Back in the good old days of gaming of 2011, back when BioWare was blowing people’s minds with the Mass Effect trilogy, they had community forums. A place where fans of Dragon Age and Mass Effect could gather and speculate about what happens next. Or, pester the developers for whatever romance they believed should be in the next game.
And then, after the release of Mass Effect 3, they promptly erased their forums and moved all discussions to Twitter. This effectively silenced many discussions, because by nature, Twitter is an algorithmic beast that prioritizes only certain things.
With the collapse of web2, Twitter especially, I wonder if they might bring those forums back.
BioWare, if you’re reading this, bring back the forums!
No way. Forums should never be run by the people the forum is discussing, for the same reason that newspapers should never be government-owned.
I do agree with your general point but there are some niche use cases, like how Paradox uses their forums for posting long-format updates and patch notes. That being said, the only use the paradox forums get at all is pretty much restricted to those long ass patch notes, and they could just as easily post them anywhere else
Right. Instead they should be run by someone like u/spez or Elon Musk. That’s so much better.
Do you understand the difference between owning a forum and running it? u/spez isn’t moderating /r/bioware. This isn’t about who should own these forums, but how they should be run.