Any reason why ILM is so quiet these days?

only thing that might save ilm now is if ppl agree to stop talking about music

also, the music critic thing? not a job. ignore them.

There is definitely a lack of posting in the UK morning which suggests not many brits/euros are on ilm now.

I think the lex mentioned once he doesnt even bother with ilx til the americans are awake as its so dead

music critics used to make lots of big posts here.. Now it feels they save that for the dayjob. Which is a loss to ilm

dyou know what would be good

ile is absolutely not as busy as ever, its nothing like as busy as ever

I had thought this too (and the ad money is no longer anything like covering the hosting bill) so tonight I went over all the data I have. Compared to 2013-2014, in the past year we are down average 18% on page views, 27% on active users. People are spending exactly the same amount of time on the site when they do visit, though.

I think a couple of big Google changes have affected us:
- The change that downranked forums. This is the one that nearly killed Metafilter.
http://www.fastcompany.com/3030848/what-google-search-algorithm-changes-do-to-the-internet

- A more recent change to penalise sites that aren't mobile-friendly.

Can't do anything about the first one, don't really want to do anything about the second but may have to. I also don't think that's the whole story either.

interesting info, thks

feels a lot quieter than even that drop tho

stet is there any way to differentiate how many active users are on ile & ilm instead of the sitewide one?

individually counting the bearable ones

dyou know what would be good

― irl lol (darraghmac),

does it include suggest bans?

Also, there is no change in the geographic distribution of users: 20% are from the UK, and that number has been the same since 2012.

xp not trivially, but I'll try some log analysis

I said users, I should have said "site visitors"

xp I thought better of it tbh

i post a bit less and it's totally because twitter has kind of become where i have a lot of the conversations i would've had here in the past, i imagine that's true for a fair # of people here. still love it here and think that the pace of things around here is a little more agreeable now than they were maybe a couple years ago when it just kinda felt like a daily rotation of clusterfuck threads dominating SNA.

come man that's no attitude

SHOTS FIRED

too few polls obvs

shots fired at a couple years ago? i'm trying to think if anybody noteworthy was posting then that isn't now, honestly don't know.

ilm is 'quiet' because even our young kids are pushing 30 and we've had all the conversations dozens of times and maybe our feelings abt music are slightly less fraught and there are other outlets and kids and etc etc

but mainly because there are few new posters. tbh it's astonishing that things have been somewhat vital for so long

shots fired at a couple years ago?

Nah, I was just goofing at darragh

I still find plenty to talk about on ilm by digging up posts from the archives, but I'm not terribly in sync with a lot of the new music that gets people hyped on here (and even when I am, I end up liking the songs from albums that other people don't so much). This has been the case for years, though, so I don't see it as a sudden shift.

I'm gunning 4u now watch ur back

This is a sad thread

oh shit

Less people are excited by modern music. Social media can be used to transmit shitty opinions about albums much more efficiently. Take your pick.

when you've lost cousin slappy, you've lost the nation

― mookieproof, Saturday, 24 November 2012 22:58 (2 years ago) Permalink

i was otm

Anyway, yeah, bummer thread. Have been trying to force myself to delurk and actually contribute something to a place that has meant a lot to me for the past 5 years; I don't want it to wither away now. I especially don't want it to wither away through being outcompeted by the megaplatforms (though obviously I can't begrudge anyone not wanting to hoe the same row indefinitely). I especially don't want it to wither away before the Stereolab poll finally happens!

ilm is 'quiet' because even our young kids are pushing 30 and we've had all the conversations dozens of times and maybe our feelings abt music are slightly less fraught and there are other outlets and kids and etc etc

this also seems really otm.

I've been here since senior year in high school and am now turning 32 this year. It's been interesting watching all of you age out of this thing that you do/once did. I'm in it til the bitter, bitter end though.

It's because twitter is better than ilx.

I was afraid of that. I liked twitter for a couple years, and then I didn't anymore. Don't want to go back.

classic rock poll last year was so much fun, wish we could do it again and again

it definitely felt like the peak of my ilx career!

i think that ACTUAL valuable new posters are coming in and will continue coming in, although it takes a while sometimes to see who's gonna stick around, and which Raccoon Tanuki's are worth trolling back until they go away

pls don't all go to 77 and/or facebook, I'm not on either and don't want to leave - even though I'm not that active or vital here, it still feels like home somehow

god, how awful

1) get on facebook because it's what people do
2) 77 is just private idiot repository board

You fucking wish

that was not a qualitative opinion, it's all good!!

fucking

the minimal text groove of ILM is work friendly - FB is not.
hence i still hang around here.
i posted about that messageboard article on an ilm thread : very little reaction.
ned posted on his facebook page - loads of chat/responses.
the FB 'Present Listening' group that i have recently signed up to gets lots of reaction to posts etc.
and as westworld once declared 'i wanna go to where the action is .. '

I don't want to be on Facebook (and can't figure out how to read Twitter, layout never made sense to me) so I'm sad to see a lot of music forums "moving" to fb, don't see this happening to ILM anytime soon though.

Something that's cool about ILM is that its structure is a lot more open and transparent than Facebook's, and even if at some point it's abandoned it will always be a great, searchable archive of zeitgeisty discussion.

xp yeah the best part of ILM is that it's text-based and minimal and people use handles rather than real names and i don't have my IRL friends all over it.

While I'm sad at the lower activity here nowadays, I think it's most likely a result of the Google search rankings and not a cultural shift away from taking music seriously amongst teens & twenty-somethings... just look at the activity on https://www.reddit.com/r/letstalkmusic ... mostly kids but that's part of its charm.

No list threads

I despair of the youth of today

One important reason why twitter is better than ilx is that it's a lot easier to have conversations with people other than white dudes. ;)

i have trouble having conversations with anyone on Twitter. Only ever use it as a promotional tool really. I like Facebook's recent multi-threaded approach now, even if it is still a bit glitchy.

I don't use it either Tom I keep ile and ilm tabs open

I do use SNA, just didn't know SNA was called SNA.

I'd like to see more threads dedicated to individual records. The rolling threads served a purpose back when ILM was at its busiest and the genre-specific threads are great for checking out, for example, the latest afrobeats or trap tunes, but there's rarely that much in the way of discussion and when there is, it's generally the same four or five posters doing an inside-baseball thing.

xp yeah the best part of ILM is that it's text-based and minimal and people use handles rather than real names and i don't have my IRL friends all over it.

This. It's from a more innocent and exciting era of the web.

otoh a tiny bit after the beginning you do get mark s opinions

/Yeah, 2017 ILX needs to contritely distance itself from its 4chan-esque past because that thread title is perfectly representative of the types of discussions people were having back in the day. Decline successfully averted!

― pomenitul, Wednesday, April 19, 2017 11:10 AM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink/

it's an extreme example but like honestly go to any really long thread and get super basic opinions about tom petty and shit if you go all the way to the beginning

or read posts on the Kendrick Lamar thread, from yesterday

i stand by my steve vai posts

xxp but just after that you get infuriating anonymous posts via a long time anonymous poster that annoys mark s :D

stop trying to make fetch happen

I was thinking of that annoying dude who you had to clean up categories when archiving

Tusk Vs The White Album [Started by Paper Money = Death of Christ (Roger Fidelity) in August 2005, last updated twenty-nine minutes ago by Shat Parp (dog latin) on I Love Music] 306 new answers

not as much quiet as talking in circles, can't figure out if self parody or realizing true potential