GiantBomb is a community-oriented site with no real community. This is a fallacy, and we wish to fix it.
Now let's back up a bit. Having started off with that inflammatory statement, I'm betting tons of you are going: "WAIT! WE HAVE OVER 20,000 REGISTERED USERS! No community my ass, this guy's a retard". But this is the thing. We have forums and a wiki, no real community or sense of community. People coming in and posting in threads does not a community make. Disparate elements will never make a whole without the proper glue.
GiantBomb has a core community of perhaps twenty or thirty users, the IRC regulars and the BS regulars (Who have become somewhat the same recently). We chat with each other in the IRC, we do community podcasts, we do game nights and play on XBL, PSN, and Steam together. This whole post is coming out of a very lengthy discussion me, DualReaver, and TokyoChicken had while playing HALO (We went 1 for 19 in team slayer XD). Now this core community is great, and we like ourselves, but beyond that central group, there is a teeming mass of people who use the site regularly, but are not perhaps members of the wider community. This expanse posts on the forums perhaps, or lurks, but does not participate, or is not even aware, of this stronger community.
We wish to expand this core community of users to encompass, well, all of GiantBomb ideally, although that won't happen. At best perhaps, we want to raise awareness, and try to create a more cohesive GiantBomb community than the one that exists today. Perhaps some of you haven't noticed it, but despite claims that this site would be one huge community, quite the opposite has happened. We've fractured. The site is made up of several disparate elements that rarely interact or see eye-to-eye. Conflict has become commonplace, and what little area we have for community, the forums, has become filled with fighting and drama.
- The staff: Despite their goal of running a community site, they are rarely seen here, and hardly participate beyond writing blog posts. There is almost zero interaction with the community. Maybe they're busy, I don't really want to call them out, but they are clearly not well-integrated into the community
- The Mods: This is the group of people that enforces order on the forums. However, often it seems their enforement of rules comes into conflict with the views of our next group. I ask you, if the mods actions are pissing off the very core community of GiantBomb, should they be taking these actions? Mods are supposed to look after the well being of the community, not actively hinder it.
- The "Core" community: This would be the people whose views I am expressing. We are the IRC. We are the Bomb Squad. We are the people who power this site (If you'll excuse the hubris). We are the majority of the active members, and the ones who attempt to promote a feeling of real community and friendship among members. We feel some of the decisions made so far in this site's life have been detrimental to the overall health of the community, and we have suggestions to fix this. We have a true feeling of community among our members, but our ranks are thin, and the more people we can draw into this group, the more people will enjoy Giant Bomb.
- Everone else: All the other users who don't exactly fit explicitly into those groups. These are the people that we need to draw into the core group, into the Giant Bomb Expanded Universe, if you will. These guys enjoy the forums and wiki perhaps, but aren't aware of the full scope of the GB core community. If we can draw these guys into the core group, we think they'll have a much more enjoyable overall time at Giant Bomb than they were having before.
Giant Bomb is a community-oriented site, but there is no cohesive community. Our suggestions are an attempt to fix this flaw.
In order to attract new members to the core community, it needs to be more visible. We try our best, but often it seems that the community threads sink, and sink quickly. Vaxdaxrin's Let's Play always gets a few posts, then is buried. Bombing Run is always the same few people every time. Bomb Should Have a Face has come under fire for being "self-serving", when they actively invite anyone on their show. Now this isn't a comdemnation of what is currently on the forums, I'm sure mods will know my opinion is quite the opposite ;) However, the community stuff needs to be promoted more and paid more attention to. The way to do this isn't by strangling all other sorts of discussion, it's by promoting this type of community stuff, and allowing the rest to run wild. After all, what good is a community-oriented site with no real community?
The IRC has been great to us, and we'd love more people to join in. Just hit up irc://irc.gamesurge.net/giantbomb and say hi. However, I can't exactly count on Joe Q. Public reading this thread. In fact, he's probably at the bottom of the page, wrting "tl;dr" right now.What we need is for people to actually check out these community efforts, and for a little help from the mods.
We've disagreed in the past, but I think we all want GiantBomb to grow into a prosperous community. But if all anyone ever uses is the boards, what separates us from NeoGAF then? Nothing. However, GiantBomb has the potential to be so much more than a forum if people would just try. As such, community outreach threads such as how to use the IRC, Bomb Should Have a Face podcasts, Bombing Run gaming nights, and other such things should be floated, at least temporarily by the moderators. This greatly enhances visibility, and will encourage community activity, suiting all sides. I don't think anyone can argue that improving the sense of community on GiantBomb is a bad thing.
Another such community venture would be a Ventrillo server, as we've found quality of discussion dramatically increases when you're actually talking in person. See the Bomb Should Have a Face podcasts and the community gaming nights (Fuzion Frenzy, best game ever). However, in order to properly host a ventrillo server, the hosting needs to be paid for. Having one hosted officially by the GiantBomb staff would be absurdly great, but having one is something that would greatly increase community, and the core users could probably do it from our own ingenuity, but having some official support would really be damn nice.
With no real incentive to be a community right now, GiantBomb will not grow. Eventually, the core users will bleed away, and no new ones will come. Simply by furthering the core community can we avoid this stagnation. As Abraham Lincoln once famously said, "A house divided against itself cannot stand". All we ask for is a bit of help in unifying this community, and we think we can make GiantBomb a truly special place.
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