You're getting me worried, about the changes which are happening here.
I'm absolutely NOT a facebook fan kind of person.
It happened to another forum. I won't mention its name here. But they went from a nice/neat open plan, forum, to a horrible messy, point scoring, expert only sectioned, massive eye hurting, mess-up.
I almost have to squint my eyes, when ever I see it, and I just ignore the silly/crazy points schemes, multi-faceted likes (many types selectable on there), and one or more sections is for EXPERT replies only. They also added up/down voting things.
But I don't mind, there are still many places available, around the internet, to find out about things.
I think they had a change of management, which was probably why things changed. They were probably more concerned about maximizing views, advertising and hence profitability.
If I understand things correctly, the users in general, hated the new schemes, and said so. But the admin teams, seemed to ignore all the complaints, and just did whatever they wanted to.
On the one hand it is their forum, they can do what they like. But on the other, the best users probably disappeared, and the less useful members remained. But maybe the forum was getting less and less popular anyway, as I suppose times change.
I think I'd read things on that forum less and less, anyway, a long while, before the changes. But I was amazed at how bad a forum can be messed up, with a change of management and various changes they make.
As I see it. It is like the modern freemium games. With paid micro-transactions. Whereby once good games, with sensible one-off game purchase pricing, became expensive horrible freemium ones.
tl;dr
Not all changes are good. It's not my forum, but a thread asking what we think, seems to have been created. So I'll leave my opinions.
On reflection, I think I'm being significantly too pessimistic, in my outlook. I.e. Making a mountain out of a molehill.
