[denny]

Glad you said that!

I thought the HBD would perk up, but it did not.

Yeah, I think the people who were/are interested in those formats aren't interested enough to actually post!

[hubie]

Glad you said that!

I thought the HBD would perk up, but it did not.

Yeah, I think the people who were/are interested in those formats aren't interested enough to actually post!

When you make a big change like that, you pick up new people, but at some point you drive others away.  I would guess that a good number of people on Tech Talk moved over to the forum and found they liked it (or at least, didn't hate it), while another group said "the hell with this" and went elsewhere.  It's easy to throw around the Luddite label or talk of the march of progress, but sometimes one person's shiny new thing is another person's annoyance. 

Perhaps sometime in the not-so-distant-future there will be cries of how we need to retire the AHA Forum and move everything to Facebook because everybody uses Facebook now, it has all these new features the Forum doesn't, and that other brewing forum moved to Facebook and we have to too if we want to keep up, etc., etc.  When that happens, maybe you pick up new people, and you'll probably lose other people for good.  (Then the Next Big Thing after Facebook comes along (it will undoubtedly have to do with Big Data and clouds and new paradigms and stuff)  and then we all have to move with it....)

[jeffy]

Glad you said that!

I thought the HBD would perk up, but it did not.

Yeah, I think the people who were/are interested in those formats aren't interested enough to actually post!

When you make a big change like that, you pick up new people, but at some point you drive others away.  I would guess that a good number of people on Tech Talk moved over to the forum and found they liked it (or at least, didn't hate it), while another group said "the hell with this" and went elsewhere.  It's easy to throw around the Luddite label or talk of the march of progress, but sometimes one person's shiny new thing is another person's annoyance. 

Perhaps sometime in the not-so-distant-future there will be cries of how we need to retire the AHA Forum and move everything to Facebook because everybody uses Facebook now, it has all these new features the Forum doesn't, and that other brewing forum moved to Facebook and we have to too if we want to keep up, etc., etc.  When that happens, maybe you pick up new people, and you'll probably lose other people for good.  (Then the Next Big Thing after Facebook comes along (it will undoubtedly have to do with Big Data and clouds and new paradigms and stuff)  and then we all have to move with it....)

Nice observations, Hubie.
I think that a majority of the posters on HBD were very experienced and knowledgable folks and the reason you don't see much activity there is that they have nothing to reply/comment on.  The new folks who would be the ones asking questions have not found that site or are using other venues.
A lot of the older, experienced brewers who don't want to try to keep up with constant posts as on this or other forums are still there, waiting, at HBD.org.

[Joe Sr.]

What is this Facebook of which you speak?

[klickitat jim]

Eventually we will all know everything that everyone is thinking and then our eyes, mouths and brains will be obsolete.

And

Facebook schmacebook. Yuk
Same with the twiddling thing

[lornemagill]

maybe all of this already exists and I don't know how to access it.  I would like to create my own forum follow page.  for example there are post I would like to continuously follow for new posts and would like to see comments on some posts I have made/created.  I know some of this is already available just not instantly accessible when I log in.

[Jimmy K]

When you make a big change like that, you pick up new people, but at some point you drive others away.  I would guess that a good number of people on Tech Talk moved over to the forum and found they liked it (or at least, didn't hate it), while another group said "the hell with this" and went elsewhere.

And TechTalk was shut down for months, which killed the momentum. Now it's back but it has fewer members I'm sure and AHA doesn't exactly promote it. Might have survived if there was a more seamless transition (gratuitous buzzword).

[denny]

maybe all of this already exists and I don't know how to access it.  I would like to create my own forum follow page.  for example there are post I would like to continuously follow for new posts and would like to see comments on some posts I have made/created.  I know some of this is already available just not instantly accessible when I log in.

That's a good point and AFAIK there's no way to do it now.  Maybe in a future software upgrade.  I'll put it on the wish list.