Creeva’s World 2.0

A long long time ago I ran a Yahoo Group enti­tled Mar­con Drinkers it was started in 2001.   Before this group was started my cir­cle of friends had another mes­sage board we were using.   One of the admin­is­tra­tors went off the deep end started ban­ning peo­ple and delet­ing posts.  He even­tu­ally found it funny just to delete the mes­sage board all together.  This is where I came into the picture.

Since I enjoyed the cama­raderie of the group, and I had the tech­ni­cal know-how, I started a new Yahoo Group, the pre­vi­ously men­tioned Mar­con Drinkers.   The con­cept of the group and where the peo­ple came in, was that once a year our cir­cle would descend upon a fan­tasy and sci­ence fic­tion con­ven­tion in Colum­bus, OH called Mar­con.  While we we there, there was mass amounts of alco­hol con­sumed, except for just a small hand­ful of occa­sions out­side of there I don’t nor­mally drink at all.  I’m not opposed to it, I just nor­mally do not have a taste for it.    Mov­ing on.

I man­aged to con­tact and grab peo­ple mov­ing them to the mes­sage board.   For a time (2001–2004) it was quite active, I think I started drop­ping out more when I hung out on the SWG mes­sage boards most of the time.   I would say around (2006–2007) it really died, which is dis­heart­en­ing but peo­ple move on, friend­ships change, and peo­ple grow apart.   Our com­mu­nity wasn’t large enough to be self sus­tain­ing since there wasn’t any new blood.   Peo­ple from the board attempted to start other groups, but none were as suc­cess­ful for the amount of time this one was.

Last year I was at a cross­roads, I didn’t want to just delete the forum — since some peo­ple may actu­ally still read it, so for them I con­tin­ued and left it up.   Since noth­ing new was being posted I decided I was going to just cross­post my blog posts.  I orig­i­nally hoped to stim­u­late con­ver­sa­tion, but it seems the posts are stand­ing alone in an echo cham­ber.  I did close mem­ber­ship to start spam­mers from pop­ping up (since I always hated clean­ing those out any­ways).   So our peak was over 100 mem­bers, now it’s down to 46.   I slowly watch peo­ple drop off.   When I am the last one still stand­ing I’ll take the group offline for good.

I do have back­ups of the groups since I don’t want the dig­i­tal his­tory to be gone, but it will last solely in my hands.  In a way it’s sad to watch a com­mu­nity die off.  First I did it with this group, then I relived it with Star Wars Galax­ies.  Any­time a com­mu­nity is lost for any rea­sons there should be a sad­ness; a moment of reflec­tion.   I think the main rea­son it is com­pletely dead these days beyond dynam­ics chang­ing is the advent of social net­work­ing.  I’m friends with many of these same peo­ple on dif­fer­ent social net­works like Myspace and Face­book.   This has given them more tools to empower them­selves in the deliv­ery of infor­ma­tion to their friends.   A sta­tic mail­ing list sce­nario like Yahoo Groups  doesn’t fit into their world any­more.  Times, tech­nol­ogy, and friend­ships change — but look­ing at the past will show us the jour­ney on how we got to where we are today.