Dawn
Member
Yesterday, I spent some time looking through past postings in the archives. I originally began to paricipated here primarly because of a resurgence of people willing to pay a reasonable bench rate for restorations. That's changed with time.
Truthfully, I find this board frustrating. There's a small core of posters and for the most part, the rest are "drive bys" asking the same endless questions that a search would answer and vanishing. The other disconcerting thing about this board is the number of views a topic gets vs the participation. I've never seen such a disparity on other boards unless these are all bots and not viewers.
There's obviously many on here that are technically inclined. I also understand that CB radio is more a turnkey end user medium then one used by technically oriented users as amateur radio would be. Judging from the user base and topics, many of you guys are not young and pretty much fit into the same age group as myself and many have moved on to amateur radio, but still retain a fondness for where we started. There's a charm and lure about some of these older boxes and new ones, that just doesn't equate with the near Detroit obsolescence of the amateur market where thousands in dollars are rolled over ever few years on the latest and greatest. CB is an amazing medium considering it's constrained to a handfull of channels, a small amount of users essentially making it difficult for everyone else, restrictions, and marketed to mass price point. Amazing alone that companies still even bother to continue let alone innovate as we've seen with the recent President/Bearcats.
The archives were eye opening though. Apparently at one time, there was a tremendous amount of technically oriented individuals that you could feel the palpable frustration in the postings as the attempted patiently to help someone troubleshoot a malfunctioning radio with hardly a clue what they were doing. Yet these old timers like I fully understood that this is how we learned, not from textbooks or training. I can easily see why many of these guys gave up here and that mentality of the drive by's still is pretty much the same and thankless. They only want to listen to what they want to hear and have a preconceived notion based on what someone else told them or nonsense based on rumor.
I'm finding myself at that crossroad. There's some very nice folks here, especially some that PM often in the back channel. I've gotten more genial PM's and regular exchanges here then any board I've been on. There's also a lot of eyes on this board that for whatever reason seem to decline to participate. Just look at the numbers and they're sobering showing how many are viewing at any given time and how many reads a topic gets.
Take from this what you will. There's no reason whatsoever given the popularity of this website as a whole that this can't be a dynamic board. The viewers are there. The topics and postings aren't.
Why?
Truthfully, I find this board frustrating. There's a small core of posters and for the most part, the rest are "drive bys" asking the same endless questions that a search would answer and vanishing. The other disconcerting thing about this board is the number of views a topic gets vs the participation. I've never seen such a disparity on other boards unless these are all bots and not viewers.
There's obviously many on here that are technically inclined. I also understand that CB radio is more a turnkey end user medium then one used by technically oriented users as amateur radio would be. Judging from the user base and topics, many of you guys are not young and pretty much fit into the same age group as myself and many have moved on to amateur radio, but still retain a fondness for where we started. There's a charm and lure about some of these older boxes and new ones, that just doesn't equate with the near Detroit obsolescence of the amateur market where thousands in dollars are rolled over ever few years on the latest and greatest. CB is an amazing medium considering it's constrained to a handfull of channels, a small amount of users essentially making it difficult for everyone else, restrictions, and marketed to mass price point. Amazing alone that companies still even bother to continue let alone innovate as we've seen with the recent President/Bearcats.
The archives were eye opening though. Apparently at one time, there was a tremendous amount of technically oriented individuals that you could feel the palpable frustration in the postings as the attempted patiently to help someone troubleshoot a malfunctioning radio with hardly a clue what they were doing. Yet these old timers like I fully understood that this is how we learned, not from textbooks or training. I can easily see why many of these guys gave up here and that mentality of the drive by's still is pretty much the same and thankless. They only want to listen to what they want to hear and have a preconceived notion based on what someone else told them or nonsense based on rumor.
I'm finding myself at that crossroad. There's some very nice folks here, especially some that PM often in the back channel. I've gotten more genial PM's and regular exchanges here then any board I've been on. There's also a lot of eyes on this board that for whatever reason seem to decline to participate. Just look at the numbers and they're sobering showing how many are viewing at any given time and how many reads a topic gets.
Take from this what you will. There's no reason whatsoever given the popularity of this website as a whole that this can't be a dynamic board. The viewers are there. The topics and postings aren't.
Why?