h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm packing up, although I'm not leaving. My problem is that if I do come back after a months' absence, I can't find any conversations that might be relevant to me, because they're under other conversations that I don't care for (At least I wasn't subscribed to Ask, eh!).

The upshot of this is that I've unsubscribed all of my friends, along with most other things, like Community Events and so on. If you want to talk to me or hear my opinion, write to me on my Space. Now I've unsubscribed to other things, I might even be able to see the conversation in my list!

No offence is meant to anyone, and I'm still avaliable at laura_sheep at hotmail dot com for email and IM.

Speak to you all soon,

All my love,

Laura x x x

Yeah, I had exactly the same problem, which is one of the reasons I haven't been around h2g2 for years...

Ah well. Are you on LJ? Have we already had this conversation?

I am indeed on LJ (tintintin), and yes, I suspect we have had this conversation in the past.

I've been LJing more than anything for more than a year. For some reason I came back here the other day and just had at it. What I did was just start going through my friends list and poking my head into conversations. I'm not yet buzzing like I used to, but I'm not sure I want to. And if I do, I've only made it through about a tenth of the people on the list. I guess one reassuring thing, and maybe why I came back, was that people will happily pick up loving you where they left off. Yeah yeah, I'm lonely and pathetic.

People are accomodating, that is true, but I think LJ is satisfying me a lot more than h2g2- after all, all we did was talk before, right? I've only managed to get one Edited Entry in my three... four? years here. It's a shame, I feel like I'm desterting. But really, the Guide itself has been supplanted by Wiki, and the community by LJ.

Ah, tintintin... yes, we have definitely had this conversation before. I like your Spiderman icons.

Heh! I've just retired one or two of them, as they've been my icons for a while. Prior to that, I had the sentient bomb from DARK STAR as my main icon.

I need a new one...if Njan would upload our fricking pictures i would have many interesting choices :P

"But really, the Guide itself has been supplanted by Wiki, and the community by LJ."

...and that would be the nail being hit squarely upon the head. The basic architecture of h2g2 is now, what, over 6 years old? It was groundbreaking, and remarkably robust and expandable, but in terms of message-boards and community setups online, it's been hopelessly outstripped. In terms of content, Wiki beats it hands down - h2g2 has always struggled to define itself; it's not sure if it wants to be a comedy guide, a la Douglas Adams (which would be disastrous, as most of the users just can't produce consistently funny stuff), or a factual resource, which also doesn't work as Wiki's functionality and versatility is infinitely superior for that purpose.

Also, there's the real sword-of-damocles thing that has always hung over h2g2, which is "precisely what is the point?" I mean, there's no way it could ever really be translated into a commercial venture, short of forcing users to pay subscription fees, which would basically just make it a fan site or yet another online forum, but one in which you don't own any content and are proactively moderated even to the point of not being able to swear...

It's living on borrowed time, IMHO, especially considering that the 'Cult' part of BBCi has folded... Once the Hikers movie DVD has been and gone, I suspect that the place may start to be wound up, and the users shunted onto a more broad-based DNA hub forum...

Well, no reason to get upset just yet... I am merely indulging in idle speculation. If the Beeb's servers are capacious enough, there's no reason for them to scrap the whole thing and jeopardise the goodwill of potentially thousands of users...

Besides, what would the like of Pheloxi and Gnomon do? They've got to consider the implications!