Non-HTLAL is too good to let die.

Discuss the LLORG's and HTLAL forum's past and its future here.
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arthaey
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Re: Non-HTLAL is too good to let die.

Postby arthaey » Tue Oct 20, 2015 4:49 pm

Daniel N. wrote:Maybe this would illustrate the data above, all years compared:

Image

Oh. So there has always been an October/November slump...
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Re: Non-HTLAL is too good to let die.

Postby sctroyenne » Tue Oct 20, 2015 5:35 pm

iguanamon wrote:
rdearman wrote:Something I have noticed, is a marked decline in new beginner members. We just don't seem to be attracting them anymore. Whether that is due to more information about language-learning in general being available, a general decline in interest in language-learning, a movement away from forums in general, difficulty in finding the new forum, or some combination of all these factors is not readily apparent to me. Sure, answering the same questions, over and over again gets old after a while but nowadays we rarely see them at all.


I wonder about this stuff too. I wonder if language learning was a general blogger "fad" for a while that has kind of passed. I remember there were tons of personal development blogs a few years ago on productivity and things like language learning - I wonder if they've moved on to other personal development projects (or if it was just me who moved on). I'd also be interested to see forum membership and activity compared to, say, Reddit's which I suspect has been replacing specialty forums among young people for a lot of subject areas.
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Re: Non-HTLAL is too good to let die.

Postby Montmorency » Tue Oct 20, 2015 8:52 pm

arthaey wrote:
Daniel N. wrote:Oh. So there has always been an October/November slump...


And what is it that happens towards the end of the year?

People winding down from work, other study, and other activities, spending more time indoors in the warm, and anticipating language-related presents?

(Although even that was apparently dropping off in recent years).

....

BTW, does anyone know how busy Benny's forum is these days? I was rather surprised to find after I joined it that it was rather quieter than HTLAL was at that time - some years back.

....

I'm wondering if forums generally are not as popular as they once were. Do they not work all that well on small portable devices? I haven't followed that trend myself (at least not for now), but I realise that most of the world does seem to have gone that way. I've also noticed that this trend has affected emails. They seems to be shorter, and some people seem to have moved off email altogether, or largely, or if they still have it, are rather resistant to using it much. Don't quite understand it myself, but I'm clearly not in touch with the Zeitgeist.
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Re: Non-HTLAL is too good to let die.

Postby t123 » Tue Oct 20, 2015 9:19 pm

Obvious spikes in December and January when TAC is organised.

February outage:
"3603","2015-01"
"2377","2015-02"
"1212","2015-03"

June outage:

"3952","2014-05"
"2624","2014-06"
"2231","2014-07"
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Re: Non-HTLAL is too good to let die.

Postby tomgosse » Tue Oct 20, 2015 9:41 pm

sctroyenne wrote:I wonder about this stuff too. I wonder if language learning was a general blogger "fad" for a while that has kind of passed. I remember there were tons of personal development blogs a few years ago on productivity and things like language learning - I wonder if they've moved on to other personal development projects (or if it was just me who moved on). I'd also be interested to see forum membership and activity compared to, say, Reddit's which I suspect has been replacing specialty forums among young people for a lot of subject areas.

While I hope this forum isn't a fad, there are subjects or interests that become very hot for a while then cool off. I belong to a Yahoo group called VideoBlogging. Ten years ago they were getting almost 3000 posts a month. They have had only four posts this year.

Everyone wanted to be a podcaster, vlogger, or the next YouTube star. Then they found out that it was a lot of hard work and lost interest. I imagine that the same thing happens with language learning. I know that it happens to me and I need to fight to keep up my studies.

Montmorency wrote:And what is it that happens towards the end of the year?

People winding down from work, other study, and other activities, spending more time indoors in the warm, and anticipating language-related presents?

(Although even that was apparently dropping off in recent years).


People return to school. Their children return to school. School activities start up.
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Re: Non-HTLAL is too good to let die.

Postby Serpent » Tue Oct 20, 2015 11:13 pm

Yep, TAC and New Year resolutions.
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Re: Non-HTLAL is too good to let die.

Postby iguanamon » Wed Oct 21, 2015 12:24 am

TAC starts off like gangbusters. People are really excited in December about joining a team and who the team members will be. Next comes a big discussion about the leader and name of the team followed by another discussion about "challenges". Inevitably by mid February most of the teams are moribund with next to no activity. The New Year Resolution people also follow a similar pattern. I don't want to be a downer but I don't see much "total annihilation" in TAC. Then again, "Let's be consistent in language learning and have some fun with other people who will help motivate me and try to keep me honest", though a more appropriate description, it isn't as cool sounding as a Total Annihilation Challenge. Still, if TAC gets people into the forum and even a few decide to stay, that's great.

I, too, don't want to see the forum be primarily for beginners. Neither do I want to see it be for serious discussion only. We need a good mix of both. Another observation I've had is that discussion on the forum (going back to the last few years of HTLAL) has largely moved to personal logs. This is both good and bad. It's good because we get to see people's techniques in action. We can read someone's log and find resources and reviews of such resources. We can see what helps to learn a language... and also, sometimes what doesn't. If it hadn't been for emk's log, I would have never used comic books (BD's) at all because I used to believe them to be "not worthy". It can be bad because the value of our logs aren't readily obvious from their titles alone as useful to new members.

Perhaps, some beginners don't see the value in reading the logs because maybe they are studying Spanish and "how can a French log help me?". This attitude may even exist with some veteran members. I believe that because most forum discussion is taking place in the logs and when someone new sees our log titles in "Active Topics" there's nothing there to really attract someone's attention who is new to language-learning. We can see our own activity of posting. My own activity says that 38% of my time is spent in logs and it is my most active room of the forum. My breakdown within that room is about 60% other people's logs and 40% my own. I bet that "logs" is the most popular room of the forum, for most of us veterans.

Some people use a log as their own personal blogging platform and others use it as an actual detail log recording their weekly/daily activities and many others mix in both. I don't know, I'm just thinking off the top of my head, but I feel this is some of the reason for post activity declining. In order to find out what the logs are about, one must actually read them, sort through them and then follow them regularly. Some people aren't willing to go to that much trouble to glean the goodies, whereas; if one sees a descriptive post title, like "How to do X", it is more likely to get a click and be of interest rather than "The iguana's tale". What does "ES, PT, HC, LAD" mean and who is this iguanamon anyway? I wonder if the predominance of personal logs may be some part of the reason for a decline in posting. Perhaps an article titled "How to use the forum to learn a language" could help to explain to people the value in starting their own log and reading those of others. As I said, I'm just talking off the top of my head here.
Last edited by iguanamon on Wed Oct 21, 2015 11:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Non-HTLAL is too good to let die.

Postby garyb » Wed Oct 21, 2015 10:38 am

At the moment it seems to me that the newbies are still landing on HTLAL while most of the long-term members have moved away. In the last couple of months it's mostly topics from new members that I'm seeing there. I suppose that's for the reasons already mentioned: it's a long-established forum and there are more links there from other sources, and also for the static content outside the forum. Like many others, I was looking for information on language learning, I found the static site, and just happened to see that there was also an active forum. The current situation is a bit of a shame since it's like one site for the newbies and another for the older members, but hopefully that will change over time as this one becomes more established.

Forums are a bit old-fashioned these days but they do have their place. Aside from a few mainstream successes like Facebook and its predecessors, online discussion and social networking has always been a niche thing. It's already been discussed that forums like this tend to attract certain types of language learner. A little while ago there was a topic on "why are so many language learners programmers?" but what they really meant was "why are so many language learning forum members programmers?" - because forums attract the same sort of analytical people who aren't necessarily representative of language learners as a whole. Of course it's a generalisation, but most of the language learners I've met, including very successful ones, aren't "Internet types" don't really see the appeal or feel the need for a site like this.

Interesting post by iguanamon, I also mostly come here for the logs, I enjoy reading and writing about experiences of learning and using languages and I find it useful. However, these logs are again the kind of thing that many learners probably just don't see the point in; they might be more interested in practical advice and the emphasis on logs could be off-putting. On HTLAL I also found that the logs could feel a bit cliquey, the same few old-timers commenting on each other's logs and ignoring the rest, but I feel that much less on this new forum.

I've gotten a lot out of these forums, in particular discovering the existence of Assimil and seeing a wider range and balance of opinions on things like input vs. output than you do from blogs or books that just present one author's ideas. But at the same time I do wonder if I'm getting much out of the forum for the time I spend on it or if I'd be better spending that time actually studying - again, lots of people learn languages well without spending hundreds of hours researching and discussing learning methods, and even those who do all the research and discussion often seem to have underwhelming results to show for it. Again this might be something that puts people off, they'd rather learn languages than talk about learning languages.

Anyway this is all just my thoughts and they probably aren't very relevant to the original question of how to maintain and increase the site's popularity, which is a matter of making more of the people who would already be interested in a site like this actually find it. I'm not sure, part of me thinks that with enough good content it should grow by itself but part of me thinks there needs to be more focus on getting the message out, and there have been some interesting ideas.
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Re: Non-HTLAL is too good to let die.

Postby Serpent » Wed Oct 21, 2015 3:23 pm

Montmorency wrote:I'm wondering if forums generally are not as popular as they once were. Do they not work all that well on small portable devices? I haven't followed that trend myself (at least not for now), but I realise that most of the world does seem to have gone that way. I've also noticed that this trend has affected emails. They seems to be shorter, and some people seem to have moved off email altogether, or largely, or if they still have it, are rather resistant to using it much. Don't quite understand it myself, but I'm clearly not in touch with the Zeitgeist.

They work fine imo, but people seem to prefer getting all their entertainment/communication/news from central sources like facebook, twitter, to some extent instagram, tumblr, pinterest. The email thing varies and for those who don't use gmail it may be due to spam overload.

Makes me wonder if login via twitter/facebook/open ID is available for forums. I'm one of the people who hate creating new accounts for every site, so I love the simplicity of this.
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Re: Non-HTLAL is too good to let die.

Postby Brun Ugle » Wed Oct 21, 2015 5:44 pm

One thing I've seen mentioned several times is that both this and the old forum are mostly comprised of Europeans and North-Americans. It would be nice with more diversity, but then, we have to make it more accessible to those who don't speak English well. Having menus in other languages is a great start, but it would be nice if natives and advanced speakers of other languages posted more content in those languages. It might make the forum more interesting to more people. Maybe we could also then recommend the site to language exchange partners and gradually attract a more international membership.

I also agree that a lot of interesting discussion goes on in logs. I would love to read them all, but then I wouldn't have time to learn anything. What I think we should do is, when we see someone has an interesting idea or method in their log, let them know that they should share it. There are probably plenty of people just puttering along learning languages and quietly posting about it in their logs who don't even realize how great their techniques are. When you see something like that, just give the person a nudge and tell them to post a thread on the technique where everyone will see it. That way we could perhaps generate more open and lively discussion like in the old days.

I'd also like to see static content, maybe language guides and clear descriptions of techniques. The wiki is OK, but the descriptions are usually very brief and superficial. But going to HTLAL to find out something will have you stuck in an endless web of threads, as I discovered when I tried to find out more about how to use Assimil.
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