I have to admit I’m a bit sad. The Wam was the first HiFi forum I really liked and felt at home at. I always thought of it as the Punk HiFi forum.
I learned a lot and mostly ignored what I had learned, but most importantly I had fun. Lots of fun. It was great!
When @FatCuntTroller sold it, I thought it might be ok, having met Anthony, but I didn’t have a clue how much of an actual cunt MVJ was…
But that led to the Abattoir being created and I absolutely love it here.
I’ve lurked over there for years since the night of the long knives, was amazed that the forum was sold again, went full potato (several times) at Pet Food Pete and then found out it was actually owned by his sugar mummy.
When they split up the writing was obviously on the wall, and kudos to Danny and the rest of the admin team for nursing it along to the bitter end. It must have been really shit trying to keep a pretty big forum going with no tech support.
Sad days.
But for me the Wam ended when this place was formed.
Since then we have moved even further away. I have had a look at the new entity and even signed up.
However I hadn’t really realised how post hifi we are.
For most of us we know where we are at and even if we buy something new or upgrade it is not really a suprise.
I really can’t go back to heavy moderation and cable threads.
Good luck to the new venture and I will be going to the show but I am at home in my cunty slippers here.
Funnily enough , I only tried to go on the Wam yesterday as I’ve finally stepped up the search for an amplifier. Just assumed it was a temporary glitch.
It’s sad to see something that was fueled with passion dwindle and pass.
Web boards in general have taken quite a knock with the rise of social media (Designed to be entertaining / fan groups / more user friendly / endorphin manipulative etc)
It seems to be second nature to google for answers / seek information which in some ways detracts from the need of community sharing too. Having a niche forum can get repetitive fast, mix that with too many rules / advertising / mismanagement / tech issues and people drift.
I’m grateful for the Wam. I learned and laughed there but more than that made friends at bake offs and Scalford - These things had community spirit, they were cool. It also led to AA, I’ve not been back since the split so to me it died a fair while ago
Sad to see the death by a thousand cuts of what was once a fabulously entertaining community
For me it was the people, bake offs and Salford that made the place stand out from the rest. Forever grateful to the people I met through the wam, who helped broaden my understanding of what is possible in music playback and helped me build my system/understanding over the years
I pretty much stopped going there other than for the classifieds when the agro started and pleased I didn’t watch the demise too closely
As a response to it gurgling down the plughole of the internet, I sort of agree. All things must pass. Buuuut, without it, I would not have met the St Albans society for reduced car use* and the other manifest twitching personality disorders made flesh that populate this site and that some of whom I meet in person regularly.
As @Ruprecht said, forums and usergroups are on the wane in general and while the clout of what is replacing them is bigger, it’s considerably less personal. A great many once thriving forums are now just a cobweb infested FB page. We do at least have our own virtual equivalent of the local pub too ropey to justify being done up.**
*By making heavy use of everyone else’s
** For as long as @TMC can keep his digits away from the big red button anyway.
That sort of leads into my view, which is that HFWW binning itself is like a pub that was your local closing down several years after Spoons took it over.
Still makes JamPal look more like a business genius in that he actually managed to sell someone people’s internet loyalty for money.
I cancelled my monthly payment yesterday I suspect it is dead now.
It is a shame as I’ve made so many great friends and attended so many bake offs because of the Wam.
Should have never been in the ownership of people who didn’t really care or understand about what it really was.
Watching the Linn twats go into apoplectic meltdown over the fact Maverick won’t give them their own dedicated Linn Owners Forum was quite amusing in a car crash way
The complete lack of awareness of the effort to build a forum or sense of entitlement was both astounding and hilarious
I wouldn’t write off the Wam just yet though, it will be sat there in a coma and she may well decide to be well shot and just give it away.
The moment profiteering or advertising (as a functional necessity) come into view things change, rules happen, expectations occur and fun leaves the building. Being fully self supporting really is the only way to retain any form of authenticity and freedom. You can measure the strength of a forums perceived ‘worth’ to it’s members by how readily people are willing to throw coins in the meter.
'Twas a good place until it didn’t suit, the filthy lucre can so easily suck the joy out of anything.
As for forum demise in general, I’ve noticed changes when it comes to the Landy money pit hobby. The forums have a few contributors, are monetised and still use antiquated software (translated, i still need a course in how to upload a pic on them). Most young people on them are on Insta, using FB groups to advertise their Insta and are monetised with a mere 1000 followers, hashtagged to fuck with manufacturers. Sycophantic dullards, it’s a generational thing I guess.
FB groups look old fashioned and anything you post on them is tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapping. Blogs are hard work and need to be monetised, very few get it right.
Think I’ll move to Insta as a way of sharing minus the FB advertising, Oh, and actually carry on meeting people, which is nice.
By rights, it should be statistically unlikely that someone in the LR community manages to increase their clout by soft pornifying their account but based on- checks notes - every single other group on Insta, it’s going to happen.
Highly unlikely I would have thought, The Wam is a commercial entity and needs to break even at least, without income from the show and advertising it will just die, even Linn couldn’t make their own forum work.
Linn killed the forum as it was becoming a massive embarrassment to them (the former Linn product manager now works for my brother and had some interesting things to say about the old Linn forum)
