Why Forums are Better than Facebook
Entry posted by Son of Samurai in Tech Talk
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Unlike when we first started Appliantology, the Internet is now full of appliance repair support resources. From Facebook groups to subreddits to Voxer and Telegram groups, you've got your pick of the litter when it comes to what flavor you'd like.
Are there advantages to using a private forum-based site like Appliantology over the social media plantations? You betcha: Privacy and Functionality
Feeding Big Brother
All the Big Tech social media sites have one thing in common: they are free because they harvest your data.
So nothing is really free-- you're paying for it one way or another. Ever wonder how it is that these Big Tech social media plantations with their thousands of employees and huge server expenses are offered to you free of charge? It's not just advertising.
Here's how commerce on the internet works: if you're not paying for it, YOU are the product. Specifically, your data. They are monitoring and logging everything you do on their sites or with their apps. It's not just every post-- every click, every "like," every post or story you linger on and for long-- it's all being logged to build a profile of you. Your network of family, friends, contacts, and interest groups are logged and fed into an AI system. Data is the new oil.
When you use these Big Tech plantations, you are literally feeding the future AI technocracy system consisting of social credit scores (think China), central bank digital currency (CDBC) where every transaction is logged, approved/disapproved in real-time with zero privacy, and predictive policing based on what you might do in the future based on their digital profile of you. Some of this is already deployed. The rest is coming soon... unless people stop feeding the beast and leave the Big Tech plantations.
We don't do any of that at Appliantology. Your data is private and none of our business. We wouldn't know what to do with it even if we wanted it. But we still have real server costs and expenses for running the site. That's why there's a membership fee.
Functionality: Information Organization
As an information tool, Appliantology has big functional advantages over the Big Tech platforms. When we're talking about a tech help resource, what we're really talking about is an information tool. A tool's effectiveness relies upon its comprehensiveness, retrievability of information, and ease of use. So the question becomes which of these platforms works the best as an appliance repair tech support resource?
Since I'm writing this blog post on Appliantology, it's going to be no surprise to any of you that I think a forum to be the most useful (and benevolent) platform for organized and effective tech help. Here's why...
Modern social media is all designed around algorithms that decide what they think you want to see. And these are pretty complex algorithms, too -- but they're all geared toward keeping you scrolling, not necessarily on providing you with the most useful information. This is due to the fact that social media is not designed as an information tool. These sites are just crudely repurposed for this use. They favor popularity over all else, so content quickly becomes unorganized and difficult to find once you start digging through content that's less recent or has less activity.
Forums, on the other hand, are organized very simply. Each individual topic has its own discrete entry -- called, intuitively, a topic. And each topic is organized in its forum based on simple chronology. Whichever topic has been posted in most recently shows up at the top, followed by the second most recent, and so on.
The same chronological listing applies to inside each topic, keeping the flow of the technical discussion as clear as possible.
And if you're not finding the chronological listing of topics to be the most helpful, you can modify it as you wish -- but again, this is completely under your control. Topics won't disappear or move to places unexpectedly; it's all under your control.
Information Retention and Searching
Another feature social media platforms generally lack is a robust and precise search engine. A good search bar needs to let you ask for exactly what you want to see and how you want to see it.
This is not just a nice feature to have. It is essential in order for information to be meaningfully preserved. The fact is that if you encounter an appliance repair issue, odds are someone else has encountered it before and figured it out. If that person used a platform like a Facebook group to get help from his fellow techs, the record of that repair is going to be lost to the digital ages after not too long. That platform simply doesn't prioritize keeping older conversations easily viewable for posterity.
On the other hand, on a forum like Appliantology, all information is stored in a completely searchable format, and the search itself gives you all the options you could want to narrow down your search to find exactly what you want.
Need more precision? Never fear, there are even more options in the advanced search page:
If your tech support resource doesn't have all of these features that I've outlined, it's not the best information tool out there. You can do better!
Here at Appliantology, we've been devoted for over two decades to providing the best appliance repair support site in the universe -- and we're not stopping anytime soon. If you want to get access to our tech-only peer to peer help forums, massive service manual repository, and 100+ hours of technical education videos, click here to become a member today.
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