FB groups often aren't great in my experience though I've not tried anything on retro computing.

Some have content you don't get elsewhere that you don't want to miss but others too often have posts you can do without. To some extent is might be the subject matter, but it often FB in general seems unstructured and uncontrolled with too many folk chewing the fat and conversations that lead nowhere, or turn into irrelevant chitchat between pals.

I believe they serve a completely different need. As you said it's a feed so it's good enough for quickly uploading a monkey island photo from your mobile, add some #retro #childhood tags, get your likes and hearts back, the occasional "this was my first game" "monkey island 2 was better" and finally get lost into oblivion.
You cannot search easily so knowledge is lost, and because of that nobody will put a lot of effort writing something good which leads to a never ending low-quality posts cycle. They don't work for me but I get why people use them.

It's not easy to get reasonable answers to a technical question.

There's a next to useless search function.

It suffers from the "How did I do? look what I found at the thrift store today ! ! !" Reddit syndrome.

I’ve been told for a while that forums are obsolete and unnecessary, Discord is the future of everything
And Discord is far worse and there is no knowledge building

Can't say since the closest I've ever come to facebook is if I click on a link to it from a news article and then regret it, need to stop being lazy and setup blocks for it.

This is somewhat related: https://www.vg247.com/gearbox-is-closing-its- … ving-to-discord
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2022-0 … luable-resource

Personally I prefer things to be a niche, any time something has a ton of people it almost always goes downhill.

It would be nice if forum software could automagically translate languages this would likely have to be a forum addon though. Obviously would be more cpu cycles required by the server.
Problem with photos is storage and then if linked offsite then eventually those links break and people fail to optimize their file sizes nowadays. No one needs a 4k raw of your server 🤣. I like restrictions since it makes people think but obviously it is an extra hoop they have to jump through.

As far as not going anywhere else this dates back to AOL. People like their cozy boxes, it's scary out there on the World Wide Web.

vetz wrote on 2022-07-21, 11:34:

I'm a lurker in some of the large retro Facebook groups focusing on PC hardware/MS-DOS and Win 9x gaming. My impressions are as […]
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I'm a lurker in some of the large retro Facebook groups focusing on PC hardware/MS-DOS and Win 9x gaming. My impressions are as follows:

- It is funny the double standards, how many users are afraid of their personal information on forums such as VOGONS, but posting with their full name + link to FB profile is of no worry.
- Mixture of languages, Spanish, German, French, you name it.
- The general poor quality of replies to technical questions.
- No searchability, everything is in the moment, same questions get asked again and again.

On the positive, many users are very good with posting pictures, so you instantly get to see much hardware and screenshots from games. That is perhaps the only thing that I think forums in general could improve on, make it more accessible to attach photos.

I see that for local groups, maybe FB has some value as many of them will be too small for a forum. Still, the same issues with searchability and everything being "feed based" makes it a horrible user-experience. The main issue here is critical user mass, and trying to move it anywhere else. There are so many stubborn people who refuse to use any other thing than FB (their main argument being, they don't wanna bother checking other webpages), that many people who'd be willing to move just give up and live with horrible user experience just to be part of the community.

So what is your experience/impression of the FB groups?

- Yes, some people can easily be linked to their other personalities/nicknames they use elsewhere on the internet.
- The translate function that facebook has does make the language barrier a little bit less annoying. does rely on people writing correct words ofcourse.
- Yes, a lot of people just want the 'participation trophy'.
- It is searchable, not easily though, and the repeating questions are the same for every fora. Plenty of repeating questions here on vogons, or threads going off topic, adding noise to the signal, writing a whole discourse while asking a question to clarify would've been better... the nature of the beast.

The photos are nice, though the whole facebook lock in has always given me the creeps.

Like you said, everything is in the moment.

subhuman@xgtx wrote on 2022-07-21, 21:28:

It's not easy to get reasonable answers to a technical question.

There's a next to useless search function.

It suffers from the "How did I do? look what I found at the thrift store today ! ! !" Reddit syndrome.

Some threads on vogons have that same syndrome.
Doing a search here can also lead one on a wild goose chase. You start in one thread, hoping to find an answer only to see the solution was something else, while the thread just keeps on going off on several other topics and eventually becomes so big that it becomes impossible for a cat to find her kittens.
At least getting sensible answers to technical questions is easier here, though often it feels like playing helpdesk, and the first question starts to become, 'have you tried turning it off & on again?' 😂

DosFreak wrote on 2022-07-22, 00:23:

Problem with photos is storage and then if linked offsite then eventually those links break and people fail to optimize their file sizes nowadays. No one needs a 4k raw of your server 🤣. I like restrictions since it makes people think but obviously it is an extra hoop they have to jump through.

As far as not going anywhere else this dates back to AOL. People like their cozy boxes, it's scary out there on the World Wide Web.

Come on, everyone needs the full 48Megapixel image of their server setup ! 🤣
and for mainboards and expansion cards, we need lots of closeups in the fullest detail possible.
We need to be able to read the laser etched QR code and human readable ID off of even the tiniest of chips! 🤣
but yeah, storage and bandwidth is definitely a problem for the amount of photos posted.

and for the cozy boxes... I'm tired of making another account on another forum just to follow or contribute to a post there. And no, I'm not going to use the sign-in/up with facebook/google/... option.

DosFreak wrote on 2022-07-22, 00:23:

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2022-0 … luable-resource

interesting article

social media is mainstream and 'now', it just isn't persistent nor is it suited to longer form conversation like forums are

it has a role for news, humor, picture sharing and very quick q&a but for longer discussion, especially if you want to search it years later, its not good

also - by using social media, you are basically giving up any control over the content and the way it is being presented

No matter what your settings, facebook does what it likes. So you are absolutely guaranteed to be missing stuff that's in your "wheelhouse" if you are subscribed to more than one popular group. Even then you probably only get half a dozen "real" posts in your feed, with about 30 spam and trash, noise to signal is terrible.

I have considered making another account for each hobby interest area just to try to tame things, but you still get the facebook stupidity, for instance, I have everything set to latest, but it seems it only turns down "most popular" by 10% and I'll get week old tornado warnings (weather page) because of "high engagement" on the post. Lots of wasted time and page loads.

For all that it's "about the now" and absolutely useless for continuous development of a topic over more than a week or two, and hard to find stuff, it is also damn useless at being "up to the minute" some posts seem to take 24 hours plus to get indexed, then only pop up when they are irrelevant. Like bud posts a flash sale today only, facebook tells you about it tomorrow.

I don't know what it is at this point, it's failing to provide a good experience in dozens of areas, really I am on there for family communications, and it's frigging horrible, but I guess it's "lowest common denominator" in all regards for basic connectivity between a few people.

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-07-25, 21:08:

No matter what your settings, facebook does what it likes. So you are absolutely guaranteed to be missing stuff that's in your "wheelhouse" if you are subscribed to more than one popular group. Even then you probably only get half a dozen "real" posts in your feed, with about 30 spam and trash, noise to signal is terrible.

I signed up to fbook years ago because one of my favorite forums went there, set up for just that forum then left 3 years and never looked at the account. Then friends said I had to join for some reason and now they get to see everytime I respond to BS.

When I finally Came back my feed was full of Asian / phillipino dancing girl tic toc repost videos and political BS that was exactly the opposite of anything I would normally interact with. (Don’t care what Russians think about politics)
Recommended for me apparently ( even though I never was on fbook besides one forum which lasted a week but it died there)

Hitting the block/hide function in fbook seems to work more effectively than liking content, hit hide and you get 10 more of whatever it was in your feed.

There were things that weren’t bad or violated fbook terms but I had absolutely no interest in, took close to a year of hiding that content before one source disappeared, but similar stuff is still there and I just ignore it.

The company that rhymes with Dalt Wisney, they must pay facebook a lot, pause scroll on any of their characters, whether it was a toy that just happened to be in the sales group, or adapted for a meme and bam, all over you like herpes. WD groups, posts Dplus ads, it will eat over 50% of your feed. Takes 2 weeks solid of blocking to tame it back down again... then some jerk sneaks a MM phone or watch in the sales group and it's poxing up your feed again.

Edit: Toyota is another brand that's really frigging "sticky" on facebook. Was looking at tires, saw a listing for "Tires" and a fuzzy pic, so wasn't until I opened it and saw the text of the ad that they were for a Toyota Echo.. closed it... too late... I had looked at Toyota parts and my doom was 2 weeks of Toyota parts... never mind that I never searched for Toyota. They've either got the stupidest AI in the world or brands feed them beaucoup bucks to sieze on any mention of them.

"What do you think of retro facebook groups?" shares a great deal of answers with the more generic question "What do you think of Facebook?". And a lot of those answers boil down to "well, it's quite shit actually, but everyone is there, so .....".

To be more technical about it. The entire platform is based around the concept of popularity. That then defines the nature and scope of it's content. The notion of 'rote surrender to popularity' is anathema to me, so the entire FB system just doesn't and never has worked for me, and that extends to any kind of Group there.