Your HA Facebook is Killing Your Forum

[Winston]

Also, FB doesn't bring Winston direct income, unlike his forum or other blog sites if he has any. Facebook groups, if he is going to use them, should probably be locked and keep other people from posting, allowing Winston to be the only one to post links or updates that redirects individuals back to the main forum to read and reply to topics there. He is actually killing his bread and butter, a slow death. As others have requested I believe posters wanted a real time chat room environment so since Winston has denied that request, those that wanted that option are using FB instead of the forum. If Winston doesn't modernize and adapt to the changing fickleness of online users, his forum will lose much of its appeal and his revenue may dramatically be reduced as readers go elsewhere.

I don't post much anymore cause there is no real decent dialogue among users here and there is little appeal to spending time writing decent material when there is no decent feedback. I think forums are a dying internet technology and will be used less and less as blogs and other social media with real time commenting will appeal to readers. I also think it's easy to put up ones own website now or blog and write for yourself with revenue generation rather than for someone else. Writing takes time and time is money so nowadays I would only post quality items to a personal site or get some kind of payment for posting.

Winston should maybe start thinking about where the trends are heading to preserve his main income stream or he may lose it in a few years. What Roosh has created with his ROK site is probably the direction Winston should be taking, quality written content under certain topic headings with main commentary by readers at the end of the written piece. Pay decent contributors a cut to continue writing content for the site, invite new writers on a trial basis. Keep the forum site going but know that it will be a slow death as internet trends change among the younger generations. Most forums appeal to the 30+ age demographic the teens and 20 somethings rarely use forums like this anymore, they don't have the attention span for it.

BTW, once I actually do get my own unrelated site up and running, posting to HA will be few and far between. Right now I only do it to kill time in between doing other things that I'm taking a break from so my days are numbered here as well and I'm assuming for others in similar a situation. It was good in its heyday, but trends have changed starting around 2012ish or so, and now it's becoming more and more noticeable that these kinds of forums will be going extinct. I give it less than 5 years, that's my prediction.

Mr S,
Aren't you forgetting something? YOU were the one who first told me that I got to market HA on Facebook, Twitter and other social media, like everyone else is doing. After that I set up our FB group and Twitter page. Remember? How can you forget that? I was following YOUR ADVICE.

Only one guy wanted the chatroom, Eurobrat. No one else really cared. Live chat rooms are not saved. What's typed on there are not saved. So what's the use? Every business and movement has a FB page or group, so there must be a good reason for that.

There is no evidence that we are losing traffic due to FB. Where is your evidence or logic for assuming something like that? There is zero basis for that wild speculation.

You guys are sounding hysterical like those in the Salem Witch Trials. To you guys, any random comments without basis must be true. Very weird. I thought we were intellectuals?

Look at the index page. We have an average of 60 users online throughout the day now, which is almost double what it used to be. That's an INCREASE, not a decrease.

What does Roosh have that we don't? Sure his blogs get a lot of traffic, but why are you insinuating that we have no blog? HELLO?! EVERYONE here knows we have a blog. So how are you the only one who doesn't?!

http://blog.happierabroad.com

In fact, the latest blog posts are shown on the Latest 100 forum topics page.

latesttopics.php

Are you new to this site or something? How the heck could you not know that we have a blog? WTF?!

Sure I can post more to the blog or get other writers to, but I can't control the amount of traffic there, or the readers comments. Some things are not in my control.

Eventually we will move the blog to a Wordpress platform though, so it's more customizable. It's one of the 1000 things to do on my list.

[Winston]

Well the forum will still exist as long as he pays the fees to keep it online, but I think the platform itself is not interactive enough for younger generations who need instantaneous feedback with short quips of communication back and forth rather than long form dialogues where one needs to have some focus skills to read and participate. Younger kids and adults have a hard time focusing on paragraphs longer than three sentences at a time. If you notice many sites are converting to this type of writing style. The long form paragraph is dying a slow death. Winston can still make get some revenue even if the forum becomes abandoned due to older postings, but yes the material will be dated and maybe people aren't interested in old dialogues past a few years old. IT won't happen overnight, but it will be noticeable every 6 months to a year that there is less and less participation.

Like I said if I were Winston I'd start doing research on what's working nowadays for discussion themed websites and start converting to that before it's too late. However, I'm pretty sure he won't as he will be in denial about this and also he is probably too lazy to do a mass over hall of his websites to a more modern format to maximize tablet and phone viewing. This forum type software is designed for traditional computers with a screen and laptop. Most people are converting to tablets or smart phones where its scrolling and tapping and forums like this don't work on those. Yeah, the big change over isn't necessarily here yet but the tidal wave is on the horizon and approaching rapidly. Like I said Winston has less than 5 years to adapt, maybe less than 3 depends on the technology and software changes and affordability for the average person.

Winston is wasting alot of potential revenue writing his long detailed essays and posting them on here or facebook rather than a better organized website like ROK that is better organized and easier to read on all technology platforms. He can still put ad revenue on these sites but people can choose to read certain quality topics or authors with specific commentary on that piece of writing rather than a hodgepodge of anything goes in this outdated forum format.

We can appeal to older folks. But dude, why do you again FALSELY ASSUME that we have no mobile version of this forum?! HELLO?! We've had one for a long time. I've announced it many times in the Announcement boards too. But no one is saying anything about it.

On my smart phone, I use the mobile version of the forum to browse. Haven't you ever seen the mobile version of this forum? If not, click here:

index.php?mobile=mobile

If you are on a mobile device or tablet, it should redirect you there automatically, unless you click "Switch to Desktop Style" last time you were here.

How is it that you don't know this after it's been announced MANY TIMES?!

Our blog is also mobile friendly. Try it out.

http://blog.happierabroad.com

What's with all these false assumptions from you today?

We are never going to attract the mainstream. We are only attracting the intellectual types and freethinking crowd. Maybe that type is growing. Even most expats will not post here if they are busy or too impatient to use forums.

I do not have mobile versions of the home page and the pages created in MS Word though. I'll have to hire someone to convert that. It's on my to do list of 1000 things.

I do have tons of draft articles to post in the blog, but not enough time to finalize all of them. There aren't enough hours in the day to do everything you want to do. I usually post my best articles in the blog too, not just the forum.

So I'm already doing most of what you say. Why don't you know that? Why do I have to waste time explaining the obvious and self-explanatory?

Is everyone getting stupid? Is the Illuminati zapping your brains?

Can you show me some credible articles claiming that forums are dying a slow death? I haven't heard that one. So I'd like to see it mentioned by credible sources, not random speculation.

[Winston]

The forum is utter trash....The users are trash, moderation is trash, the site is trash....I just come here, say what I got to say and then leave....

Then get the f**k out of here asshole. Or how about I ban you to make it easier for you to resist coming here? Your post above is a total waste of space.

[Winston]

One more thing guys. If this forum is not busy or active, then why did this weird thread get over 15 posts already?

GOTCHA! haha

Can you guys come down to reality and start being realistic and rational and start making sense and start making accurate statements? A lot of you guys make random INACCURATE statements and for some reason, the rest of you don't see it. Very Twilight Zone like.

One more thing. Most of traffic here is from the search engines, from NON-POSTERS, not from the regular posters. The visitors from the search engines are the ones that the advertisers here are targeting. They know that regular forum posters do not click on ads. It's the traffic from search engines that do. So that is the prime target audience of our advertisers. The posters here merely create content that gets indexed by search engines, which brings in more traffic from them.

The admin panel says that ever since the forum began in 2007, we've had an average of 72 posts a day. Not bad.

[Ghost]

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[Yohan]

The forum is utter trash....The users are trash, moderation is trash, the site is trash....I just come here, say what I got to say and then leave....

Is it so? Did you check out other forums? Forums with so-called trash moderation?

Well, you might join 'orientexpat.com' (xpat.life) where I was a member for many years and made over 11000 comments and compare its activity with HA.

Due to insincere moderation by the admin, his 'orientexpat forum', which could be a good source about living in Asia for Western men, gets now only 3 or 5 comments per WEEK. Most of them are smileys or brainless one-liners.

The idea to create such a forum for 'Expats in Asia' was good, it was all about an useful niche-forum - but the admin was unable to make anything out of it, many left, many were banned. Comments and even pictures were edited or deleted, and now only a few members from UK remain active, writing some lines to each other.

[Ghost]

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[Jester]

WorldTraveler, Cornfed, Rock, Mr. S, and all the other posters on this thread,
Thank you for helping our mutual friend Winston.

Winston, I suggest you choose 1 to 3 collaborators, and LISTEN to them, do not QUIBBLE with them.

Mr. S, +100 for your cogent overview of the situation.

[Rock]

The admin panel says that ever since the forum began in 2007, we've had an average of 72 posts a day. Not bad.

That's a great number to start from. Now break it down by year to see if any trends emerge. What were the average number of posts per the following periods:

2015 (to date)
2014
2013
2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007

It seems things have been going downhill mostly for 2 or 3 years, at least quality wise.

Now let's see if volume has indeed been declining as well. Of course there have been some spikes, especially periods where trolls were hyper active. But currently, most trolls (except BlackKnight), have been taking a break.

[Ghost]

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[Winston]

WorldTraveler, Cornfed, Rock, Mr. S, and all the other posters on this thread,
Thank you for helping our mutual friend Winston.

Winston, I suggest you choose 1 to 3 collaborators, and LISTEN to them, do not QUIBBLE with them.

Mr. S, +100 for your cogent overview of the situation.

I'm not quibbling. Just telling the truth and being accurate. Don't you like honesty?

Why should I agree with something not true? Did you read what happened?

Mr S was BADLY misinformed and thought we did not have a mobile version of this forum nor did we have a blog. Yet those were announced many times here.

Jester did you know we had a blog and a mobile version of the forum? The blog is mobile friendly too.

How do you explain why he didn't know that? If he doesn't know basic things like that then how can he be informed enough to comment?

Plus a lot of guys here were making unsubstantiated claims with zero evidence. There is nothing to indicate that we are losing traffic to the Facebook group. It should be the other way around.

Jester if you want to produce better content then you should stop doing those +1 posts with nothing else in them. Those belong on social media, not here. A big bulk of your posts are mere +1s.

Finally go here and use this Google test to see if this forum is mobile friendly.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools ... -friendly/

You find that Google says it is. So Mr s was definitely wrong about that. Why don't you point that out to him instead of telling me to listen to everyone?

Besides I know more about internet marketing than most guys here do, including rock and Mr S. I've done tons of research on it and give advice to others on it.

[Winston]

Also guys, if you want to attract more posters then post something more positive. The posts here are overwhelmingly negative and puts off a lot of people. Even some of our biggest fans such as Steve55 said that he wanted to leave because there was too much negativity on here. Its ultimately unhealthy if you think about it.

So you guys have yourselves to blame for that. We all contribute to that negativity here, including me of course. Why don't we work on producing more positive content? What do you think?

[Mr S]

You're making insinuations that I don't know what else you're doing i.e. your blog and mobile forum, which I know of course cause you always send 100's of reminders to us that you have them so that's not the case. You're turning constructive criticism into negativity, we are not doing that ourselves here. The actual one poster (Banano) who made fun of you directly you didn't even comment on but decided to attack everyone else that were making critical observations. Rather, you attacked us and presented your rebuttals with an emotional tirade like we're all still in middle school or high school. You should have just stated you disagreed and these are the reasons rather than making it all insensibly emotional and personal. This is the reason why people don't post much anymore cause whenever we make observations that you don't agree with or can't understand why we are saying them you go on an emotional defensive tirade and start attacking people like we are complete retards and you're the only one that knows everything, even though you are also always asking us inane questions about every little decision involved with your personal life. So why do we even bother anymore with it all? We try to provide feedback and you go insane and make us sound like we are all delusional or something.

Anyways, what I was saying which you didn't get it seems is that you shouldn't be having two separate types of discussion boards if you are trying to make income off of one cause Facebook does not give you any direct kickback. People make discussion boards/groups on FB when they don't have one on their main website so they use FB to augment it. If you allow posters to post their own writing on the FB groups there is no incentive for them to use the main HA discsussion board. FB should only be used for people to follow you and follow new link postings you make and then they can follow them directly to the forum or blog and join the discussion there, not on FB. You are losing postings by allowing people to discuss topics on FB rather than the discussion board. Just because some people prefer using FB rather than the discussion board is no reason to actually keep promote them to use FB to post whatever, it should only be used as a marketing tool for yourself rather than an alternative posting platform.

Your blog is not maintained enough to get many people to follow and read it regularly. It should be updated with unique, quality writings at least 3 or more times a week and you should mix your own best new unique writing with other quality writers and those writings should remain exclusive to the blog and not posted on the forum or other sites. You should have unique content for both areas of HA, they should not have the same writings on them. You need to entice people to write for the blog with some kind of decent incentive or kickback to get more variety and regular new postings for it.

The mobile site for the forum is viewable of course and one can read posts but is it really something someone wants to use on a regular basis? I rarely use the mobile version and I would never post a topic using it either. I barely feel like posting using a regular computer half the time, I can just imagine how much of a pain it would be trying to post using a tablet or smart phone. Older people are used to primitive looking sites so the mini forum is okay for our age demographic but younger people would laugh and not even bother for the most part. Not that anything can be done about it cause it's the software itself that is lame looking, but I just wanted to say yes, I know about the mini forum for tablets and phones. I just feel it looks lame and not very inviting to entice me to want to post or read discussions for a long period of time. I only use a main computer to access the forum cause that's the best user experience.

Just cause there are more users visiting your site it doesn't mean they are interacting with it and who knows how long they stay on it. Yeah, you can't expect all visitors to join HA but I'd expect more would join if there was more decent quality postings from a wider source of different individuals, some of them could migrate from the FB group if they were barred from posting there.

My comments about forums dying out is speculative based on trends in social platforms and new communications and technology. It's not like I'm saying the forum will be extinct tomorrow, but I'm guessing by 2020 they will be irrelevant in comparison to whatever modern social platforms are existing at that time period. Unless of course the internet evolution comes to a halt due to the internet being taken away from USA control and given to the global UN authority or whatever they are called, which is in the works to happen soon. Also net neutrality could kill or minimize incentive to keep the internet evolving so we'll see what happens over the next couple of years.

I like the HA no political correctness format and at the time it was created there were less options to go related to this type of open discussion or writings. Nowadays there are many more options, thus I'm and i'm sure others are less inclined to spend our time here. Especially when half the time the poster gets personally attacked and called names for zero reasons. There is no reason why you should have gone on a diatribe about constructive criticism concerning what your forum needs to improve itself further and succeed. This is the reason many disassociate themselves with the forum or don't return much at all. Some posters only return cause they have a long-term attachment to it even though it's changed from what they originally encountered. I only stay here cause I've been here for so long and feel like I have to follow what's going on occasionally even though I really have little interest in the whole movement anymore cause I am already living it and I am also independently self-reliant and figured out all this on my own before this discussion group ever existed. Plus, there are few posters on the same wavelength anymore as there used to be in the past. Maybe it's a generational thing, I don't know but compatible posters with similar qualities to each other seems difficult to find than a few years back.

Back in the 00's I believe it was easier to leave one's home country and start a new life overseas, however nowadays it's quite difficult, especially for younger people. So much of the forum now is devoted to how guys hate being stuck wherever they are and hating on women and all the other negative shit in the anglosphere of influence. Those that do make it overseas and stay are older guys who tend to already be married or have family and contribute less and less to the forum for their own reasons. I think it's much more difficult for forum posters to make deep connections with each other today than it was maybe 5+ years ago. This is why many don't stick around for long or post randomly. There aren't many places for our type of independent political incorrect thinkers to go to to have conversations with each other, but at the same time many of the topics don't seem to catch as many peoples attention and after a few comments die out over time. Sometimes a particular discussion will go many pages but I think it's becoming rarer and rarer.

I'm only posting this as my observation about the forum in the present, I'm not providing solutions cause they have been discussed before and many are theoretical and unknown whether they would work or not to increase traffic or quality postings.

I'll probably be taking another hiatus for a few months after this discussion posting is finally over cause I know Winston will try to ream my ass over what I'm saying here and take it all as some personal attack on him, which it is not. I can keep making clarifications over and over regarding my position but as we all know, him having to post rebuttals will never end until he has the last word saying we are all mental cases and our observations of what's going on with HA are delusional and incorrect. Validating his stance of course as the only correct option and ours as completely irrelevant, marked as nucience writings of mad men not following our HA liege .

[Rock]

The admin panel says that ever since the forum began in 2007, we've had an average of 72 posts a day. Not bad.

That's a great number to start from. Now break it down by year to see if any trends emerge. What were the average number of posts per the following periods:

2015 (to date)
2014
2013
2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007

It seems things have been going downhill mostly for 2 or 3 years, at least quality wise.

Now let's see if volume has indeed been declining as well. Of course there have been some spikes, especially periods where trolls were hyper active. But currently, most trolls (except BlackKnight), have been taking a break.

Even if he found that volume has been declining, there would be the issue of figuring out why. Correlation is not causation.

Winston is denying that the forum has declined over last 2 or more years in terms of post volume and quality. But it seems many maybe even most posters here disagree on that point. So before having a discussion on causes, we should first establish whether or not there actually is a problem at all.

One group of metrics which might shed some light at least on the quantity issue would be average per day post numbers and word counts over the years including 2015. Are those stats available Winston?

[Rock]

As for the mobile version, I personally don't like it at all. I feel a lot more comfortable with the desktop version, even when reading the forum on my iPhone. For me, the mobile version is just an annoyance or distraction just like the Faebook group msgs., ladies forum, silly PMs from Winston (highlighting threads that I'm already aware of), emails from Winston highlighting threads, and group HA group What's App messages.

Can't we focus all the energy on one medium instead of jumping all over the place?