I completely agree.
It's an issue many message boards are facing. One message board I used to be very active on is pretty much dominated by bearded Boomer types. They're having a hard time pulling in younger users. Message boards now have a reputation as being kind of old fashioned, because they're not seen as a kind of social media"
According to Google, we have a very diverse range of visitors, age-wise. Here's a summary for 1/1/2019 to today:
Still, if I had to draw a bell curve of who's
active, my guess is that it would probably peak at 45, with little participation from those under 25 or over 65.
With the move from vBulletin to XenForo, the trend of declining visitors reversed. Visitor count is still nowhere near its peak 15 years ago, but things were looking good -- until the middle of March this year. Traffic dropped about a third, started to recover a bit, and dropped again at the start of May. The timing coincides with school and workplace closures related to COVID 19. Similar thing with posting activity -- a nice jump after the switch to Xenforo, good sustained activity through 2019 and the first few months of 2020, and then
.
When message boards were at their peak in the early/mid 00's, Cyburbia would get about 15 to 25 new users a day. Today, we get about 1 to 3, and about 10%-20% are spammers that somehow make it past all the various layers of anti-spam security; the IP range and country blocks, prohibited email and username keywords, Stop Forum Spam and other blacklists, and so on "Conversion" -- getting visitors to register and become active users -- has been a growing problem since the start of the social media era. XenForo made joining much easier, since new users can register and log on through Facebook, Reddit, Google, and so on. The average visitor to Cyburbia spends about four minutes on the site, which is actually pretty good. However, the increase in visits hasn't translated into an increase in new users.
Since user registration began in 2001, Cyburbia has had 48,000 registered members. About 90% to 95% of them were "legitimate" -- not spammers. We remove the accounts of members who haven't logged in for a year or more, with zero posts to their name. As of today, that leaves about 11,000 members who posted at least once. About two-thirds of those accounts are essentially dead -- invalid email, and haven't logged in for years. We have no way of contacting them. For the rest -- at least the ones who chose to receive email from Cyburbia in their profiles -- the few times I've sent out an email blast, the response is fairly lukewarm.
Of the 11,246 current member accounts, 4,630 were what we call one-and-done; they posted only once. 1,603 posted only twice. 824 only posted three times. The Pareto principle applies here, as on most message boards -- 80% of the content is created by 20% of the users.
Millennials and Zoomers increasingly use Reddit for the same kind of topical discussion that would have been on independent message boards 10 years ago. If someone is already registered on Reddit, all they have to do is add the /r/urbanplanning group to the list of subreddits they follow. /r/urbanplanning probably drew away a lot of the activity that would have gone to Cyburbia years ago, even though it's really more of an urbanist group, with discussion leaning heavily towards a few pet topics (car-free cities, suburbs are bad, zoning is bad, YIMBY). Also, Reddit posts are more ephemeral. If a thread is more than a day old, it's as good as dead. Still, activity in that subreddit is slowly growing.
There's a feed of Cyburbia threads on Reddit and
Twitter. I don't think they helped draw traffic to Cyburbia. I paid for ads on /r/urbanplanning, and they were all downvoted to oblivion. Even though outreach to the Reddit crowd has been largely a failure, there's still plenty of younger folks out there who might like what they see here -- if they even know we exist.
We face the same issue with with Facebook. If you have a Facebook account, all you have to do is join a group. Cyburbia struggles to get more than a few hundred Facebook fans -- it's depressing. Like I said earlier, joining Cyburbia is easy if you have a Facebook or Reddit account, but cross-registration hasn't been the "bridge" I thought it could be
The biggest issue Cyburbia has struggled with for the past 20 years is the lack of "buzz". After the emergence of Planetizen, CityLab, blogs, and so on, Cyburbia has gotten absolutely zero buzz.
Cyburbia has never been mentioned -- not once -- in any articles or anywhere else on CityLab, Treehugger, Strong Cities, Governing, Next City, Streetsblog, The CIty Fix, New Geography, Inhabitat ... I could go on. Nobody from those sites has ever contacted me. Cyburbia has been online for 25 years, and there's been absolutely no recognition of that anywhere else online. None. Nothing. Nada. Not even on some obscure blog. We're truly out of the loop. Even the blogs of once-active Cyburbia members don't mention Cyburbia. This is one of the reasons why I was scarce for a while. If the site wasn't getting recognition after so many years, the tens of thousands of hours of work so many put into it, why even bother? I could care less about being recognized personally -- my full name don't even appear here -- but it still bothers me that Cyburbia has generally been ignored by the built environment community.
The result of being ignored? No buzz = fewer inbound links = declining positions in search engine pages. In the early 2000s, Cyburbia came up as the very first result in a Google search for "urban planning." It then fell to 2nd. Then 3rd. Now, it's not even on the first 10 pages. Fortunately, it still comes up first for "urban planning" + "discussion", but for how long? Few remember Cyburbia exists until they come across a thread in a Google search. A couple of minutes later, they forget, because a site that's never had a mention in CityLab can't be that great, right?
What to do to get new blood?
Recognition from the outside world that this site exists, and that there's a great community here, would be a good start. How to get recognition without spamming the bejezus out of the Internet? I've been trying to find the answer for years.
Sorry for my tone. This has always been a sore spot for me. More thoughts in a few.
