Hi Alex,
How's it going? Good to see you checking in again!
I completely agree, but I'm afraid that's simply the nature of the beast and there's little that can be done about it.
As has been said though, it certainly helps in terms of the 'community' aspect (and minimising said "disengagement") if you've actively got to know other members, by meeting up with them, and perhaps made some friends in the process, which is thus liable to help sustain your engagement with the community.
That's unlikely to be the case if you've simply used a forum to document your 'hi-fi journey', sucking information from others in the process, just for your benefit and to enhance your listening experience, and then when the exercise is over, sail off into the sunset... This goes back to my earlier point about 'takers' and 'givers'.
Perhaps it would be a good idea for members to apply some introspection, and ascertain which of the two categories they consider that they belong in?
Indeed, which again relates to what I've just been discussing. Don't get me wrong, what you've outlined is perfectly natural behaviour, but if everyone did that, there would be no forum, and no community.I think it's normal that a lot of forum users will go through a cycle of discovery, enthusiastic engagement and involvement, a plateau of interest and then progressive reduction in participation. For a lot of people who join a forum, there is a transactional nature to their participation - they have a problem or need questions answered and once the itch has been scratched they tend to fade away.
That is why amassing a hard core of regulars, who've made AoS (or some other forum) their 'home', and thus an integral part of their daily lives, is necessary to keep things ticking along. Therefore, maintaining their interest in contributing is vital to a forum's sustained success and longevity - a point that you've touched upon yourself.
In terms of the first bit, perhaps, but it's not so evident here.So it's just a hypothesis, but if less people are joining a forum because interest in Hi-Fi as a hobby is waning (as opposed to interest in music in general) do Hi-Fi fora experience a reduction in membership growth? it would be interesting to know what the trends are in new member signups, volume of posts per user and what the profile of volume of posts looked like over time.
We're currently averaging around 8-10 new sign-ups per day, from all over the world, so even if interest in hi-fi as a hobby is waning (which I'm not so sure is the case, but rather that interest is diversifying into different areas, compared with before), we're not seeing any evidence of that in terms of growth - and quite a few new members are hanging around and getting stuck into discussions.
As for the second bit, that's something which would need analysing more closely. However, even when you've got the actual statistics to hand, it's easy to misinterpret them by drawing the wrong conclusions, in terms of why certain members have small or large post counts.
Many people, for example, join forums with the full intention of making regular contributions, but then life gets in the way, or something unexpected happens, which prevents them from carrying out what they'd intended - and therefore their subsequent non-participation is no reflection on the forum itself, or those who run it.
No problem, and I totally understand. It's good though that you're still 'around' enough to pop in and contribute to discussions such as this, so please continue to do so, even if you don't have anything particularly interesting to say about your system, as I always enjoy reading your postsFor myself, as my sig shows, I haven't bought any new Hi-Fi stuff for a couple of years so I have less to tell you all about, certainly little that is novel or hasn't already been covered in depth by others. I still check in periodically but am certainly less active than I once was.
Marco.