i’m sure T Nation has a reason, be it marketing or cost, but, i agree with some others. i am not going to virusface, or shitbook or any place else to read comments on articles. i don’t even go to my own business facebok page. i will miss it. yes, some comments were bs(in my opinion) many were insightful.
Whatever the reasons are, I hope it works out.
best wishes
Is it just me? Or do T-Nation and social media just seem like odd bed-fellows? When I think about T-Nation, the words twitter and facebook are nowhere in my thoughts…I’m like plenty of others who avoid those verbal-diarrhea receptacles.
I don’t like facebook or twitter either, and I enjoy reading/posting comments for articles.
This is stupid.
To try to assist people with questions, and there were many good questions for the two articles I wrote recently, tonight I set up a Facebook account and a Twitter account.
Those that want to ask that way, I’ll endeavour to have replies there.
For those not liking Facebook, starting a thread in an existing forum would work for my articles anyway and probably many articles, perhaps all.
[quote]Chris Shugart wrote:
We are following suit and encourage readers to use our forums, <a href=“https://www.facebook.com/OfficialTestosteroneNation"target="new”>Facebook or <a href=“https://twitter.com/T_Nation"target="new”>Twitter for comments.
[/quote]
That’s interesting, because I noticed as recently as a couple of weeks ago that people asking questions about articles via Facebook were being redirected to the article comments section on the website. I liked the old system where each article automatically had its own thread in the article discussion forum as it allowed for more complex posts to be articulated than in the livespills. But then, I also recall most of the threads were tumbleweed territory, or turned into author flame-a-thons.
Anyway, whoever writes those T-Nation Facebook replies cracks me up.
[quote]dave-g wrote:
I’m with pushharder and usmccds on this one - I don’t have anything to do with any social media sites and I’m not going to start now. I would typically skim the article discussions each day and often would find bits worth reading. I’ll miss that but I’ll still read the articles each day. Still the only training site I check out daily and still the best around in my opinion. No way am I logging on to Facebook or anything like that to follow up on the discussions though.[/quote]
Ya, it was a great way to pick the author’s brain if he or she doesn’t have a dedicated forum.
Maybe in the Training or Biotest Forums there could be a guest author sub-forum for article discussion?
Hey… if we have to go to another site to make comments on the articles, no way am I going to do this…it was so convenient…
this site is different than the others…YOU ARE MAKING A HUGE ASS MISTAKE…we ALL learn from these comments…sure some are worthless…YOU HAVE REDUCED the QUALITY of this site by this action and many are extremely disappointed…
Such is life…
Rather than auto-populating the forum with a thread for every article, let the forum users decide which articles they want to discuss.
The Article Discussion forum wouldn’t seem so barren then.
[quote]Chris Shugart wrote:
[quote]MattyG35 wrote:
Not sure if you’ve thought of implementing this or not, but iIf that’s the course of action, then I would suggest a forum dedicated to article discussion.[/quote]
We did that before. No one used it. [/quote]
I noticed it didn’t get used a lot, but when it did it was fantastic. By memory the 10,000 kettlebell challenge and also that gazillion pullup program for bigger biceps had great multi page threads with lots of insight from people who tried the program and gave feedback. I guess due to the volume of articles, expecting that kind of feedback for each one is not really possible.
Im quite disappointed in the elimination of the livespill. There was generally very good discussions on there and rarely anything that would be considered trolling. I dont expect we will see many authors replying to questions anymore.
Sorry Chris, you lost me at the word “Facebook”…
I noticed they added a link to the Facebook comments for those on FB.
[quote]usmccds423 wrote:
I noticed they added a link to the Facebook comments for those on FB. [/quote]
I did too, and looked, and it’s painful to read.
For every actual comment, you also have a line that says “Like Reply Thumbs-Up X Hours”. Even excluding that noise, it’s still very low information density relative to the LiveSpills.
I mean, I realize there’s been a few debates recently in the LiveSpills, and a few cases where readers blatantly disagreed with the content, but most of the time there was actual discussion.
Personally, I like the idea of a forum thread created for each article (like way back when), with that being the only avenue for discussion. When you had the choice of a forum thread OR the LiveSpill, nobody saw a need to use the forum.
I think there were problems with the LiveSpill approach, because of multi-part replies, frequent double-posting, and it was very hard to quote and reply to someone. The forum format makes that quite a bit easier.
My two cents.
This is BS, went on to facebook and the comment section was full of people talking about random nonsense. I know you are probably trying to appeal to a greater audience, but trying to find the great info you provided before will now be like finding a needle in a haystack. Thank you to the coaches(CT,Jim W etc) for maintaining your forums and my sanity
Dear editors: Much of the power of your online asset is the dedicated, dare I say fervent involvement of a large number of knowledgeable members. They ask and help answer questions that come from their collective experience and many times involve detailed and nuanced responses that take time. This community of un-paid super users are very comfortable in the world you have created here on the T-Nation web site. I strongly suggest that they will not migrate to the saccharine one-liner world of FB and other social media sites.
In my opinion (as a new user who is much more of a receiver than dispenser of knowledge), the suggestion that many have already made of linking each article to its own discussion thread, preferably in an article-discussion forum makes the most sense .
I do agree that it makes sense to remove LiveSpill as it is a bit duplicative. It is just that FB is not the logical replacement - especially when you have such a powerful asset in the forums.
Thank you for this site and your products.
[quote]LoRez wrote:
[quote]usmccds423 wrote:
I noticed they added a link to the Facebook comments for those on FB. [/quote]
I did too, and looked, and it’s painful to read.
For every actual comment, you also have a line that says “Like Reply Thumbs-Up X Hours”. Even excluding that noise, it’s still very low information density relative to the LiveSpills.
I mean, I realize there’s been a few debates recently in the LiveSpills, and a few cases where readers blatantly disagreed with the content, but most of the time there was actual discussion.
Personally, I like the idea of a forum thread created for each article (like way back when), with that being the only avenue for discussion. When you had the choice of a forum thread OR the LiveSpill, nobody saw a need to use the forum.
I think there were problems with the LiveSpill approach, because of multi-part replies, frequent double-posting, and it was very hard to quote and reply to someone. The forum format makes that quite a bit easier.
My two cents.[/quote]
I definitely like the forum approach better. At the end of the day it isn’t a big deal to me personally, but I do think it’s a step in the wrong direction. One of the reasons I like this site and these forums so much is because they’ve typically stayed away from following social trends. It’s always been about presenting the best information and products without the BS, from my perspective. The access to authors was a great feature you just don’t get in other places. I mean, the other day I gave a world record holding IFBB Pro a hard time about the pink dumbbells in his house, which he thought was funny. You just don’t get that anywhere else in my experience.
I’ve always seen T-Nation more as a locker room than anything else and other rival sites more like FB (garbage imo). Ultimately I understand it’s a business decision though, which I can dig.
Facebook issues:
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You are no longer anon if you want to comment.
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a lot of the comments are crap.
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half of the damn comments/posts are of people tagging other people.
I don’t think every article needs an automatic threads because not every article needs to or does get discussed; however, I do think it would be great to have a specific sub-forum for article discussion (as I suggested earlier). For example, I would think a lot of the female posters and many of the male posters here would want to discuss the most recent Dani Shugart article.
It’s the type of article that could generate a lot of back and forth, but where would you do that? GAL, no to many meme’s & jokes. It doesn’t really fit in any of the Biotest forums. Maybe BSL, maybe Bodybuilding, maybe Figure Athlete, but then if you don’t regularity look through those sub-forums you’ll probably miss it. You’ll also probably get duplicates.
Idk, just my thoughts.
[quote]xXSeraphimXx wrote:
Facebook issues:
-
You are no longer anon if you want to comment.
-
a lot of the comments are crap.
-
half of the damn comments/posts are of people tagging other people.[/quote]
I wish it had a thumbs down button for stupid comments. You’d have to make up a whole new anonymous profile, if you didn’t want the whole world to know your questions or comments. Not in a trolling way, but let’s say T-Nation did an article on Low T and lifting. Do you think people on here would want to comment on Facebook?
Then again SAMA on Facebook would be pretty funny
Put a link at the end of article to go directly to the forum discussion. The nature of most articles is for readers to ask questions. This is not a political or social debate that takes off into the endless troll postings.