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Derringer posted an update in the group
What do you think of the new hobbylink.tv? 9 years, 8 months ago There is a potential problem that will likely manifest once we have more than 10 groups, which is topic overlap and the inability to find anything. Right now there’s currently about 4 or 5 groups where I could potentially put pictures or links to a web page of some kit I have completed. But which one do I put it in?
The problem is this is isolated to that group. But, it’s also clearly inefficient to re-post the same thing in every applicable group.
I could just make a group called “Finished kits”, but then what incentive is there for someone to post both in that group and also the “Custom kit group” and also the “Dynamic Pose group?”
Activity
What do you think of the new hobbylink.tv?
I think the point you raise about this kind of format is a good one. One of the benefits of a web-forum-like structure is that there’s a certain level of organization dictated by the site’s admins.
This “social” format is still pretty alien to me, but here’s how I see it:
As more groups are created probably some will emerge as more popular than others. Or there might be some that you just come to like more than others. So that might help guide your decision. As long as it’s a public group, people will be able to see what you post even if they’re not members of that group.
Regarding some of these niche groups – there’s nothing wrong with posting in multiple groups (and the incentive, if you want to think of it that way, is that more people will see your work) – as long as what you post is appropriate to each group. So a post in “Dynamic Photo” should be about your effort to work your new model into a cool pose, or a post in “Custom kit” should be about what you did to set the build apart from a straight build. You could use different photos and write-ups for each post to keep it from being too redundant and to make each post uniquely valuable to its respective group.
Someone shouldn’t have to write a bunch of different plugs for what is ultimately the same thing on one web site. Furthermore, if you are a member on multiple groups, wouldn’t you be tired of seeing the same post in 3/4 of your groups.
I kind of want to just create the 50 or so odd groups right now to illustrate how ridiculous this may end up being just to post one kit and have it seen by a large audience: Perfect Grade kits, Master Grade, High Grade Kits; Federation kits; Zeon kits; Universal Century; Good guys; Bad guys; Sieg Zeon! Char’s hot pub, Gundam Wing; Gundam 00; SD Gundam; Metallic Paint jobs, The weathering corner; Celestial Being suits; Heavily modded; etc etc.
My point is that it wouldn’t be the same post in those different groups. Each one would present a different facet of the model… Or if I couldn’t do that in a worthwhile way, then I wouldn’t cross-post so much, maybe just find one group that suits me and post there.
But I see your point. I’m just also looking at this thing and trying to figure out (since I haven’t done a whole lot of hobby-related stuff on Facebook-like sites before) what the upshot could be, here.
Consider this, I guess: On a forum, normally you’d have one place where a particular finished work should be posted (maybe one for the whole forum, or one each for multiple genres, whatever.) The expectation is that everyone on the site who’s interested in that genre will be reading that particular forum on a regular basis, and will see your post.
If a forum is HUGE, this model is harder to sustain. Posts just wouldn’t stay visible for long enough as they’re constantly bumped off the front page either by threads with more activity, or by new threads being posted. So the site would either have to be split up into finer granularity, or people would just have to get used to their posts not necessarily reaching anyone.
The social structure, I figure, lets the site adapt – not really “automatically” but more like “naturally”. If there’s a huge number of groups but not enough activity to sustain them, then people will stop paying attention to some of those groups and focus on other, broader groups where there’s more activity, and the surplus groups will fade to irrelevance. People will naturally gravitate toward groups that are not merely relevant to their interests but also which have some currency, and back out of groups that have too little activity or too low signal-to-noise ratio. If the site winds up with a huge level of overall activity, most users won’t be patient enough to take it ALL in, so everybody chooses their slice, what they want to see and what they want to participate in.
*shrug* That’s the theory anyway. Between this and COM and my recently-increasing activity on model groups on Facebook I guess I’ll see how it works out in practice.
Good points, the idea behind groups when launching the site, was just see what the community does. Yes, we could have hundreds of groups but the most popular and active groups will float to the top. We thought about locking groups down, but that would be against the ethos of a community based site. And there might also be topical groups that are only meant to last a week, and we wanted users the chance to create them.