I feel quite deflated now
The other forums may be very slow, but footblogs get dozens of posts per day. It's mostly just evolution
It's different than it was; slower, but it's still active. I'd even argue that the
quality of posts these days is better. There's a core group of good people that still post here and there
is new blood coming along. Describing the place as a "graveyard" is a bit much, and I think you could use a dose of optimism
New players certainly aren't going to stick around when everyone is lamenting a decline and calling the place dead.
I also think that Facebook merely gave a voice to people who don't like these forums and never did. A lot of people who post there never posted here, and not a lot of the people that posted here ever post there. There's some crossover, to be sure, but I don't think it's enough to say that its truly the
reason for the decline; it was a factor, certainly, but I'd
not say that it was the sole reason. I think we'd be much in the same position today were Facebook not here.
Active, social players quitting was the bigger factor, but, I think, still just a symptom of the real problems we were experiencing then. Those people quit for a reason. I touched on a couple of those issues above (burnout, flames, spam), but I'd like to put forth another reason: YouTube & the proliferation of cheap, easy digital video cameras.
Pre-YouTube, forum text talk was basically
all we had to communicate with. And it was failing us. Jobs notation, while an amazing innovation for its time, breaks down at describing more advanced moves, and is sufficiently complicated that really only technically-minded folks use it (and use it correctly). Video is the
only medium which can truly capture footbag and communicate it unmistakably. It's the picture that's worth
1,000 words ... x 30 fps.
But recording and publishing used to be exclusively the domain of geeks. In 1998, I gained access to a computer add-on card that captured and converted analogue video into digital files. It cost $2500 and required an expensive, beefy computer system to employ it. Cameras were bulky and were shit resolution/quality. Video editing programs were slow and tedious to use; exporting a 2 minute video took
hours.
And publishing? Setting up a web server and hosting a video was doable for geeks, but given any amount of traction of a video and the bandwidth quickly became cost prohibitive. When I published Evan's 2004 SJFF video (one of the first videos published 100+ MB in size at 220 something), it cost me $50+ to host it over the course of the first week; not a sustainable model.
Over the course of the aught's, digital cameras became affordable and easy to use. Computers got way more powerful and editing the digital clips together became trivial and fast. YouTube gave us an avenue to host our shred videos that had a good UI and could take thousands of hits for free.
These things, I believe, had a dramatic effect on the game and, in particular, on these forums. Slowly bring in Facebook and add in the total burnout people were experiencing from trying to express shred moves through in inadequate and spam-filled medium and you get to much the state we are in today. In many ways the internet created much of the footbag community. It's also helped hinder it in many ways over the last 8 or so years.
I don't know what the answer is. I do know that it's not in complaining the situation and I am even more certain that the game is not dead.
