The Columbia Heights News forum, once a place full of lengthy debates between everyone and William Jordan, is pretty much dead.
http://www.columbiaheightsnews.org/forum/
I haven't been checking in as often as I once was, and apparently nobody else is ether. The last update was November 8. Before that it had been awhile.
PoP's forums are also pretty quiet these days: http://www.princeofpetworth.com/popforum/.
Guess everyone has moved on to the TWEETS. And in case you are interested, you can find us there at http://www.twitter.com/theheightslife.
5 comments:
Things just aren't the same any more. Anyone remember Jonathan Rees? The surest sign that DC's become sanitized is when you can go for a month without reading a single incomprehensible conspiracy theory rant from someone like Mr. Jordan. And he's just a pale imitation of Rees (who passed away, I believe, but his nutty blog lives on in memoriam).
Ah, those were the days... before blogs, we had just a few neighborhood forums where some lunatic would ask questions such as "So when will DC's mayor Adrian Fenty finally admit to his use of marijuana, cocaine and adulterous affairs? It takes a real man, not a sissy fag like Fenty to pony up to the truth and move on!"
We have created a new moderated forum at the NCHCA website:
http://www.northcolumbiaheights.org/community-forum/
Thusfar, little interest generated, so perhaps the forum truly is dead! But I hope anyone interested will eventually migrate over.
It's likely dead in part because it's moderated.
Actually, the CHNews Forum died because it was NOT moderated. Moderation keeps out spam and off-topic posts, that is all. I just think that these sort of community fora (as evidenced by the POP forum as well) are a bit redundant given the large volume of discussion of virtually all neighborhood issues happening in the numerous local blogs, and then Craig's List is the go-to site for local services. CHNews thrived before there was any blogging presence to break news. It was still doing OK for awhile, but then spammers / trolls took over, and it was all she wrote.
I do still think there could be a valuable role for these for things like contractor recommendations, but it is hard to generate momentum.
The problem with moderation is that it prevents any kind of real-time discussion. People have short attention spans, and if they don't see their post appear right away and can't get responses right away, they lose interest.
At the same time I agree generally that blogs have substantially changed how people have "conversations" online and they are definitely the de-facto fencepost for discussions these days, while most formerly active forums and mailing lists are pretty quiet these days.
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