Minecraft Forums

I swear, it's starting to **** me off when people just say:
"umg use twitter lolololololl stop posting on forums we dont care lolloollolool just go on twitter"
Yeah?
Well some people don't want to use Twitter.
Some of us don't have accounts on twitter, and don't want to make one / can't make one.
So please. Stop saying "use twitter.com"

It's best to just ignore them. They tend to be newer to the internet and don't understand what forums are for. They weren't around back in the day before stupid sites like facebook and twitter cropped up, where discussion forums were the place you went for that sort of thing. A decade ago there weren't really even blogs, so forums were where people came to discuss and talk about things they enjoyed.

Now it seems people have this idea that these forums are only for discussing new patch contents in fifty identical threads, or showing off grand creations.

Quote from Candanz »

use twitter.com

Really?

I agree.

Here's the deal.

Forums are places for group discussion. The first page of a forum makes up the topics that get 90% of the attention. If everyone made a different thread for every time they did anything in Minecraft, it'd be impossible to find great threads unless you were lucky enough to load the page when they were relatively new. Already the only way I can keep up with threads on this forum is via browser bookmarks.

Because of this, when you make a post, it's best to make it something that people are going to want to add to. There's really not much to say about "check out this spawn point" other than "Nice!" or "Meh."; it doesn't promote good discussion and thus it's a spammy topic. A topic like, "Here's a video of a creeper exploding 10 squares away from me... has something changed?" is an example of a not-spammy topic. Tons of people are going to be interested, and many people will try and reproduce it. (Along with accusations of hacks, mods, etc.)

Not all of us hit the forums constantly. I visit at most once or twice a day, sometimes twice in an hour if I'm really bored. Every time I log in, more than half the new threads are spammy. It's bad for the forum and it hurts those who put work into good threads. Every spammy thread is a good thread that's pushed to page 2 or further. I don't bother going to page 2 because I don't feel like digging through the even higher concentration of spam there to dig out the good ones. Part of the reason I visit here so infrequently is because finding good threads is like trying to pick out usable bits of food from vomit. I wonder how many other decent users don't participate because of the high degree of spam?

There's a good reason why people suggest Twitter for spammy topics: Twitter is opt-in. On the forums, people have to see your post whether they want to or not and a new post will always push other topics off of the first page. On Twitter, someone has to explicitly say "I want to see your responses." before they get them. This is a big deal; if you're known for "OMG FLOATING ISLAND" then people who are annoyed by it don't have to see it while people that like to see every possible permutation of the map generator can get your message.

The forums do attempt to solve this problem via sticky threads for video/pictures that don't warrant much discussion. It's only a bad solution because people don't use it; everyone wants to be a forum superstar and have a thread with thousands of views. You don't get that from one screenshot and a sentence of text.

It doesn't even have to be Twitter. There's plenty of other services that let you publish information to interested parties: Tumblr, MySpace, Facebook, identi.ca, various blogging services, and so on. If you want to make tiny comments that only warrant a virtual pat on the back, do it via a medium where people can opt out. "You can ignore me" isn't a solution on the forums because 1) it doesn't hide your threads from the index and 2) you might one day say something intelligent that I'll miss. On the other services, it's great because if you say something smart odds are someone else will rebroadcast it and I'll find it via group recognition, and I can choose to see messages from people that mostly say things I'm interested in.

Though I don't get much minecraft through Twitter; it's mostly .NET and ruby developers that I follow.

I understand spammy topics like so, but I mean you're talking about a project you took months to make, and some pisser tells you to go use twitter.
I don't even understand how to use twitter
I say stuff, and no one ever responds.