I agree that Facebook is a major reason for the decline in participation on online forums. I don't care, and here's why, in a rambling, roundabout sort of way
Facebook: Quantity over quality. Instant gratification, which is actually NOT a good thing. Sheer numbers mean there's always someone online, so if you have a question you can often get an answer right away, even if it's the wrong answer. It doesn't matter if the question has been asked already, 100 times that day: because of the layout and format of the FB pages, someone would have missed the other 100 identical questions and will be happy to answer yours. There are a couple of FB "boards", where there is an extensive file section to answer many common questions, in an effort to keep the main page somewhat uncluttered with redundant posts and information. If someone asks something that can be answered by going to the file section and doing a little homework, someone will point them in that direction. These original posters often don't have the patience to click over to another section, never mind read articles, and FBs' very layout makes it very difficult to do any sort of search for a specific answer, so such boards have seen a very steady decline in activity. If someone doesn't get their instant answer, they leave. Poring through file sections, or disseminating Google search results has become too much work. People will just post in another forum, or multiple forums until they get the answers, or the "likes" they want, even though (ironically) this takes more time. If they don't get the response they are looking for, or consistently get answers they don't want to hear, some will forget about it and post something else in hopes of a response, but most people will lurk or simply leave the group(s).
Sometimes when someone posts a question, a hundred people will answer without even thoroughly reading the question, never mind the previous answers. Often this leads to conclusion-jumping, arguments, hurt feelings and even name calling. There is a definite lack of impulse control in most FB forums. Heaven forbid someone recommend culling for illness, or even hint that they might have to; there will be someone (or multiple someones) who jump out of the woodwork and call you a vicious murderer that clearly doesn't love animals as much as they do, because you haven't tried ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING and that poor unloved animal should be rescued from you so someone (not THEM, but SOMEONE) can spend thousands in vet fees and the poor animal can be stuffed full of colloidal silver and then be allowed to die naturally in some loving arms rather than quickly under a broomstick.
FB is full of armchair warriors.
Nobody has an attention span anymore. People who frequent facebook go from one topic to the next to the next, and cherry pick which information they take to heart, or learn from, or respond to, or repost. Five minutes later they can't tell you what they read five minutes ago. I admit to being very guilty of this, and it's something I'm trying to curb. Although there is good information to be had on social media, it takes enormous gobs of time to find it, and I'm finding the negative effect on my attention span and cognition in general, to be cumulative. If I'm pointed to an article online, I have trouble getting through it. If I have to read a hundred responses before I post my own, I may skip the post entirely even though I may have something of value to add, but I refuse to be guilty of posting without reading. I thought I was just getting old and losing brain cells, but apparently Social Media/Attention Deficit connection is a real thing and is happening to all ages.
PTO: Quality over quantity. There might not be a lot of people posting on a regular basis, but old or new, the posts are always worth reading, and if we miss a chance to answer a question or welcome someone new, we feel bad about it.
Respect. Whether we agree or not, we are determined to learn from the experience, even if the only thing we take away from it is when to keep silent
Sometimes, silence is golden! Which is something I think we often tend to forget in our busy lives, and something that FB most definitely discourages. For instance, politics tends to get me heated, and so I avoid the topic, or, if I feel I HAVE to say something, I will give myself a few hours or even days to cool down and measure my response. Nobody does that on FB, because they CAN'T. Even if they wanted to take some time to mull something over, three days later when they want to revisit a topic, it's either been lost to all the newer posts, or deleted because someone got nasty.
Here, we do not usually name call, or take personal shots at people, even if we don't agree with them. We are able to (and have the attention span to) walk away, think for a bit, and then come back to it later. We can put down the phone, or PC, or tablet, or whatever, go spend some quality chicken time, come back, and the post will still be right where we left it and we don't have to spend twenty minutes trying to find it way down a page. I think most of us that come here and stay here, are interested in learning, even if that means challenging long-held beliefs. We are willing to go through post after post, we read it and actually RETAIN the information.
The few times someone had to be ejected from the old Poultry Swap Ontario, they went straight to Facebook, which is reason enough to avoid it
People come here to get answers, share experiences, and "hang out" with like-minded people who aren't afraid to put down the phone and pick up a book from time to time, and even to "crow" a little LOL, but nobody gets butt-hurt if they don't get a hundred likes. At least, I hope they don't
People go to Facebook because it gives them their happy brain hormone fix, or to get their ego stroked, or both.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog ... your-brain
I'm not sure you'd want to attempt to emulate FB in any respect, because you'd be attracting more fly-by-nighters and not less. A certain U.S.-based poultry forum has been trying that for a couple of years now, and they are suffering a continual decline in new membership and posting as well. Old members are posting less and less, because the questions have been answered a million times already, and now they have to suffer through ads and banners and e-mails trying to sell you stuff. The only thing that BYC has going for it, that we don't, is page visits--you can Google a question about poultry health, or breeding, or incubating, and chances are good that some of the top search results will be BYC pages. So, they get views (which means the ads do as well). Big whoop. I would be willing to wager that very, very few of those "views" translates into membership/contribution.
All that said, PTO cannot remain static, as nothing can and still survive. People die, move away, give up keeping poultry,
get caught up in other things or pursuits or family tragedies. Poop happens. We need new members, and to engage members that don't contribute, not only to keep the board alive and well, but because without new perspectives, new information, a diversity of contributors, WE remain static. I'm not sure what the numbers are, so I'm just throwing some out there, but say for every 1000 people that find our forum, 100 may join. Out of that 100, 1 will post, and out of the ones that post, maybe only 1 in 100 will contribute on a regular basis. Yes, I read the statistics that Martin posted, but because I spend too much time on facebook, I cannot process or retain that information
To increase that last number, we need to increase the first one. Trying to engage people who have joined but don't post, hasn't worked in the past. They come here to read something, or post something for sale, and then forget that PTO ever existed in the first place, because they either got what they wanted, or got instant gratification somewhere else, and/or forgot their password and couldn't be bothered to retrieve it or get a new one, whatever the protocol is here. Have you considered putting a time limit on inactive memberships, so that PTO member numbers aren't artificially inflated? Nobody want to see membership going from 5000 to 500, but if 4500 of those are deadweight, lose them. Instant less 'clutter', at least in the member's list.
One thing that can possibly be "fixed" is the search function within the board...it's horrible. For instance, earlier I wanted to reference Andy but couldn't remember his username, so I tried searching for "Andy" because he at one time signed his posts. It would not return any results unless I added two more words to the search line, because "Andy" returned too many results, perhaps because it searched for "AND"??? So I tried "resistance is futile", something he was fond of saying, and got two pages of results but none of them relevant, because several others of us are also fond of saying it
I gave up, because I figure it will come to me later (it did), and it wasn't that important anyway. As a test for the search function, I searched for "losing feathers". The search doesn't return exact matches, as it should, it gives you all posts with the term "losing", and "feathers" in the post. That's annoying, and if I was a first time user looking for something important, I would give up. Exact match as entered, in the order it was entered in, should be the default. If I take the test a step further and type in "Why is my chicken losing feathers" , I get fewer results because fewer posts have all those words within, but none of the words are in the order I typed, so the posts are irrelevant to my question. If that makes any sense. Please ignore any grammatical errors, as Facebook brain has rendered me incapable of stringing a proper sentence together
Of course, I personally KNOW why my chickens are losing feathers, but it's a common question, and if someone found PTO and typed a question like that into the search bar here, they would likely quickly get frustrated and go elsewhere for answers. Search bar needs to also be larger, and high contrast, to make it easier to see for people who've never visited the site before, but no point in doing that if the functionality can't be improved.
If you actually clicked on that article link and read it, and not just a sentence or a paragraph, we can be friends
If you lost interest and didn't read past a few words, or didn't even click on it because it's too much work, you need a little less screen time and a little more real life time
Paying for advertising...I really don't know how well that would work. I mean, people keep doing it, so it must get some sort of attention/clicks/sales, right? Where would you advertise? Ads keep getting bigger, flashier, more precisely targeted...and I personally keep ignoring them on principle LOL. If I'm looking for something in Google (or FB or anywhere else), and I see a link is sponsored, I generally refuse to click on it even though it may hold the information I'm looking for. But, I may not be representative of the general population
Changing "join the conversation" to something a little less aggressive (most people don't like being told what to do, even while looking for someone to tell them what to do
) is a good idea in my opinion. Companies use taglines/slogans, mottos and jingles because if they're memorable, they work. K.I.S.S. principle would apply. Short and catchy (remember the attention span thing) and to the point. More than three words should be broken up with a period. Maybe time to revisit some of the other slogan ideas if you think "Join the Conversation" has outlived its' usefulness. "Friendliest people without trolls" , while true, doesn't peak interest/affect the brain in the same way "Friendly People. No Trolls." does, at least to my way of thinking. Just as an example, I'm not suggesting you use one or the other.
I think people that stay and contribute to PTO, do so mainly because of what they find here, which is apparently a bunch of people who seemingly know each other personally (even though many of us have never met, the regulars tend to speak on here as friends do)as if PTO is some sort of club or elitist group. Often I think, new members hang back, lurk, feel us out for a bit before posting, if they ever do. Other people find the close-knit-community feel of this board very intimidating and disappear as quickly as they come. You can't please all of the people all of the time. I don't think we should be asking how to change the group dynamics so that we are more attractive to the latter group, because any answer I can think of, requires that members change their behaviour. It would become a totally different group, where strangers post "me too!" a hundred times, and topics of substance would be lost. That's what facebook is for. I think we should find a way to play up our strengths, make the group more attractive to people who are looking for what PTO already offers, rather than change PTO to cater to what people are deciding they want right now. Because as a general rule, when people get what they want, it very quickly becomes Not Good Enough, or Something Completely Different. An individual person may be smart, but people are dumb as stumps
and that's what Facebook is--people. A mindless mob of people taking a break from reality. I don't think it's a bad thing that that this group has so far avoided that.