I've noticed this too. It seems part of the problem is that most of the active threads are about trivia like "Have you met anyone interesting online?". A lot of the remaining threads are essentially event related.

There really isn't all that much to discuss in these threads, so Yehoodi is going through a "not much to see here ... go home" phase. A lot of people who were Yehoodi regulars a year ago seem to have found something else to occupy their time with.

It may not just be Yehoodi. A lot of Internet discussion boards have lost a lot of people to social networking sites like Facebook. I'm not sure why. There's no cohesive sense of common interest in most social networking sites like this ... just networks of "friends following friends", which can be quite random.

Or is it possible that the Internet has just been a passing fad and lots of people have moved on to the next big thing? I'd ask, but not too many people seem to be around online these days. Except maybe on Facebook ... but that's like trying to interact with just about everyone in the U.S. or making random calls to everybody in your address book.

Did somebody say something?

I'll take this to mean people want more pictures of me posted.

No Beckto curry goes up YOUR nose.

hahaha

blame facebook...

rt;dr

Beckto, Eff said you just lay there and took it.

I actually disagree with this. I haven't been bothered by Maisie, et al. in some time. It isn't the people on Yehoodi at all, it's the system we're expected to interact on.

The 3.0 switch - it's got a lot of plusses, but the biggest minus is that it's not a tech that fosters the kinds of interactions that lead people to post and create community. 2.0, for whatever reason, felt more like a public square. This feels more like a list of topics we can comment on.

And that's important. Whether RM likes it or not, Yehoodi was a tool for social networking long before Facebook and co. ever existed, and it was an effective tool (at least 2.0 was). Now that 3.0 is here and it's a far weaker message board/social networking tool than 2.0 was, it no longer really makes sense to use it when things like Facebook fulfill the same function for most people. I see no end of picture posts and recaps with tons of comments and discussion from big swing events on my FB feed, so clearly the dancers are out there and interacting and making connections, they're just no longer doing it on Yehoodi. It makes me sad, but them's the breaks.

I think Yehoodi could benefit by evolving into a different kind of social networking tool than Facebook and the like. Perhaps some of this can be done with only minor technical modifications.

The problem with Facebook and its cousins is they are social networking tools without any particular community focus. Yehoodi at its best is a social networking tool based on a community whose members have at least one thing in common.

The problem is that successful "community focused" social networking sites have user interfaces that make it easy for special interest groups using the site to create "special interest areas" of the site by starting new discussion groups that contain their own discussion threads.

The thing that prevents this from happening yet on Yehoodi is that the creation of forums is top-down, not bottom-up. For example, a number of people in the NYC area have expressed regret that their regional forum disappeared with the upgrade. If members of Yehoodi had the power to create new forums on their own (perhaps in a section of the browse area separate from the list of Yehoodistrator created forums), in all probability some New Yorker would create one and people would post to it.

One thing that other social networking sites that allow bottom-up member-created forums/groups often do is to make these member-created forums/groups moderated. The creator of the forum/group automatically becomes the moderator of the forum/group and has the power to approve membership in the forum/group and delete posts that don't belong there. Although this power can be abused, I haven't seen much of that in the social networking site of this type I belong to.