Board 8 > A topic-sequel to GameFAQs losing people over the years.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Probably the contests, honestly. They were the only reason people talked about GameFAQs at all after 2008. Draven and Undertale were free marketing...to an extent.

Archiving topics did the exact opposite of retaining people or growing the audience

Karma points absolutely had me remembering to login and check the boards every day...

Leonhart4 posted...

Archiving topics did the exact opposite of retaining people or growing the audience

Fair, and I liked the point from the other topic...but it was done for a reason at the time and continues today, so I thought I'd mention it.

For me, GameFAQs was always about the sense of community

There really needs to be some kind of new hub for the gaming community in general. Stuff like Reddit is endless scrolling hell, and I just dont get a sense of community from there. You could post something, and it'd just disappear into an endless sea of comments that nobody cares about. There's no individualism. Discord is fine, but again anything you post disappears into a sea, and who has the time to scroll up and read a chat every day.

Maybe I'm just old, but there was something special about forums. There were always niche little communities sprouting up everywhere in the old days, and some of my best friends are ones I met on the internet. Nowadays it really feels like that sense of community is gone. Gen Z is more plugged in than any other in history, and they're also considered to be the loneliest. Corporations have homogenized the internet into scrolly social media crap for people to passively consume content, rather than be an active participant in a community.

Whoever figures this out is gonna make bank. Doubt it'll be GameFAQs lol.

That's a good point. You go to Reddit for information...and memes. You go to a message board for community; even if you're mostly a lurker, there's still comfort in seeing the same names pop up and getting a general sense of a person.

Which, if I think about it, is kind of funny. Today's internet culture feels more para-social than ever before, with personality based video game coverage, not to mention everyone following "content creators" and "influencers" on their platform of choice. And yet forums have mostly died off!

Part of it too is that most of us here are old farts in a certain sense, likely being in our 30s and early 40s. We grew up with message boards, so of course that's what we like! I personally browse Reddit but otherwise don't really do any other social media. Nothing I hear about Discord makes me want to use it.

Maybe we'll see a bit of a resurgence in smaller-ish community sites like GFAQs (even if not gfaqs itself) with the larger hubs seeming hell bent on going Digg v4.

I wouldn't still be visiting GameFAQs if not for Board 8--with or without contests--so I voted the option that included message boards.

UltimaterializerX posted...

How are the contests not a poll option?

Third from the bottom

HaRRicH posted...

Fair, and I liked the point from the other topic...but it was done for a reason at the time and continues today, so I thought I'd mention it.

It was done because people complained about new users coming in to make the same topics over and over again

With the unintended consequence of killing all conversation and sense of community because it became unnecessary

I had a few game boards I used to frequent back in the day, but I haven't visited them in years now

Like 99% of the time when I google a video game question I get some archived gamefaqs topic as one of the first hits, so I think it's a double edged sword. Brings people to the site but also curtails a lot of forum activity.

Yeah, you find your answer and then you leave. Even if you click on the topic list, once you see there's only one or two active topics, what are you hanging around for?

The text-based FAQs lose tons of traffic. It's way easier to google a part you're stuck at and get an article about it on IGN or something.

Leonhart4 posted...

Yeah, you find your answer and then you leave. Even if you click on the topic list, once you see there's only one or two active topics, what are you hanging around for?

I mean I don't think people brought in that way really join the community per se, but I think it's plausible it makes them more likely to turn to gamefaqs first for questions about games, i.e. driving site traffic. Keep in mind that for 99% of game boards, the alternative to archives is not "thriving community" it's "zero topics whatsoever"

Right, most game boards have zero traffic, but they're also not the games that most people would be coming here looking for in the first place.

But if someone came here looking for an answer and liked what they found, then maybe they'd be willing to make a topic of their own in the future or something like that.

I went with the top option, because I think the site's actually done an admirable job of retaining it's 2008ish era userbase, all things considered. While new features were added it was always a slow rollout, not massive changes to frustrate entrenched users and drive them away.

And I'd argue the site basically looking like it did in 2004 has been a win as well- its always loaded quickly and been something you could pull up at work to do some light browsing without having to worry about pop ups and annoying flashing ads and users directly linking questionable images.