Why most metal forums suck

[born for banning]

Sometimes you want to read what people are saying about metal. You can pick up some good information this way, but the signal/noise ratio can be awful.

This thought found me browsing some metal forums well-known to the underground. Most of them are all noise, if you're looking for something other than an aimless way to spend your aimless life. I thought about this.

Most metal forums suck.

They suck because they encourage quantity over quality, which itself is a result of not taking the music seriously as art, but viewing it as entertainment. Entertainment is a way to pass the time. I've always thought it a condescending term.

If you want to be a "big success" in the metal forum world, you:

(1) Get yourself a commercial forum like vBulletin, spend a bunch of money and put in a bunch of mods, then get expensive hosting. Now you need to have advertisements to pay it off, but those can benefit you too. Claim you're defraying costs, and make a tidy profit.

(2) Find people with nothing better to do than spend six hours a day on forums to moderate your forums. These people will quite frankly be fucking losers. How can they not be? Anyone else is doing something great. Look for the forty-year old burnout who is on disability and has an alcohol or drug habit, and make him moderator. It will be the best thing going in his life, and he'll be really excited to exercise his authority in trivial ways. What do you care? The only people he's going to beat up on are the minority who say something controversial, or behave oddly.

(3) Encourage whatever is trendy, since you're surfing the media wave. People read Terrorizer or Metal Maniacs, see the bands on the cover, and then start gabbing about those because they don't know or care about other things. Make sure you feature those bands and stay "in touch" with what other monkeys are saying.

(4) Give people a sense of identity for just logging in. Tell them you are the ultimate metal forum, or the hardest ass forum, or the most open-minded forum. Then they think they're important somehow.

(5) Encourage trivial participation threads like "What did you eat today?" and "What did you buy today?" People love to feel included, even if they have nothing to say.

(6) Invite all your stupid hipsters in. They'll say exciting stuff like:

what band should be covered and what needs to stop being covered

someone needs to start an integrity cover band, mikey x lookin at you guy

You will now have a thriving metal "community."

[TYONS]

Agreed, but you could have left out the "metal". Most forums suck.

[antithetikal]

Bornforbanning, that post just made me smile... you got it right
I could easily say this is the first time I participate in a forum in where I find intelligent people.

[ShitFaced]

I believe more than "most metal forums" suck.  Pretty much all of them suck. But that doesn't mean you won't find intelligent hessians only here and real life. There's actually miniature metal communities in many forums. Some forums I've found even had on-going threads with over 5,000 posts discussing metal. And not just Black Sabbath, Metallica, Iron Maiden, and shit like that, but also bands like Immortal, Bathory, Morbid Angel, ect.  Some of these threads even had predetermined rules banning discussion of metalcore and false metal. The discussions aren't always intelligent but it's good enough. But it was these miniature communities that got me into metal.

Unless a metal forum is heavily moderated to filter out trash, there will be nothing but idiotic conversation. It's a general rule.

[Prospero]

I used to spend a lot of time on Kerrazy 1-2 years ago, they were an interesting community.

[Heydrich]

For those of us a little long in the tooth by Metal standards, most of those Forums suck, simply because they are overwhelmingly populated by children(or perhaps some who have never grown-up)! Even the more "knowledgable" types were more than likely dedicated MTV/Hip-Hop fans three to five years ago...and were probably 13!!

Few if any of these children can appreciate what it was like to be there for the NWOBHM, the birth of Thrash, Death and Black Metal, etc. Yet they "know it all."  

As others have said, simply put most Forums suck...most people suck - so it is inevitable.





 

[Agni]

eg.
http://www.metalstorm.ee

but even metal hall is starting to entertain topics such as hairs, earwax, snot, shit, piss etc.

[jimmy]

(2) Find people with nothing better to do than spend six hours a day on forums to moderate your forums. These people will quite frankly be fucking losers. How can they not be? Anyone else is doing something great. Look for the forty-year old burnout who is on disability and has an alcohol or drug habit, and make him moderator. It will be the best thing going in his life, and he'll be really excited to exercise his authority in trivial ways. What do you care? The only people he's going to beat up on are the minority who say something controversial, or behave oddly.

Six hours is probably an understatement. I have no idea how the hell some people can get five to ten thousand posts on an internet forum within a few years. Maybe it's a bad assumption, but I always assume that the people with the highest post counts on a lot of these forums probably barely ever leave the house or do anything constructive.

[More Celt Than Sassenach]

To be fair many forums are far more active then this, almost guaranteeing a response within moments of its post. Thus allows you to make several short posts per minute. Where here You usually have to wait a short number of hours until a response is given. Although I do often wonder about the people who have over  60'000 posts.

[ShitFaced]

To be fair many forums are far more active then this, almost guaranteeing a response within moments of its post. Thus allows you to make several short posts per minute. Where here You usually have to wait a short number of hours until a response is given. Although I do often wonder about the people who have over  60'000 posts.

You have quite the post count considering this type of forum. I do believe thousands of posts isn't too much considering a few posts here and there for years easily add up. I've never seen anyone with a post count of 60,000, and I'm not sure if I really want to meet anyone with that much free time on their hands.

[we hope you die]

I think the layout of this forum is also very important. Most other forums i see have flashing pictures all over the place, each member has a ranking based on their post count. There is also a much higher percentage of memebers that post regurlarly. On this forum i have noticed that only a small proportion of members actually post on a regular basis, which does make it much less hectic; there is less shit to wade through in order to get to some kind or intelligent discussion.

[More Celt Than Sassenach]

I think the layout of this forum is also very important. Most other forums i see have flashing pictures all over the place, each member has a ranking based on their post count. There is also a much higher percentage of memebers that post regurlarly. On this forum i have noticed that only a small proportion of members actually post on a regular basis, which does make it much less hectic; there is less shit to wade through in order to get to some kind or intelligent discussion.

It also allows you put to put a face on the poster. Because it is easy to recollect ways in which you have interacted with them in the past compared to much larger "impersonal" forums.

[Prospero]

It also allows you put to put a face on the poster. Because it is easy to recollect ways in which you have interacted with them in the past compared to much larger "impersonal" forums.

Yeah, I put a face on bornforbanning.

[antithetikal]

DrGrowl, don't make Bornforbanning cry

[Humanicide]

hahaha!  

born, nice mustache.