Quote:
Originally Posted by SameOldStory
But if there are or aren't any changes I don't think that you'll see people deserting.
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Not yet, no, but I think over time, as the ratio of book promotions to things other than book promotions increases, people who are looking for news, writers' chat, bookstore sales, etc., will start to check back less often because when they go to the sections that formerly held those things, they see only books. Since they're not around as much, less discussion will take place, and it will snowball, to the point where there's nothing left but book promotions -- at which point the authors, too, will be getting screwed, because the book buyers will have drifted elsewhere. A bit of organization now, setting up the Book Fair section and splitting Deals into Deals/Devices, Deals/Books, and Deals/Stores, would ensure that MR keeps working for everyone.
Think about it in terms of sports. Imagine a sports forum with only one section. Mostly, it's full of baseball fans, dutifully glorifying and adulating the Red Sox, and everyone is happy. Then football fans start showing up, in increasing numbers, and righteously praising the Patriots. After a while, there's so much football talk going on that the baseball fans don't see a lot of baseball threads, so they don't come around as much. They start fewer baseball topics and don't respond as much to existing ones. Eventually they've all drifted away and there are only football fans there. So the forum has traded its baseball fans for football fans, which is not a good thing if it's supposed to be a general-interest sports forum; it needs them all.
This could have been avoided splitting it into a baseball section and a football section, and then as needed adding a basketball section and so forth. That would allow the forum to keep its Red Sox fans, and add the Patriots fans, Celtics fans, Bruins fans, Revolution fans, and other right-thinking people (Yankees fans would, of course, be IP-banned).
In other words, it's just basic forum management. When one particular category of discussion starts to dominate a section, you split it off into its own section so that it doesn't drown out the minority categories. Everybody wins.