Community Chat

[juperier]

I only paid attention to the Amazon forums around Black Friday thru Christmas. I hadn't noticed that the IMDB forums were removed. Didn't participate on either one.

I've been a member of and sometimes participated on several forums over the past almost 20 years. It helps that I don't get offended easily and am able to pull back and accept that due to their own unique background and life experiences:

• people have different viewpoints, and tend to think of theirs as the correct one
• people have their own combination of sensitivities
• people can interpret the same word/action differently
• people's vocabulary and ability to express themselves varies
• some people gravitate toward peacefulness and stability, while others thrive on "stirring the pot"

I don't envy anyone moderating a forum. How do you maintain the ability to have actual discussions when what constitutes a discussion is so subjective? Sure some things are obvious (at least to many). But what about when the distinction is not so clear? Should there be an attempt to prevent issues? What defines an "issue" anyway? 

[Moonchilde]

@Spurt, Amazon will certainly lose book business because of this, because most of the Kindle forum posters got a majority of their book recommendations in the forum. But Amazon is selling so much and going in enough different directions that their book sales may not be that much of a concern to them compared to a few years ago. They created a monster with Kindle Direct Publishing that has caused them all sorts of issues, since people could publish a “book” of dog food labels if they chose to - and not everyone who thinks they can write, or that their book is a masterpiece, is correct. Oy.

Forums are tricky. Under-moderating and over-moderating are easy; moderating enough but not too much, and doing it uniformly, is close to impossible I think.

[haddon9]

I only became aware of the Amazon't boards within the last year and I think most who do read and post are sellers.

I agree that if this board becomes too much of a PITA for the Q they could shut it down.  However I think there is a lot of enabling going on here which helps their bottom line.  I buy more since coming here though I know not everyone does.

[Moonchilde]

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@juperier wrote:

I only paid attention to the Amazon forums around Black Friday thru Christmas. I hadn't noticed that the IMDB forums were removed. Didn't participate on either one.

I've been a member of and sometimes participated on several forums over the past almost 20 years. It helps that I don't get offended easily and am able to pull back and accept that due to their own unique background and life experiences:

• people have different viewpoints, and tend to think of theirs as the correct one
• people have their own combination of sensitivities
• people can interpret the same word/action differently
• people's vocabulary and ability to express themselves varies
• some people gravitate toward peacefulness and stability, while others thrive on "stirring the pot"

I don't envy anyone moderating a forum. How do you maintain the ability to have actual discussions when what constitutes a discussion is so subjective? Sure some things are obvious (at least to many). But what about when the distinction is not so clear? Should there be an attempt to prevent issues? What defines an "issue" anyway? 

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This ^^^^

I don’t need or even want things to always be “my” way, but I also don’t want them to be 80-90% in the opposite direction either.  The balance isn’t easy.

[Moonchilde]

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@haddon9 wrote:

I only became aware of the Amazon't boards within the last year and I think most who do read and post are sellers.

I agree that if this board becomes too much of a PITA for the Q they could shut it down.  However I think there is a lot of enabling going on here which helps their bottom line.  I buy more since coming here though I know not everyone does.

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It may be that since they decided they wanted to wind them down and shut them off, they still encouraged sellers to have a forum, but until that point, there were many forums on many topics and tons of very active posters. At its height, the Kindle forum was much, much busier than these forums are, or have been for the past few years. But, it definitely hasn’t been like that the last couple of years.

[mustangsal]

Perhaps QVC could look to Amazon for more things, like pricing and shipping costs and lead times for example.

[mustangsal]

"... less moderated and somewhat wilder & woolier."

I think you just answered your own question as to why the forums have gone away.  When I see some of the nonsense that takes place in forums in general, and realize the time and manpower required to babysit  moderate them, I probably wouldn't keep one going either.

[Moonchilde]

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@mustangsal wrote:

Perhaps QVC could look to Amazon for more things, like pricing and shipping costs and lead times for example.

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@mustangsal wrote:

Perhaps QVC could look to Amazon for more things, like pricing and shipping costs and lead times for example.

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Since QVC always seems to be operating on a shoestring, they don’t have the $$ to do that. They need to make more profit than Amazon does, any way they can, including not providing Amazon service in pricing or shipping...or indeed mdse cost either.

[Moonchilde]

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@mustangsal wrote:

"... less moderated and somewhat wilder & woolier."

I think you just answered your own question as to why the forums have gone away.  When I see some of the nonsense that takes place in forums in general, and realize the time and manpower required to babysit  moderate them, I probably wouldn't keep one going either.

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I never had a question as to why they’re getting rid of them; the reasons are fairly obvious, but that’s only one of them, though probably the major reason I suspect. 

[gardenman]

Interestingly enough, Amazon shut down the forums a couple of days early. Luckily my ABNA colleagues created a private Facebook group to stay in touch so we're all meeting there. They were supposed to keep them up and running until tomorrow, but shut them down Tuesday I believe. So far they're keeping the old posts up which is kind of nice for those of us who like to go back and read older posts, but no one could post from Tuesday on. Reportedly they were getting pretty badly toasted on some of the more popular forums, so they pulled the plug early.