On Tue, 11 Sep 2012 08:50:15 -0400, Edward Ned Harvey (lopser)
<[email protected]> wrote:
From: [email protected] [mailto:discuss-
[email protected]] On Behalf Of Moose Finklestein
The big question is (I think) -- what does having forums get you that
mailing lists do not?
People who prefer forums. And people who google for something and then
want to join in the conversation that they find.
In my opinion, I think the forum people tend to be the younger crowd.
(Just my opinion.)
This matches my experience as well. People who were very active in the
90's when Usenet was the thing are all pretty nostalgic over it. I know I
am. High density, text-based, threaded interactions. And in the later
years, pretty discoverable via search-engines. There is nothing like it
anymore, no matter how hard we try; things are just too balkanized now.
Kids these days, and I've had a few come through our office in the form of
Interns, hit Google first. This brings them to all the names we already
know. linuxquestions. Experts-exchange. gmane. stackoverflow. Innumerable
blogs like mine. Maybe the occasional google-groups hit. And if they
really dig through the search-results, IRC logs.
Forums gather new users in ways that mailing-lists don't because the
barrier-to-entry is perceptably lower. Yes it's dead easy to join a
mailing list, and joining a forum usually requires a trip through email
anyway. But a mailing list carries the onus of "please send me lots of
stuff", where a forum login is a lot more fire-and-forget (especially if
it's OpenID enabled).
"I just want an answer to my question, I don't need to know about
everything going on here."
That is the mind-set of the vasty multitudes who have problems. They have
zero comittement to the platform they find their resolution on. Though if
they notice that they KEEP finding resolutions on a platform, that's when
they start becomming sticky.
These Interns of ours are not pining for the older, more effective
communication methods. A couple of them were on mailing-lists for
technologies they were actively working on and having a lot of problems
with, but in the main they were dedicated forum-users.
--
Law of Probable Dispersal:
Whatever it is that hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.
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