Words of Danny O'Bigbelly My idea of a good time

Last summer, I started a forum site. My goal was to recapture the spirit of the original TBD, which I missed very much. (I have written about TBD at sufficient length already, so I feel no need to expand on that statement here.)

I was not successful.

There are many possible reasons for this. First, the software I am using doesn’t provide as clean and simple an interface as TBD. Although there were a few things I would have changed if the choice had been mine, the original TBD interface was very good at making it easy to find what was going on. (it also made it practically impossible to find things that happened in the past, and search was chronically broken, but most people live their web presence in the now, so this hardly seemed to bother anyone.)

Second, we didn’t get nearly as many users as TBD. The audience was smaller, and the pool of respondees smaller as well. Discussions seemed to peter out rather quickly. Part of this is due to the diaspora of TBD users to many different sites: facebook, eons, various ning sites, their own blogs, and even barbaric hinterlands like MySpace, GoogleGroups, and AOL. Most people have a hard time keeping tabs on more than one site regularly, so after they made a new home for themselves somewhere, it was hard for them to just pick up and start again.

Third, the novelty of social networking was gone for many people. Lots of people (such as myself) didn’t really get into social networking until TBD came along, and then we dove in headlong. But we quickly gobbled up all the low-hanging fruit, and, mixing our metaphors mercilessly, just kept running over the same ground again and again. The first page of recently-updated discussions on teebeedee.ning.com, for example, has discussions that were transplanted from the original TBD. They’re word games or serial jokes or other things that a core of users apparently find endlessly amusing, but other users find the epitome of tedium.

Fourth, the founder of public-spectacle has an abrasive personality that tends to rub some people the wrong way–on purpose. The living antithesis of the original TBD staff. Some people might have thought that Kat’s application of the community guidelines was inconsistent, but at least they thought they could reason with her if they felt that they were being treated badly. The community guidelines for public-spectacle were quite draconian–none of this three-strikes-and-you’re-out coddling. You could get kicked out of public-spectacle for holding the bat wrong. (and yet, in the entire history of the site, nobody ever actually did get kicked out, or even censured–not even that one really annoying person–you know who I mean)

There might have been other reasons, such as the fact that the admin would disappear for weeks on end. Or maybe it was the fiasco with the bafflingly unpredictable number of stars that the software put next to members names, and the fact that some people believe that it’s really, really important to understand how stars are assigned because they thought that the stars denoted status, rather than the day of the week they joined public-spectacle or the number of vowels in their screen name. Who knows? The only thing that isn’t open to speculation is that the site failed; nothing was posted for days on end, and eventually I shut down the site in order to prevent it from attracting griefers or other undesirables.

But recently, news reached me that teebeedee.ning.com, one of the largest tribes of the TBD diaspora, is in danger of being shut down, along with every other free site hosted by ning. The ad-supported free social networking site business model turns out to not be much of a business model at all unless you can attract enough users (and nobody really knows how many users “enough users” really is–there is some data that even facebook doesn’t turn a profit on anything other than its ability to raise capital), so ning is going to start charging. It’s their prerogative. Who knows; maybe they’ll even find someone willing to pay.

In the meanwhile, I’ve restored access to the forum at https://www.public-spectacle.com. It’s as free as ever, and either sucks as hard or is as wonderful as ever. I’ve offered it as a halfway home for refugees from teebeedee.ning.com to find each other. I don’t assume people will stay, but if they do, that’ll be fine.

It’s like we jumped directly to June… after getting all the rain that would have ordinarily fallen during April and May compressed into a two-week period… and into our basement.