As a feedback mechanism your proposed procedure suffers from being slow, unspecific, and drastic. It’s impossible to improve the quality of posts by quietly going elsewhere, because the author of an off-topic post cannot see your reaction; all that will happen is that, two years later, the forum begins to seem kind of dead because all the veterans are gone; but who knows why? “The Internet, she moves in mysterious ways,” you say, shrugging your shoulders. It is not as though you can pinpoint any particular post that caused any particular non-participant to non-participate. So you may as well update us all on what your kid is doing now. It’s a pity we don’t have some means of rapidly indicating that a post is off-topic, badly-thought-out, or otherwise of inferior quality; say, some kind of thumbs-up/thumbs-down button, and maybe even a method for giving more specific feedback so the author can figure out exactly what was unpopular about the post. Hey, maybe you could implement something like that and get rich when everyone wants your software to run high-quality forums!
The natural state of every online forum is a Facebook/Tumblr/Twitter feed. It takes constant work to keep away from that.
As a feedback mechanism your proposed procedure suffers from being slow, unspecific, and drastic. It’s impossible to improve the quality of posts by quietly going elsewhere, because the author of an off-topic post cannot see your reaction; all that will happen is that, two years later, the forum begins to seem kind of dead because all the veterans are gone; but who knows why? “The Internet, she moves in mysterious ways,” you say, shrugging your shoulders. It is not as though you can pinpoint any particular post that caused any particular non-participant to non-participate. So you may as well update us all on what your kid is doing now. It’s a pity we don’t have some means of rapidly indicating that a post is off-topic, badly-thought-out, or otherwise of inferior quality; say, some kind of thumbs-up/thumbs-down button, and maybe even a method for giving more specific feedback so the author can figure out exactly what was unpopular about the post. Hey, maybe you could implement something like that and get rich when everyone wants your software to run high-quality forums!
The natural state of every online forum is a Facebook/Tumblr/Twitter feed. It takes constant work to keep away from that.