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« on: September 08, 2015, 04:48:38 PM »
My experience is that the shift to Facebook has really negatively impacted airsoft forums in general. FB offers significantly more real time content than forums ever could. For example, a normal forum might get, at best, 10-25 new posts a day. If you're part of multiple FB groups then you're experiencing 25-100+ posts a day easily. A lot of the content is buy/sell/trade related and I think this attracts a lot of people. Unfortunately, B/S/T isn't really a solid basis for creating and maintaining a community. People in B/S/T groups aren't posting new information as much as they're trying to flog their old junk... which, of course, is the purpose of B/S/T groups. And because people can create groups for anything on FB, you get very specific sub-communities developing (MARSOC impressions, CAG impressions, teching, Polarstar, Tippmann, etc). So unlike say ASF or Arnie's where there's a lot of very general AND very specific information, you get these communities of specialists. So what used to be contained under a big tent via forums is now scattered all over the place in these specialty groups.
That's not to say that I don't enjoy the specialized nature of these groups, it's just that there's not really a sense of community there because I don't see that one guy who is really knowledgeable about MARSOC stuff also posting about tech stuff like I would on a traditional forum.
I also think that forums generally held people to a higher level of discourse than social media. I tend to see a lot of random memes and other juvenile posting on FB simply because it's judged to be sort of informal. People just whip out their phones and tap some chat speak rather than needing to compose their thoughts and ideas. I guess I'm just an old man like that.
One of the themes that I've noticed over the last few years on various forums is the fracturing of the airsoft community. On the one hand, I actually feel more in the fold as far as MiA because I know a lot of the guys who post here on social media. So they're not just some random internet handle, but a real person with a face and a name. This has definitely helped when going out to games by myself. That said, I also think that forums used to comprise a sort of common ground for people to circulate through and interact and I think that's being lost as more and more people come to rely on FB.