To quote Ripley, "has everyone's IQ's dropped while I've been in a cryogenic sleep the last 40 years?" Or something like that. And the answer is that IQs and attention spans have both dropped, phenomenally. Someone on Facebook posted an 8th grade civics test from circa 1880. I'm pretty sure I'd fail if I took it cold turkey. You can find numerous articles on colleges complaining that incoming classes need remedial math and instruction on how to read and analyze literature. So, it's not shocking that a forum like this one which doesn't have glitzy AI-generated recreations of "How Bigfoot interrupted our basketball game, dunked, and left" or 15-minute videos of "The Top 10 Most Horrific Bigfoot Attacks in Manhattan" can't compete for an audience used to getting their information in 60 second Tik-Toks.
If that's what's askew with this Forum, I'm okay with keeping the recipe the same.
Cliff & Bobo and Greg Pruitt mentioned on one of the last Bigfoot n' Beyond podcasts that at one time, the BFF was the place to go for Bigfoot information as it was an improvement over message boards and relatively open (i.e., no gatekeepers who "owned" the forums and ruled them with an iron fist, like some field research organizations). But now, to get visibility in a monetized world, you need people willing (and capable) of pounding out blog posts in 15 minute increments or video shorts on 18 different platforms. I just don't think that's what the Forums are (and I'm okay with that).
As to Reddit, never has so much been said with so few words; well done, Beachfoot. (Okay, technically, the Commander, American Forces in and around Bastogne did better, but you still win the day here.)
Even for the non-cesspool aspects of Reddit, it's just not an easy system to use and information in it gets lost faster than virtue in a ... in a place where virtue is lost quickly. I had a baseball site that was like a local bar. When Vox took it over, the regulars looked for a new place where everybody knew your name and Reddit was not it. It was difficult to find even basic threads on the topic there.
Rant over. I"ll go back outside to shake my fist at some clouds now.