Slutty_Eddie
lanzer
My heart is really in having a great guild system. It still baffles me how we never reached the level that I wanted to be with guilds.
The guild system failed because of three reasons.
1. The good guilds just duplicated the forums with less people, which having a lot of people is the whole point of a forum system. The C&T regular guild, for example, was just an extension of our hangout thread. Most of the active guilds currently are basically just regular hang outs, which mostly duplicate other hang outs.
2. The unique guilds were very difficult to find. For example, I was browsing for German speaking guilds last month, because my goal is to learn Deutsch by 2020. I was unable to find an active one in an hour of searching, even though there are many advertised.
3. The whole guild system is harder than using a forum anyways. There are many more steps in checking a guild compared to checking the forums.
TL;DR: So you have a guild system that is hard to get people to join, hard to get people to participate, and didn't add value to what gaia already has.
That's why I was suggesting going to a reddit-style multi-view, so the guilds would be different than the forums and there would be some added value to guilds. IMHO, I think everything should be that style, but i think maybe a hybrid system would work, too.
Guilds were a part of Gaia that I most enjoyed back between about 2009-2012. I spent at least half, maybe more, of my time on Gaia in guilds. I helped run the LD reg guild for a few years and my experience was that it was only useful when the forum was very active. At the high point, back in like 2010 or so, there were so many active threads and casual posters that a reg guild made a great place for people that posted often to get to know each other on a more personal level. The LD had "support threads" that were like hang out threads, but for a very specific topic, like pregnancy, trans issues, disabilities, etc. The guild offered somewhere for people that posted in the wide variety the forum covered to hang out without derailing every forum thread into a chat thread between regs. And there were other specific issue Guilds that grew out of the forum, as well. Years ago I was in active guilds for responsible drug use and polyamory that came from the LD community.
I don't even post in LD anymore, because it's so dead and what's left is often spammy. I just stick to ED and the News forum now, which are still barely dragging along. LD is basically a useless forum now. Good discussion threads get moved to even more dead subforums when they finally come along. I think the reason a lot of guilds have died is just that the forums aren't healthy. You need a big, active community to foster these smaller, more specific communities. The point of guilds is to get people together with a specific interest, whether it's for one of the forums, a hobby, etc, but doing that requires a large amount of those people to actually be active on Gaia. They require at least a few people that are really dedicated to keeping up recruiting and keeping the members interested, but the big thing is that they rely on a large, active userbase to actually recruit from.
I think the reason guilds died is entirely because Gaia itself started hemorrhaging users. Guilds just exist in a way that they're always going to be the first thing that suffers when the userbase shrinks. If Gaia can't even maintain enough users to keep their subforums mildly active, hoping to keep Guilds active is an impossibility. I like the format Gaia uses, with forums and guilds. I don't think that's what they need to change. They need to rollback to when Gaia was actually active enough to support guilds and try to go in the right direction this time. Personally, I don't like Reddit and find it more unwieldy than Gaia's format. I think a big change like that could end up backfiring with the people that have actually stuck around
because they like Gaia's format and hoped the site would just get back on track. I think they should focus on the changes that originally started losing members, not try to go in an entirely different direction with the site. Consolidating the forums and culling subforums might actually be more helpful than division right now. With the small userbase, I think they need to focus more on facilitating growth of active discussion, rather than dividing up and creating more dead/low reply discussions. Subforums are already killing forums like LD, so I don't think a Reddit style splicing up would be helpful.
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