Blade Brown wrote:
Honestly you can't say "fuck this site." Due to the natural progression of the Internet the masses have gravitated towards the social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Myspace the past 5 years. Message boards have been deprecated because of this. Threaded conversations are no longer the norm. SMS texting, blogging and comments on peoples profile pages on the Social Network sites have replaced all of this.
As far as a music oriented site there is no point for HHE to continue creating content. Viral content on YouTube to bloggers on blogspot to twitter have made it more difficult for independently controlled media to thrive off the Internet. Honestly this is a great thing for public interests since it's made the Internet more dynamic. It has rolled out editors who have to QA the content prior of its posting. Instead, the content creator can publish at will without permission.
The downside from all of this that I truly do miss interacting with talent, working with record labels and getting content online. The industry has bypassed sites like this and focus on viral sites like YouTube, Facebook Myspace, and Twitter to get their content out to the masses. In 1997 for instance the record labels would send me vinyl, cd's, VHS tapes, head shots on 8.5x11" prints, with a printed bio. I would scan the head shot, type the bio, trans-code the vinyl, rip the cd, and encode the video to digital form. It was work! It was also fun. It was the early stages from the progression from physical distribution to digital distribution. Now an artist just snaps a photo on their digital camera, they record digital in the studio, and the bio is usually composed in MS Word so they just copy/paste it online.
The downside to this progression online is that its harder for artists to get their content positioned without money behind their marketing. The main reason why good hip-hop music thrived in the 90's was because of word of mouth. DJ's put music they like on mix tapes. Online sites put music online they liked. Now with the saturation of marketing online the mainsteam artists have their content positioned everywhere. Go onto iTunes, YouTube or Myspace or any media outlet online and I can guarentee that their content is purely positioned on those sites based on media buys paid by the record labels.
Honestly how marketers control exposer makes me wanna re-invent the industry and make you the user in control and own what's placed on-line. The reason why this concept isn't popular is cause a venture capitalist won't give you 100 million for it. You won't be valued as a company worth 10 billion (like facebook) if you use this approach. Google won't buy you out for 1.8 billion. You won't be the Mark Zuckerberg making front cover of Forbes Magazine.
Back to my point the Internet is much bigger now. The stakes are higher. It's now mainstream and no longer an emerging technology. When you guys were chatting on here it was still emerging. YouTube or Facebook didn't exist. Maybe Friendster was around but that wasn't the norm to be on social networking sites. Maybe in 1995 it became the next big thing. Now it is.
So you can't really say "fuck this site" and say "fuck mvilla" for trying. As hard as I try it won't matter. Everyone is on Facebook, Twitter and Myspace. There is nothing I personally can do about this. And, honestly... You shouldn't really care if this site has dropped in popularity. You all made friends on here. You build relationships on here. That's whats important is that you get enjoyment on here. And, I hope you continue to find enjoyment on here.
<frankthetankimpression>
"THAT'S HOW YOU DO IT! THAT'S HOW YOU DEBATE!!"</frankthetankimpression>
But in all seriousness Villa is right on the money with that response. For the most part...
One thing you're not taking into consideration is the fact a lot of people, like myself, don't fuck with Myspace or Facebook. I personally find them both too revealing and a pain in the ass for my taste. If I'm going to interact on the internet, my medium of choice is still message boards. A lot of people still love boards for the anonymity of them. I'd like to be able to choose who knows what about me, especially when it comes to employers, women, relatives etc. I may not want certain people knowing my personal business or interpreting something the wrong way. I know people who have lost jobs because of facebook. If you happen to be dating a crazy chick, she might just make your life a living hell because of facebook.
Anyway, I always figured this board would be strong enough to survive regardless of what new thing came along, and lets be fair here, there are still scores of message boards that still thrive on the web. I've seen this board "dead" before only for it to pick up again out of nowhere.
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