Has FB And Twitter Taken Most AZB Members?

easy-e

easy-e

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
logical said:
I come and go on various gun, pool, motorcycle, car and other forums. It is simply a matter of what is going on in my life. If I'm looking for or just bought a new bike, I might be on a Harley forum daily for months and then none at all for years. I know to some it is different, but my level of obsession comes and goes with pool. The only point here is people come and go for many reasons.

I have zero interest in Facebook or twitter, and only reluctantly deal with LinkedIn due to my job. I'm sorry to let all of you down...but frankly your lives and what you think about belly button lint are tedious. Just because you have technology where you can tell all your friends that you are really liking your cheeseburger and wanted to share a picture of it....doesn't mean you should. And again, sorry but that YouTube link you sent me did not lead me to something "awesome", "amazing", "hilarious", or that I absolutely had to see. It was just OK and I only say that because I stopped it after 15 seconds so that I wouldn't feel compelled to tell you what an idiotic waste of my time it was.

I'm not antisocial or even grumpy in general.....I just see how these things take over peoples lives and find it moderately sad and very strange. If you are at a live concert....be at a live concert.....don't watch it through your iPhone screen while you record it so you can send the clip to people who aren't there. You're missing the show.

So, no. For me....Facebook and Twitter are not the reason.
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I agree with the idea of what you are saying. If I spend 15 minutes a day catching up on Facebook, I tend to see something that makes me laugh for a good part of the day. For example, today I saw a picture of a dude in a Whinnie the Pooh costume. Only he had the pants on backwards and his tail looked like his dick! HA! Well worth my time.
 
Snapshot9

Snapshot9

son of 3 leg 1 eye dog ..
Silver Member
I spend time on facebook, and especially in our private group (558 members) entitled 'Wichita Pool Players' which has local news about Pool players, upcoming matches, etc.

Actually I am a member of several other groups like Midwest Pool Players, OKC Pool Players, and others.

AZB has become so repetitive and tedious anymore that I only occasionally check in. Frankly, little on here interest me anymore, mostly abouit cues, cases, and what cuemakers have to say. A lot of dumb threads seem to be in the Main Forum, like what is my inexpensive to begin with Dale Perry cue worth, duh! What is the best chalk? etc.
 
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CreeDo

CreeDo

Fargo Rating 597
Silver Member
A couple of people have mentioned that anonymity is different on AZ vs. Facebook,
but from day one I never put up real info on there. Though I'm sure someone
who was dedicated could figure it out. So for me, AZ and Facebook are the same in that regard.

I think the real difference is just in the transient 'feel' of facebook.

Poolplaya, you mentioned that people can choose to use facebook like AZ
and spend hours using it like a forum. I have never seen that.
New content comes up so rapidly on facebook that any particular topic gets
shoved off the page after a day and rarely revisited. You can't easily search for it
(as you can on AZ) and it requires massive amounts of scrolling to find it again.

In some ways it's self-moderating because you feel more aware that what
you say will be seen by an actual real life friend or relative, not a bunch of anonymous AZers.

Facebook has a very different signal to noise ratio. For every topic worth discussing
there's 10 pictures of cats or shared articles or "click share or this kid/puppy dies".
This not only adds to the scrolling, it decreases the urge to participate
in facebook like it's a discussion forum, you have so many other distractions.
I'm a sucker for spastic cat videos.

I guess I have seen a few who use the AZ forum like facebook,
but I've never seen anyone use facebook like a real forum.
Which is part of the appeal I think, for many pool players.
 
Poolplaya9

Poolplaya9

Tellin' it like it is...
Silver Member
CreeDo said:
Poolplaya, you mentioned that people can choose to use facebook like AZ
and spend hours using it like a forum. I have never seen that.
New content comes up so rapidly on facebook that any particular topic gets
shoved off the page after a day and rarely revisited. You can't easily search for it
(as you can on AZ) and it requires massive amounts of scrolling to find it again.
Click to expand...

You misunderstood what I said. I didn't say that people act the same on both (although I have in fact seen people do facebook just like they do AzB). What I said is that the same behaviors take the same amount of time. Facebook and AzB only take different amounts of time only because people use them differently, but they do that by choice. If those chose to use facebook like they use AzB it would take as long or longer than on AzB to do the same things. This was in response to someone who was talking about how quick facebook was compared to AzB but I didn't think they gave the full picture and it was a little misleading to someone who may not be familiar with facebook.

In other words facebook is only faster than AzB because of how it is used differently (little different culture if you will), not because it does the same things any better or faster. We basically agree.
 
JB Cases

JB Cases

www.jbcases.com
Silver Member
CreeDo said:
A couple of people have mentioned that anonymity is different on AZ vs. Facebook,
but from day one I never put up real info on there. Though I'm sure someone
who was dedicated could figure it out. So for me, AZ and Facebook are the same in that regard.

I think the real difference is just in the transient 'feel' of facebook.

Poolplaya, you mentioned that people can choose to use facebook like AZ
and spend hours using it like a forum. I have never seen that.
New content comes up so rapidly on facebook that any particular topic gets
shoved off the page after a day and rarely revisited. You can't easily search for it
(as you can on AZ) and it requires massive amounts of scrolling to find it again.

In some ways it's self-moderating because you feel more aware that what
you say will be seen by an actual real life friend or relative, not a bunch of anonymous AZers.

Facebook has a very different signal to noise ratio. For every topic worth discussing
there's 10 pictures of cats or shared articles or "click share or this kid/puppy dies".
This not only adds to the scrolling, it decreases the urge to participate
in facebook like it's a discussion forum, you have so many other distractions.
I'm a sucker for spastic cat videos.

I guess I have seen a few who use the AZ forum like facebook,
but I've never seen anyone use facebook like a real forum.
Which is part of the appeal I think, for many pool players.
Click to expand...

The thing with Facebook is that you can certainly choose to be anonymous but if you use it for what it was originally intended for, to stay informed about your circle of friends, then you can't be anonymous for long.

I think it's entirely possible NOW to consume content generated by others on FB - to be a member of many groups and give your opinions etc...but the thing is that all those people you are talking to and with can just cut you out easily because they all moderate their own experience whereas on a forum it's much more difficult to do that.

Groups on FB are similar to forums with threads and discussions. Sometimes very heated ones.

I simply use Facebook's tools to make people or topics I don't like completely invisible. There used to be a plugin that worked wtih Vbulletin that would do the same thing on AZB but it stopped working. That was a little slice of heaven for awhile because I could make some people and topics completely gone from my AZB experience. I really wish that AZB could be more in the control of the individual user in this regard. Be a lot flaming if trolls could be banished from sight.
 
Double-Dave

Double-Dave

Developing cue-addict
Silver Member
Poolplaya9 said:
Or maybe the number of threads in the main forum has dropped,
even though the total number of posts in main has stayed the same, and less threads is why is
"feels" like there is less posts? Do you happen to have any statistics on the number of posts
or number of threads in the main forum only over the years?
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Sure do, pretty easy to get.

In 2014 4158 threads in the main forum (130 days), roughly 11.700 for the whole of 2014
In 2013 10370 threads were started in the main forum
in 2012 10033 threads were started in the main forum
in 2011 10920 threads were started in the main forum
in 2010 11824 threads were started in the main forum
in 2009 12289 threads were started in the main forum
in 2008 12598 threads were started in the main forum

So again this is pretty stable, espescially since many sub forums didn't exist before.
As an example, the Ask the instructor forum has over 1500 threads but wasn't started until april 2009.
Aiming conversations with almost 600 threads was started early in 2012, most of those threads
would have normally been started in the main forum.

gr. Dave
 
Poolplaya9

Poolplaya9

Tellin' it like it is...
Silver Member
Double-Dave said:
Sure do, pretty easy to get.

In 2014 4158 threads in the main forum (130 days), roughly 11.700 for the whole of 2014
In 2013 10370 threads were started in the main forum
in 2012 10033 threads were started in the main forum
in 2011 10920 threads were started in the main forum
in 2010 11824 threads were started in the main forum
in 2009 12289 threads were started in the main forum
in 2008 12598 threads were started in the main forum

So again this is pretty stable, espescially since many sub forums didn't exist before.
As an example, the Ask the instructor forum has over 1500 threads but wasn't started until april 2009.
Aiming conversations with almost 600 threads was started early in 2012, most of those threads
would have normally been started in the main forum.

gr. Dave
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info. The number of threads in the main forum does show a trend of dropping for sure, but not enough to ever really be noticeable without the stats IMO. Have total posts in the main forum remained relatively stable as well (I know total posts for all sub-forums combined has remained pretty stable)? If so we can probably conclude what someone has already said. It just seems like less to those that have been around for a while since they have seen most things over and over. And perhaps the content quality could have dropped as well, further making it seem like there are less posts/threads when that isn't really the reality. Thanks again for the info. By the way, how did you get those stats?
 
JoeyA

JoeyA

Efren's Mini-Tourn BACKER
Silver Member
sfleinen said:
It's a personal choice, really. You go where you get the best experience. For some, that's pure AZBilliards, because they can remain anonymous. For others, it's Facebook and Twitter because of the self-administration and moderation abilities (e.g. you are fully in control over who can see and respond to your stuff).

I've worked in I.T. since the 1980s -- during the Internet boom -- and I've seen technologies come and go, blossom or die on the vine, fads or to-become founding technologies, etc.

I've used all these technologies (because I have to) and some I just don't spend much time on. For me, Facebook and AZB are my "go-to" technologies. I don't use my Twitter account much at all, because it's too invasive / interruptive. I want to go to my personal-use technology when I want to; I don't want my personal-use technology constantly interrupting me, because I get enough of that crap just as a matter of course in my job.

I treat AZB as a morning newspaper of sorts. I sit down with it over a cup of coffee. I peruse, read, enjoy, and post on occasion (not nearly as much as I used to). And here's the key -- I don't take it too seriously. Those that are whining here because somehow the dynamics changed for them, take it w-a-y too seriously. If you take forum life seriously, you ARE going to get hurt, and often.

One can still be a contributor to a forum -- and benefit those that can use your information -- without being vulnerable to all the dark personas and identities here. I strive everyday to do just that -- be appreciated by those that are here for good purposes, and not be vulnerable to trolls or other mal-intentioned people.

-Sean
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Like!
JoeyA
 
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