, well, will I be welcome? Can I join in? What am I joining for? With LJ, there are a thousand and one communities made available to you if you join. With Wordpress, you can comment on most Wordpress blogs, and there are scads of interesting blogs with interesting content out there. With most forums, the forum itself is usually the default available draw.
Successful forums are mostly either tied to some other site that supplies the wank or the meta or the fic or the random musings that fire up discussion, OR they create that sort of thing in and of themselves, or rely on other sources to create it for themselves, and do a good job at pointing to those sources and providing a general place to discuss everything. But that is harder to do with a forum than it is with an LJ or even, to an extent, with a Wordpress or Blogger blog.
Of course, once users have joined the community/board, there’s the issue of keeping them there. But that’s more of a universal problem that all websites have in keeping their online communities happy than a dealbreaking sort of thing— which the issue of getting people to join really is. The way I see it, LJ and Wordpress and Blogger are like the internet on a smaller scale, with smaller communities forming within. Forums and boards are therefore competing with mini-internets in that way, just like they would have been competing with stuff like AOL and Compuserve earlier on. And since single sign on not easy to handle for even one huge site, I highly doubt that smaller forums and boards are going to do anything but continue to slowly die out.
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So, the real problem forums and message boards face in competing with LJ for users is that joining the former is generally harder than joining the latter. The reasons joining a message board is usually hard for new people to do include:
Actually joining is difficult to do, because all message boards don’t run on the same software or come under the same hat of website styles. If you’re logged in on LJ, you can participate in any smaller community on LJ. If you’re logged in on Wordpress.com, you can participate in pretty much any Wordpress blog, anywhere. But if you’re logged in at FictionAlley.org, you have to log in at Mugglenet to participate there as well.
Actually joining isn’t an easy decision to make, especially when the prospective user is new to fandom or new to the web or new to anything important about the community. Because the usual basis for such decisions is, well, will I be welcome? Can I join in? What am I joining for? With LJ, there are a thousand and one communities made available to you if you join. With Wordpress, you can comment on most Wordpress blogs, and there are scads of interesting blogs with interesting content out there. With most forums, the forum itself is usually the default available draw. Successful forums are mostly either tied to some other site that supplies the wank or the meta or the fic or the random musings that fire up discussion, OR they create that sort of thing in and of themselves, or rely on other sources to create it for themselves, and do a good job at pointing to those sources and providing a general place to discuss everything. But that is harder to do with a forum than it is with an LJ or even, to an extent, with a Wordpress or Blogger blog.
Of course, once users have joined the community/board, there’s the issue of keeping them there. But that’s more of a universal problem that all websites have in keeping their online communities happy than a dealbreaking sort of thing— which the issue of getting people to join really is. The way I see it, LJ and Wordpress and Blogger are like the internet on a smaller scale, with smaller communities forming within. Forums and boards are therefore competing with mini-internets in that way, just like they would have been competing with stuff like AOL and Compuserve earlier on. And since single sign on not easy to handle for even one huge site, I highly doubt that smaller forums and boards are going to do anything but continue to slowly die out.