The regressive nature of the sites community

The site's community has always been a major drawcard of activity. The site had a sort of cycle, where users would come for the market, and then stay for the community. Obviously there were those who did their business and left, and those who got banned for various reasons. But there was never a problem because the influx of new users would always offset the loss of older users while the existing regulars would usually be retained. This created many characters that gave this site a distinctive feel which provided an incentive for users to visit the site. When I first joined this site in late 2006 it was a hugely popular site. There was discussion everywhere. You got replies on your thread within minutes, the discussions were active, and there was always new things to discuss. In my opinion, the site was constantly improving during the years between 2007 to 2011. I remember where you would make a thread, go to sleep, wake up 12 hours later with a dozen replies and it would still be halfway down page 2.

The following is only my opinion, based on no facts but only observations and thoughts based on my experience as a member of this site.

The site has lost it's feel. The communal nature of this site is dying, the site is becoming blander by the day, there isn't new users replacing the old ones. In short the site is boring. The spam forum is a ghost town. The discussion forums are dead. The site is imploding on itself. Posters are turning in the lurkers, lurkers are turning into visitors, and visitors are no longer visiting. This site cannot survive on the black market alone. Something needs to be done to re-invigorate the site.

The reasons for the decline of this site is in my opinion are based on a multitude of factors which have resulted in a decline in the site's activity.

1. The decline in popularity of Runescape. Runescape has always been the primary userbase for this site and the primary reason for people joining this site. It's loss of popularity has resulted in less users joining for the communal discussions as in previous years.
2. The loss of popular figures. For years, the users of this site had someone to point at and say "He's the bad guy!". Whether you like him or hate him, Finn provided drama for this site and since he's been gone the vacuum he left behind has been filled by people without the character necessary to lead this site forward.
3. Stability in the staff team. There used to be a wolf mentality when it came to being staff on this site. People wanted to become staff, and the staff knew that. So the users of this site had to prove that they were more worthy than the next guy. That is no longer the case. The staff just seem to stay the way they are until someone decides he wants to leave in which case he gets replaced by the next guy.
4. Users being banned for small reasons. In the past we've had the luxury of being allowed to ban whoever we want whenever we wanted. However in times where the site is already dying, banning notable regulars when they pose no significant threat to the users of the site is not such a good idea. I am not for a second suggesting allowing scammers to roam free, but we should be trying to retain as many reasonable members as possible.
5. The loss of User Education. I have always been proud of my past as a Head User Educator. User Education provided a platform where people could apply to have a position on the site and receive a rank. Often it was the breeding ground for future moderator. It gave users an incentive to be active whilst giving them a way to work towards a position on this site. Community Development or whatever it's called lies in the shadows of what was once a successful community program. It's removal still baffles me.
6. The average age of the users has increased. Users who joined in the years of 2007-2011 are likely in there late teens or early 20s. They no longer have the time to visit this site like they used to.
7. The regressive nature of the sites staff. The site's staff don't seem to care about the sites community. It's been indoctrinated into them that a stable site is a good site, when that's simply not the case. In order for this site to progress the staff have to lead the way.
8. The purging of "drama threads". Anytime anything interesting gets discussed in regards to the site, it's always locked or deleted. The staff cannot seem to come to terms with the facts that users like drama. Instead of seeing the drama as an increase in the site's interest, they see it as a burden and the discussion stops. Any discussion is a good discussion, and the staff here don't realise that.

Now I don't want to make any suggestions on how to run this site. This site's is Richards, and it's his to kill if he wants to. However someone like me, who's been a loyal member of this site for over eight years, can admit that this site has been a part of my life that I enjoy. Where I can be less mature and more crazy than I can in the real world. This site still has certain characteristics which would make it appeal to new users, it's just that the site is not progressing in the ways that it should. I could suggest a dozen innovations that this site could try, but some are too radical to post and I don't want to be seen in that light.


I've made this thread to bring attention to the elephant in the room. For anyone who honestly cares about this site, and I truly do, something needs to be done on an administrative as well as operation level of this site. It doesn't have to be as dead as it is now. We can still return the site to it's glory days, however I'm afraid if we wait much longer the site's community could well and truly die. This is not an attack on anybody. This is an appeal to the people who run this site to start working towards repairing the community this site once had.

Thank you for reading.

 

Originally Posted by Farcast View Post
Magic Faggot posted, the thread sucks now.




I agree with op on some items. Thanks for showing your opinion on the site. I dont think runescape is dying tho.

 

Does Sythe advertise? I feel like a good way to increase visitors/users would be having advertisements on some popular RS related sites. I understand it can be costly but maybe they can hold some type of a fund-raising event or something idk. People aren't going to magically find Sythe unless they're looking for RS gold or animal porn right now. There needs to be a way to attract new users.

Furthermore, I feel like there is just a lack of things to do. Lack of threads to post on, lack of response time so you're just sitting around waiting on a response, lack of interesting community events. Community events don't necessarily have to be by the CDT, just anybody really to get the community involved.

Mostly everything you said is spot on, looking forward to hearing some admin responses.

 

"Sythe - The craigslist of virtual Runescape goods"

The market of runescape is doing more harm than good to this site. It's the same people scamming under different aliases that gives this site a bad name. I can go to thread introductions, and without a doubt in my mind say that everyone who posted a thread on the last 2-5 pages that mentioned runescape in their main post are banned, twc'd, or plan on scamming in the future.

The community is dying out because unique members aren't sticking around on a day to day basis. I don't blame them when the structure of the site is lopsided, and favorable to the ones in charge.

Not many people still post with the sole intention of interaction with different people, or to learn. Even before the users who did so, did it primarily for staff. Once that goal is achieved, their activity dies down. All their posts become dispute related. One way to combat this is to remove post count from dispute related forums. Unfortunately this won't happen.

Default donor ranks are still runescape related and archaic.

The donor lounge is repulsive.

Users are afraid to speak their mind.

The list goes on.. Runescape will dwindle in the years to come. You won't see immediate action to combat the possibility because it's still going strong somewhat. The rules of various forums are the real problem.

 

I myself have moved more to reddit because I feel the discussion is a lot more free there and there are interesting discussions and in a lot of subreddits you can get a lengthy discussion going with no effort. Also the moderator community is hardly seen, but they're there, in moderator mode, when they need to be and respected for that fact. It also helps that other people get to upvote and downvote. I am on my phone, add more soon.

 

Agreed.

Personally, I think, donor ranks should be based upon 3-4 different games/known concepts.

I.e,

1. Runescape type (as we have now).
2. League of Legends type.
3. WoW

etc.

Let the user chose which to apply, based on their own preference.

 

All these points have been made numerous times before. Everything here is accepted by a number of prominent users and has been for years.

 

Have pride in being the minority, brotha!

 

That doesn't mean nothing can/will be done.

 

Very well-educated and thoughtful post. I'd like to format my reply in a numerical response to your points.

1. This is unarguably a factor. I've stated many times that, in my personal opinion, it's best we adapt and advertise for new and popular games (Destiny is a money-RACKET for the teenaged heavy gamer that we all used to be, and they're DYING to find the best farm/gear/teams!) as well as moving on to become a sort of "gaming community." Times are changing, and eSports are growing larger daily, with no signs of letting up. Gamers, especially the mature-type that we love having around Sythe, are looking for others to play with and where there is a gap in community, Sythe should be there to fill it.
2. You're right, there isn't much to elaborate here, but I'd like to explain a bit further while addressing the last point.
3. Now, what I'm about to say isn't a "Cry for attention/staff beg," i'd like to explain my personal situation in order to relate to the matter at hand. The staff team rotates in the same pool of ex-staff and occasionally friends of staff join the party as someone fully retires from Sythe. To join with point 2, I believe that we hold too much of a stigma around our opinions of users. Moderators who performed very well years ago, or posted and were very helpful for a month before being promoted can have character changes. There are plenty of examples of people getting comfortable in their positions and no longer showing effort to improve. This should be considered a business, where if staff are not looking to better the site and themselves, they are removed. It's not competitive, and it should be. I've been aspiring for staff since I joined this website. I know the rules in/out, have been highly-reviewed staff on other popular sites and have never been involved in any sort of scamming-nonsense. Why am I not staff? In the past (I joined sythe when I was 15-16) i was a completely different person. Trolling and highly influenced by the moronic spam forum, my posts were unintelligent and I cringe looking back at most of them. I've changed, quite a bit. The military, live experienced and simply time giving maturity have shown that. We should not hold users to the past. This goes both ways. There are many users who were at one time great staff, but then were very inactive and sat around barely making modlogs monthly with zero community interaction. This needs to change. tl;dr - make staff competitive, and remove the trivial "Never promote this user" list. (Yes, I know it's rumored, but I've heard it from so many sources it's assumed factual)
4. I cannot agree enough with this. It's my opinion that users should be given more slack for sythe-drama and less for any sort of scams,hacking or rip off types of activities. I have examples, but there's no need to post it. This forum is currently centered around gaming and ToS-violating game currency exchange. So don't ban users for simple and irrelevant things. I'll just refer to them all as the common "**********."
5. Yes, what? WHY? I was pretty lost to see this section removed. UE was a great stepping-stone to evaluate future staff and brought traffic to the site. I started my time before becoming a moderator on T-bot as "support staff," where I started a live-chat service to help users with issues on the client as well as creates tons of guides, the site rules, most of the sections and stickies and other things. Why? Helping people is enjoyable to me. These are the kids of opportunities we should be giving users to "compete" with staff, as I stated earlier. The old "Well, we have a ____ section mod and he does it fine" is NOT acceptable. There's an aspiring, mature member who is more active and knowledgeable about the section and its active users? Time for a switch!
6. Once again, we need to reach out to the younger audience by adapting to the games currently released for them. Destiny, etc.
7. I've addressed all relevant points earlier in my post, no need for redundancy.
8. It doesn't matter what the users are talking about, they're talking. If everyone is accusing a staff member of an action, let them post. Allow them (in a single thread and while in adherence to the site rules) post their opinions, relevant proof and similar experiences to better judge the situation. Drama brings attention. On web forums, this means traffic and more users. Good!

Loved the post, hope I didn't type a giant wall of text that's longer than the OP which slips by. Glad to see people still care about Sythe, even after so many of us have come and gone.

 

You are an idiot. If you haven't realised by now this site is going stagnant you've either:

a) Not been here for quite some time.

b) A fucking moron.

 

Certainly. I just wanted to make it known that the ideas you have are not fringe or something that they can just dismiss.

 

The do not promote list is a joke. It does not exist, unless the admins have a list. However, if anyone does not want you to be staff that is generally enough to make it not happen.

 

The staff and admins aren't willing to let this be a free forum where open discussions take place and instead want it to be heavily monitored, in turn decreasing activity. I don't know if this is because of mod scores or picking staff that are too controlling but I think that's the main reason activity has always been limited. So either change the rules of moderating or pick new moderators, or both. You shouldn't have to worry about your thread or any thread being locked in the middle of a discussion.

 

From my PM inbox.

Also, that's an issue. One staff not liking a user? Ridiculous. Staff didn't like how quickly I was promoted on t-bot, that didn't stop me from getting global faster than anyone had ever made sectional, and the users loved me. There will always be personality disputes among a large group of people, especially when they share similar interests.

So, to follow up on this, (from your experience as a mod) let's say there's a global who you have openly gone against their decisions in the past. Let's say this (metaphorical) global is agreed to be completely horrible for staff by over 90% of veteran Sythe users but, for some strange reason, is still staff. Their say will determine a users' ability to become a sectional?

 

Yeah I think there are other reasons other than "I don't like him" why someone would be on that list.

I could list all the reasons I may be on there but I'd crash the servers with my long post.

 

Even in your case, past actions shouldn't be the only deciding factor on promotions. Sure, you've probably upset some users in the past. That shouldn't determine your effectiveness on a current or future position on the team.

 

Read the OP, you have some valid points but nothing that hasn't been discussed.

I agree with blade bro4 as well, the idea of a DNS list is silly. Promotions should be based on who is currently suitable for the position, not taking into account who pissed off a mod 3 years ago.

 

Lol, interesting that whoever that was (I have a hunch), confirmed it was a real thing. Would have thought if anything I'd be on it by now but eh. Will post a detailed response in a few days.

 

You have some good points but I think that the least effective thing the admins could do would be to find a magic way to "turn the site around" and get back to a pattern of growth.

All things need to come to an end, and Sythe is one of them. We can keep delaying the inevitable as long as we want, but it won't really help. Sythe is a brand, and it's deeply entrenched in Runescape and I don't think there's any way around that.

I have two suggestions:
First of all, I do expect the admins to stick with Sythe to the end even if it were totally abandoned. History is valuable.

Second, use your experience with Sythe to start off something new. Something that isn't Sythe. Build more communities and more black markets and make them independent and mostly self contained, focused on different games and demographics. I think it's time to move on and start fresh. Interoperability is OK, but not one large and smeared community spanning ten sites.