Better archival of older posts
On 99% of social media platforms, informative news comes and goes. It's far easier to have real-time conversations on platforms like Discord, but its biggest downfall is the difficulty with looking back on past messages. It's thrilling to sometimes dive back into the past with old construction threads on these forums, especially when people did detective work on what a new addition might be and the reactions to something unexpected. With other platforms, it is incredibly difficult to find these old messages and replicate that feeling.
The terrible archiving also makes it easy to accidentally re-post news, often having to start your message with "not sure if anyone's seen this but", and then some shining stars say "you're late" because you're not terminally online.
More action is taken on bad apples, and forums have a far more prominent "think before you post" incentive
On most social media, an unsavoury user cannot simply be banned on the spot, and most of the time, is also allowed to exist and be extremely annoying with insane levels of leniency from moderators. On places where they cannot be banned, such as Twitter and Facebook outside of special groups, we have to rely on the community collectively banding together and say "no, we don't want you here" instead of a trusted person ridding them with the click of a button.
Facebook and Twitter do have spevial groups for certain aspects of theme park enthusiasm, but a) these are all disjointed from one another, b) there is fighting between these groups in extreme cases where they "compete" against each other, and c) you have to "prove yourself worthy" of joining these groups, such as being a passholder or having a certain degree of knowledge of a park before even getting in.
Everyone is seen and heard at the same level no matter what
On other social media, you can spam something multiple times to get someone's attention, or you can repeat a would-be unpopular opinion on several occasions in an attempt to rage-bait others. Here on the forum, you post one reply, and whether or not people respond to what you say, is up to them. You don't repeat what you say because the conversation's moving too fast and are worried that people didn't see. The slower nature of a forum makes it so that every reply and post is seen, something that almost all social media fails at. You can make a post on social media and it gains zero replies or traction because people didn't see it. With a forum, if nobody replies to your thread/post, you can at least conclude that it was because nobody had anything to say or add to it, but you can guarantee that people at least saw it. When most comments sections on social media default to only showing the most-liked comments first, it can be difficult to engage properly. The "forced chronological order" of forum posts appeals to me greatly.
I am not having the same conversations every week
On a forum, rarely ever do I have to worry about a conversation descending into the same old stupid "is it a credit" argument again. We have a thread for that where anything related to that goes. The weekly Alton Towers bashing can go into the "WTF Merlin" thread instead of clogging #main-chat and becoming the only thing we discuss for two hours.
There is a better and more positive outlook towards excessively long posts
Extremely often on social media, when someone makes a long and passionate post, it is incredibly easy to a) scroll past it and say "i ain't reading allat
", or b) tell them "bro rewrote the whole ahh declaration of independence
". Social media appears to be for people who prefer short-form posts and comments, with messages almost never consisting of more than three sentences or "montu is NOT a 6 bruh" before hitting send. A long message made of huge winding paragraphs is often met with ridicule more than anything, and suddenly it's "not that deep". I understand that short-form messages have a place especially in real-time messaging on places like Discord and WhatsApp, I am not against it, I'm just saying it's most often seen there.
On a long forum post, the whole thing gets read, and more than one person actually replies to the points that you make.
Sometimes it's just nice to see the proper grammar
As a frequent Discord user (and actually as someone who's indefinitely left almost every server I'm in due to an addiction to it that I'm struggling to control), I'm no stranger to throwing every single grammar rule out of the window.
every message i send is in all lowercase and punctuation is only really there when necessary tbh
in fact i kinda talk like this everywhere LOL but here is where i make a strong exception lmao
its pretty much just here and emails where i decide to put my big boy boots on
It makes sense for forums to be a far more mature place than social media. I can't quite pinpoint why not grammar and spell-checking your posts here annoys me so much more than the exact same thing on other social media platforms.
I do not want to see forums die out
Frankly, this is a huge motivator for my increased activity here.
Finally, there is no AI here
And let's keep it that way forever.
