Wither this forum?
 

I am saddened by the death of the print magazine Macworld. Will this website forum continue?

I don't know. I'm not overflowing with optimism at the moment.

What a shame. I've been a member and daily reader since October 2002 when I retired and had time. I'll really miss a 12-year old habit if hintsforums die with the magazine.

Agreed. I really appreciate personal experience input here and, sadly, it seems that ther are few of us still actively posting and replying.

I'd hate to see this place bite the dust.

Anything we can do? Can the Mods do a broadside message to the Membership?

Worth a try. Perhaps those with a dog in the fight could make a note to apply themselves?

My 2 Baht

I don't really understand why, in this Internet age, forums of this kind are losing active membership. MacScripter is in a similar fix, with a few very active members and a shrinking number of lurkers.

Admittedly, there are several possible factors.

1) Genius bars provide quick and easy fixes to folks who can't or won't make the effort to learn how OS X works and the tools it has available. Further, for the uninitiated, Apple products are just easier to use and less customizable than they were back in Classic Mac OS days. My wife, who knows nothing about how a computer works and cares less, just asks me. Otherwise, she's a dab hand on her iPad for all the things she actually wants to do with it. My youngest daughter asks one of her girls. My eldest asks her boys.

2) Scripting is probably on the decline. Young folks want to write apps for iOS, not diddle around with scripting solutions for conventional apps. Further, there seems to be a decline in scriptable apps these days. The primary reason I never bought Bento is that it is not scriptable.

3) Competition. There is a real plethora of places to seek help and Google is your friend (to quote Cameron Hayne) in this regard. At the same time, ad revenues are shrinking for many sites; Google gets the gold.

What I like best about this forum is that for the most part, it's focused on sharing experience to help fix issues. I don't have to wade through 100 "Android sucks" posts, or "When is the next iPhone coming out?", or "8 or 16 GB of memory?" posts to get to the good stuff. I learn from others, and get a chance sometimes to help. There's opinion here when it matters, and it's handled civilly. Unfortunately, I think the size of the community contributes to that. It's not big enough to mostly suck. So there's the heart of the dilemma. Size or suckage? Hard to find a forum that doesn't obey that connection.

The trick is finding the baseline. You need an active and knowledgeable core of members/staff, and enough traffic to keep coming back. I like the "feel" of these forums. Perhaps it takes me back to an earlier time. ;)

Hits the nail on the head. I wonder too what the average age of us is.

42

But I'm not sure what (number) base that is in - it might be hexadecimal.

Given that I'm 77, there must be some members much younger than 42 then.

In no particular order..

48 I am.

Macworld I do not believe is disbanding its web site, just print. The way they did is crap. But Print is close to dead. For those that want a curated non web monthly, weekly daily there are electronic reader versions of many periodicals. They compete against the same nemesis and joy of web sites with out the huge printing and distribution expense. Less greed and they would be more popular.

Some people will pay for content web or curated reader versions of things. Printed Mags had gotten insanely expensive, people stopped buying them particularly when all the information is available at their fingertips.

Forum: This forum is intimate and valuable. It could be more strongly attended but there is also less noise. If one is seeking a solution on something on another site you might have many 100s of responses and no real solutions. Here there is much more of a solution in the threads.

It's not just that MacWorld and others became ridiculously expensive (particularly here in Canada) but that the content from early days (when I actually subscribed to it briefly) has faded away to glitz and crap. Advertisers noticed. The best of the genre was Byte, imho, and they died years ago.

Paper publications are a dying breed. The NYTimes and a few others have made paywalls work I gather, but for the most part, since the same news is free elsewhere, they're few, far between, and often have special content.

Yes Magazines got thin to cut shipping, printing, and Editorial costs, but prices remained High.

Greed is the real problem Pay wall and E-reader based periodicals would do better if the pricing was dramatically lower then their print counterparts (those that still exist). Of course everyone's idea of value is different but if reading the WSJ, NYtimes were say perhaps $30 a year and Periodicals like Macworld were $12 I think there would be a lot more takers.

I think the problem they have is not recognizing the sea change. They're trying to maintain the old business model which requires that they support a huge printing establishment and on-site reporters working the phones. Same with the book publishing industry. If ebooks were priced lower, only old folks like me would buy print copies. They want to keep the presses rolling.

A long time ago now, I bought an early Kindle. I read two books on it, haven't used it since. Not because I couldn't enjoy the books but because I realized that I really didn't own them, couldn't give them away, couldn't move them to other machines. When Amazon withdrew some books that people had (don't remember the details) that was it for me. I've long been in the habit of passing books to other family members who enjoy the same genres and they, in turn, donate them to a local library when they've read them. Paper's not dead for books, perhaps, but it certainly is for magazines. I don't read any paper mags any more.

I suppose “glitz and crap” for one is gold for another…but I dropped my subscription to MacWorld simply because I decided Snow Leopard was where I wanted to be. I know nothing about iOS, I still use a mouse, I don’t download Apps and, best I can tell, the latest Apple OS is in another world…a world I don’t know.

IMO, MacWorld became (or maybe always was) a showcase for the latest and greatest products rather than being a source of information and feedback about current or “obsolete” systems as well.

All well and good..just not for me. Apparently I wasn’t the only one.

I have a nephew who wouldn't drag himself away from Facebook long enough to consult a forum like this. He has largely immersed himself in an echo chamber of ignorance.

I'm a few weeks shy of 48. There used to be several active members in their early teens, and quite a few around college age. Most of the ones I was familiar with seem to have drifted away over the years.

Publishing is in transition. It's frustrating waiting for the industry to settle into a new model. I have only a couple of print subscriptions; in some cases, I've switched to podcasts for the same information. I have nothing against paywalls in general, but often disagree with how publishers implement them. I had a Kindle 2, which I never quite liked. I have a Paperwhite now, and use it daily. I like being able to try samples and get books anywhere, anytime. I always download a copy of a book to my computer as a backup, just in case, and buy print copies of my favorites. It isn't perfect, but I am reading more, spending less, and my house is less cluttered.

Love that way of putting it. The real crime is that people get medical advice that way. Notice how 90% of the young population now seem to be gluten intolerant?

I stopped reading the Times when they paywalled it. I can get the content elsewhere for the most part and their cost is too high for me to accept.

The Telegraph has a system which allows you 10 articles per month before the paywall kicks in. That's easy to circumvent by deleting a few cookies. ;-)

I wouldn't actually mind if the price was right, but, either way you still get the ads!, they want me to pay to see their ads??

Yes, allergies and intolerances have become another fad and as a result my child's truly life-threatening peanut allergy is sometimes dismissed because we "must be overreacting."

Well, there are ads in print publications, but there needs to be a balance. We have come to expect that paying for digital content removes ads, and the publishers need to find the correct price structure. I'm willing to pay a little more to have ads completely removed, but are enough people willing to do that to replace the lost revenue?

The good news capitalJ is that kids often grow out of those allergies. There's even a treatment that builds up a tolerance.

I don't mind ads unless they interfere with reading. More specifically, I make extensive use of Safari's "Reader" button and often use the "Readability" plug-in if I want to print something for my wife. I also use a number of blockers.

It's odd how ads have changed. I used to read a number of technical mags, things like "Machine Design" and "Byte" (I consulted in computer control of industrial equipment, things like printing presses and their ancillary equipment, instrumentation and data logging ) and always looked forward to the ads as being informative. Nowadays they just seem like hype.

Its that the Paywall price is very high indeed. Advertisements are understandable to the extent that they lower the price of admission. NY Times Paywall also has free article limit. My only problem with advertisements is the ones that "jump off the page" Block your ingress to the article your trying to read. Similar but also the commercials that start prior to Video links. I think the advertisements should be bandwidth aware if the end user seems to have fast connection then OK other wise content should be less taxing.

My solution to that is simple: I click away immediately. I don't watch the ad and don't see the video either.

I do that as much as possible. Some adds do jump into your way and try to hide the close button. Video links always include advertisements and their start that you have to watch anywhere between 10 to 30 seconds off before your desired content.

Have you tried these exercises on the NYTIMES there are some that are pretty bawdy.

Usually I get to the NYT via a tweet link so I don't often get their semi-opaque mask. When I do and care enough, I try googling the topic. If that fails and I still care enough, I switch to an anonymous browser or diddle cookies. Gotta really care to go that far. There's not a ton of stuff a Canadian wants to see in the Times that would justify the very high prices they ask.

Perhaps we can set up a Google group or Yahoo group if this site is taken down. This is where answers are useful rather than hot air.

Good idea Irene, but who has the membership mailing list?

Anyway, should that happen, why not set up a similar, but alternative site? What are the financial implications of doing so?

+1 for a Google group, this forum is the best!

No replies. Wakey wakey all y'all!

Lets hope this stays up, if not, Google group would probably be best. I have had issues with the Yahoo group for GraphicConverter.

Late to the party, again: two points to make (I'm 67).

First, freetards. Count me as one of them. With the internet and Google, you could type in your problem and you could get your answer. Computers, cars, health, whaterver...

Printed media became a luxury, considering the rising cost. And they had to raise the price - everything has gone up in price.

Second, OSX. When I first bought my first Mac (a beige G3) I had to learn 8.5 and how to maintain it. 9 wasn't a whole lot better, but I needed it to stay on the internet. I relied on the mags and internet to keep on top of troubleshooting methods and solutions.

OS 10? Ever since 6.8, I have never had a problem that didn't stem from messing with something that I shouldn't have. I have two friends who I used to maintain Macs for. I went to their place yesterday to update and fettle their computers for the first time in almost a year. They have been running perfectly. A 10.6.8 G5 and a 10.8 .? iMac.

The point being, I suppose, that most of us just keep hanging around out of habit. Younger people might hit on this site from a Google search when they have the odd problem, if they haven't already gone to Apple's site (dreadful as it is).

Older members might remember that there used to be a social side to these tech websites, too, that has ebbed over time.

My 2 cents.

I want to state again (while we exist) our 97 active members versus almost 95K members are still vibrant. In the same way great small teams come together to solve big problems.

That said counting active I would say the biggest decline came when Apple set up their one boards. Couple this with the Myriad of other forums, some I am sure much better attended.

That is the real question what is kept/keeping traffic from coming here as much. For one, forum button on Macworld, broken, only hints button works and both burried at bottom of website where No one will see, as opposed to Top banner.

Do a google search on "Mac help" and see what you get.

No other site compares to this one.

I still miss the Info-Mac Digest arriving in my mailbox :(

Remember, the name of this place is MacOSXHints Forums. Notice the MacOSXHints part. Have you noticed the decline in quality of the front page that drives traffic to this area? Without a strong and thriving hints front page, the forums will slowly die.

Also, I think it's telling that the majority of the folks here are over 40, including myself. Traditional discussion forums are no longer in vogue. Everyone has migrated to social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and as for highly technical discussions, I see a lot more of that on mailing lists. Forums are kind of dead. Nothing specific to this place, just in general, although I would pont back to the issue of having a vibrant front page to drive traffic to your forums. The MacRumors forums are still thriving, because the news on the MacRumors front page keeps people engaged. The old-school forum can't survive on it's own.

There's always MacRumors forums.

I'd rather see a migration to a sub-Reddit (r/mosxh?) than have to spend time at the MacRumors forums.

Signal to noise on MacRumors is pretty bad. In many ways MacRumors is a perfect example of the issue with size versus quality. There's a lot of great content there, and some great contributors and staff, but the snark and noise gets in the way. In the last year or so the tone of the discussion in a lot of topics has taken a trip south. Things that used to be frowned upon have become commonplace. It has affected the culture of their forums negatively, IMO.

Karstorff makes a really good point -- this community, while apparently small, is serious and tends to stay on topic and civilized.

Snark, schmark. It's the interface that bugs me. But it looks that's where we're headed.