Current Layout of PG is killing it... slowly

[AlienX]

I have been around PG for almost a decade now. Although like many others, gaming was not really the objective to join the forum. It was interaction with other gamers, citizens, like-minded and creative people. Over time the forum went through a lot of changes but the focus has always been bringing together the former.

Mostly people came in here to chat and discuss various areas of life, not just gaming. However since the latest layout changes, I am seeing the activity has come down to almost a full-stop. Even though it's still an active community, alienating regular visitors with unnecessary shuffling of topic layout seems very odd.

Not everyone who come on PG is/was a gamer. Forcing it to be a solely gaming or tech community is hurting the forum more than doing good.

Most of tech forums are only PTCL bashing/complaints. Most of Gaming forums see no activity for days, and moving lounge deep down the page has also seized the activity to a crawl.

I do appreciate moderators and admins who have worked hard over the years to keep the forum in top shape, and countless hours they have spent to keep it clean and healthy place. But not all changes are good, this time however it was completely unnecessary to shuffle the layout. There could have been reasons for doing so but to me, it doesn't make sense.

Suggestion/feedback/opinion ... whatever it is.

 

[MrGutsy]

There are many reasons for this which has been discussed before.
Here's my analysis: Most of the star posters who were active in the PG opening years were young teenagers/20s guys who have just transitioned into new era of their lives as a natural process so they have much less time for gaming or just being active in discussions around the forum and their haven't been many replacements.
Now social media has taken off in force, we have twitter/facebook/whatsapp/imo and whatnot to share. 10 years ago there were indeed social media platforms available but they were no where near popular they are now.
And this is not the case with PG but all bulletin boards in general. There is no reason for an average person to join a forum to get information when that information is readily available via youtube/reddit/facebook.
I remember 10 years ago some popular forums like videohelp.com forums/bethesda/bioware forums used to move like 1000s of posts per minute but these days they are mostly empty, some have even shutdown completely.

I personally joined PG mostly for buying/selling reliably and that's still my major purpose, although i do post on various places occasionally but i am not an active poster (never was and never will be).
That being said, bulletin boards are dying slowly due to rise of social media and nothing can be done about it. Think of it as transition from sending letters to telephone ---> video calls. (evolution of technology)