did social networking kill gotapex?

[mojo]

Facebook killed forums for me. I have only so many minutes per day to spend online, and other activities have taken me away. I also missed my 10th anniversary here without a whisper. Wow, 10 years ago I was just a punk with only 7 kids.

BTW, our first grandchild is due a week from Monday!

congrats!

[WhiskeyPapa]

Congrats, WP! family getting a little bigger, eh?

Between weddings and grandkids, we're going to see it start to increase exponentially in the not-too-distant future!

[cruelpupet]

Between weddings and grandkids, we're going to see it start to increase exponentially in the not-too-distant future!

Start signing them up with G|A accounts....problem solved

[Thesifer]

Another thing that ruined GA for me was when they started posting daily in the 'Deals' forum with all of the site deals. Now my 'New Posts' link is always annoying to search through for content I want to read. Whenever I wanted a deal, I always just went to the DEALS page.

[oogeooge]

Got Apex was rocking in the old days. I don't think social networking killed G|A. The prolific spreading of internet usuage is what killed G|A.

[Maarchk]

I think it's just evolution and other distractions. This was one of the main deals pages I knew about, and the deals were awesome so I was here a lot. Then the forums were big and fun and that was good too.

But time changes, deals are harder to come by and I think this page focuses on tech, so for computers, I come here, but not much else.

The forums were always good but a little dicey in the politics range. I imagine people got tired of the fighting or being watched for crossing the line and went to facebook where they can just say whatever. I visit now and again but I just don't have much time and the threads that used to overwhelm me by growing pages every day, are now posts every couple weeks.

Perhaps there will be a revitalization, but with google having the quick answer to almost every single question, forums aren't really practical for answering questions. They are nice for discussions. But as was said above, most people seem to already have their opinion worked out and there isn't a discussion as much as an argument.

But i miss and enjoy the G|A people and I'll drop this in my book marks and try and come around a bit more.

M-

[gwilks98]

To be fair, I don't FB much anymore either. My FB is mostly flooded with uninteresting crap like "going to the pumpkin patch with my best girl sara!" My mom has completely taken over being the first to comment on any post I make so aside from blocking her from some of them, (you can't block her from them all or she'll get suspicious) I just get annoyed.
Tangent: There ought to be a level of importance you assign to your FB posts so that people can specify what level of detail they care to hear about your daily lives. I could give a rats ass if you made chicken spedini for dinner, but I'd like to know if your cancer came back.

G|A is the exact opposite. It used to have tons of useful stuff to read and discuss. I liked NOT knowing people here on a personal level. It's not that G|A changed: people just stopped posting as much here.

[DarkFury]

Yeah, FB is way too "personal" for me. Folks who actually know me don't need to know that much detail about what I'm doing.

[jstreet]

I think for me it was the Internet changing and my life changing. Growing up in a relatively small, insular, homogeneous community, and suddenly getting the Internet in the mid-90s opened up so many doors. This was a good central place for pursuing tech interests (and good lord, the discounts/free things then), pursuing web interests (there were so many new things to look at/learn), and talking to a really interesting cross-section of diverse people in the world I'd never have gotten at home.

But the Internet changed for me. Today it doesn't feel "special" like it did for me from the mid-90s to probably 2002-03, I think because everyone got it and it became so integrated. It used to feel like a separate, mysterious, strange thing and that made it so much more interesting. Anonymity was interesting because it wasn't really available in real life; interacting with strangers was interesting because I didn't get to meet a lot of new people in real life; learning how to code/interact with the web was interesting because no one really knew how. And now that's not really true. As far as the decline of anonymity goes, a lot of that is probably due to social networking; a lot of current web functionality is crippled if you choose not to share, or share as your true identity.

And I guess my life changed, too. A lot of conversations I had early on via the Internet had to be online-only because I didn't have an outlet in real life. In the mid-90s I hadn't come out yet in real life, so I found people I could talk to online about being gay. We were all just pseudonyms and so there was no risk of really being hurt. And there weren't a lot of people in my small town interested in discussing technology or politics, so it was great to get to do that online. But now I'm out, and I have been at a university for ten years in a big city, so there is no end to my chance to meet/befriend diverse people and talk to them about anything I could want.

I do feel nostalgic quite often though for the old days. I like my life now, and my interactions, but I miss the wild-west appeal of the Internet when it felt like an adventure. It gave me an enormous motivation to explore and contribute (which touches upon what you wrote, Air, about content). I don't create any content now, I just consume it, in a very formulaic and rote fashion (email, facebook, news, finances, scholarly research, log off).

Maybe there's something there with the creativity angle, too. The commercialization of the Internet brought corporate culture/content to bear. It would take someone like me an increasingly large amount of time to generate unique, compelling, relevant content to compete with the corporate world, for an increasingly smaller benefit as people spent less time here (and on every site) and more time elsewhere on the increasingly large number of sites. I mean consider the days when you could actually find it useful to use a category-based directory like Yahoo or Geocities to discover the relatively few places worth going. Now that would be unthinkable and you just Google and pray. It's so individualized and the opposite of a community-based approach. And my skills at creating content - web pages, programs, etc. - used to be so absurdly advanced, and now I struggle to design a website that's even vaguely professional in comparison to what's average these days.

I dunno. I do miss this place, and the people that were/are here, and that time period in my life. There were bad parts for sure, but there was a lot of good. It just doesn't seem like that time could exist again.

Anyway, rambling instead of studying for finals.

[ufcrusher]

Personally, I still lurk and comment when I feel like it, but between everything going on in my life I have little time to be super active.

I will say that the lack of other posters definitely impacts my post count. While there are a few old timers around, many people seem to have departed.

[DaFunkyUnit]

[revil]

Also things drastically changed for me when someone on here took me to a sh!t house and then he raped a log. I won't name names, you know who you are...

[kimchicowboy]

Also things drastically changed for me when someone on here took me to a sh!t house and then he raped a log. I won't name names, you know who you are...

WTH is a hof?

[revil]

WTH is a hof?

Hasselhoff apparently left quite the impression in Korea.

[RoniMan]

Wow, what a great topic! Looks like it brought out almost everyone, seeing all these names makes me a bit nostalgic
o <-- actual tear

I don't think social networking killed G|A b/c Friendster, Myspace was around and we were still here. I think like any "relationship", you hit a plateau point, and you have to decide if you want to keep working at it to make the relationship work. Unfortunately for the internet, there's always something new popping up. So a lot of people (myself included) just took the easy way out and found another "exciting" page to go to. (Sorry Apex, it's not you, it's me =P)

I can't speak for others, but I was definitely thankful for the level of civility (for the most part) maintained here. I like politics, but just found that it's hard enough to be in a heated discussion in person. To engage in online discussion with someone who you can't "read" is even harder. So it was nice to have a forum that catered to those who wanted such topics.

I still come back once in a while, but I am on FB for the most part. I still keep in contact a quite a bunch of you, and I have G|A to thank for that.