I’m certainly not against blank posting, memes, jokes and whatnot, they all have their place and it’s part of the forums and what makes the community unique, I enjoy reading them, I’ve blankposted myself from time to time. What I’m against is when chains of them get posted in otherwise decent threads. Ok granted this one is literally about badges so it’s kind of expected that this would happen and is a poor example for me to post about this in. I just hope it doesn’t spill over into everything else.
What my thinking was if you’re a new user and you come to forums and all you see is chains of blank posts and meme replies you’re going to think all anyone does here is spam which either 1) puts you off bothering to post actual content or 2) join in and add to the spam.
I’m not the morality police and I’m not gonna go around reporting people who do this. I don’t care enough. I just wish more new users would use the forums. I’ve been here over 2 years now but am still considered new to almost everyone here. And I don’t see many people newer than myself posting much so there must be a reason for this. Maybe this isn’t it. I dunno. I’m basically just wondering out loud about it all.
Thanks for clarifying. It also irks me when someone is trying to have a decent serious discussion about a topic and people just blast her/him with in jokes, blank posts or otherwise.
As far as to why not many people post on RB, there’s definitely a lot to think about. It took me forever to start posting on RB forums, mainly because I really didn’t need a place to talk about beer - I came to RB solely to store ratings, and that was great. It’s only when I started meeting a few ratebeerians through travelling and IP trading that I began to value the community aspect of this website. I think that will always be a fairly small number of people though.
I also believe that internet forums are in for some tough times. Facebook has crushed almost everything significant, and people just don’t spend that much time exchanging in text forums anymore.
All of this doesn’t detract from the fact that we should be civil and welcoming to newcomers as a basic effort to make things better, I just don’t really think people on here are as toxic as some people occasionally complain about.
For the record, I agree with @LazyPyro BUT, have you guys been on TalkBeer lately? Their only rule is don’t be a d-bag. Everything else goes and their community is thriving with memes, heckling, shit-posting.
They certainly are in for tough times. I mentioned in another thread that I’d ran a forum (not related to beer at all) for the past 15 years but Facebook and social media in general basically killed it off even 5 years ago now to the point where it’s actually dead now.
I think RB has a big enough userbase to warrant forums and keep them active, and I hope they can. I came to RB for the same reason as you, literally just to store ratings. Nothing else. I can’t even remember why I started posting in the forums, I was probably reporting a bug or something I don’t know, and then just started posting more whenever I was bored. I haven’t even met any Ratebeerians yet or done any trades. It’s something I can look forward to I guess.
I agree about the toxicity thing. No one on RB is toxic that I’ve seen, that’s far too harsh a word, they’re not even unwelcoming. They’re just not… welcoming. I don’t know I don’t have the words for this. Hopefully you get what I’m trying to say. I think we’re agreeing with each other anyway.
I’m checking that site out for the first time right now. It says they have just 8,000 members yet somehow have amassed a total of 1,596,066 posts. That’s an average of 200 posts each per member. That’s pretty incredible
Hope you can. Its the Community i love most about Beer. I came like you cause of the ratings, well more to give back as i found RB usefull anytime i wanted to know about a beer.
Love the RB community
Open invite to come up to Edinburgh and have me hold a tasting for you
Yeah, 200 posts is nothing when you are just reply to people’s questions with GIFs.
and I don’t use Facebook not since 2012 and I fully agree with you about it destroying a ton of thriving communities. I was at the monthly breakfast for the BMW Motorcycle Owners of Vermont yesterday. Every comment was “I posted it on the facebook group” with half of us saying “we have a website with a calendar, forum, events, photo galleries…post it there” but 600 people actively use the facebook page. The woman who runs the monthly newsletter used to receive email submissions from people of photos & stories. now people post it as it happens to Facebook and no one reads her newsletter because they saw it 3 weeks ago on facebook.
it’s eaten up beer trading, craislist, photography galleries, dating websites, blogs, it’s going after YouTube now. It used to be Intenet and IRL was serrated but now I miss out on IRL events because I’m not on Facebook. It’s bullshit.
so yes, I think FB had a huge impact on these forums.
Yeah i use facebook and it is good keeping in touch with a global community. But also agree its eating into Dedicated site like this.
Im hoping we can get good discussions and stats and such and then try post link to FB tiwtter etc. Thus we hopefully suck people in who want to talk, or better still have the same stats
Stats was the other huge reason I came here. I love geeking out over my stats and since I’m quite far behind most of you it’s a nice challenge to try and break into top 50s and stuff like that. I also love reading and posting in various stats threads people make and hope people continue doing more of those. Would also be nice if Joe added even more stats pages
Also if we keep this discussion up we’re having now we’ll reach 100 posts soon enough and can get the badge for reading them all!
think its must be 100 unique likes not counting 3 to same post 
