Ask Asian Junkie: What do you think about allkpop threatening to shut their forums down?

Don’t call it a comeback.

Hey there Asian Junkie!

I’m really enjoying the editorials on your site so far! Both troll and serious.

I wanna fuck you too.

Anyway, my question concerns 6Theory and Allkpop. What do you think of 6theory threatening to shut down it’s forums, and then completely revamping it in response to the “vulgarity” occurring on the boards (http://i.imgur.com/tvOAG.png). Could this change give allkpop a drop in users/bad rep, or (as you said in a previous article) will it not really matter since allkpop was never really forum-centric nor had a good rep in the first place.

Honestly, I don’t visit their forums at all, so I didn’t know this was even happening.

I previously tackled the issue of how allkpop and Soompi see their forums completely differently, and as you said, allkpop has never been forum centric.

As of right now, allkpop’s forums are back up and the format has been revamped, but if they did shut it down, I think they ran the risk of having their forum users migrate to Soompi and eventually start using Soompi’s news department with increasing frequency.

That said, forums suck from an investment perspective. They’re difficult to monetize without making them useless, but yet they take up a ton of traffic and storage, usually filled with inane banter. Plus you have to deal with users and moderators and all of that shit, and none of it makes you money, so it can be a headache. That’s not even mentioning the potential legal issues if some shitty company gets ass hurt over shit your users started sharing on your forums.

It’s a necessary evil because the users want a place to bond and rant and shit, and allkpop gives it to them because the risk of having them do that elsewhere is probably too great to just ignore, but as you can see by the bare bones nature of the forum (compared to that of Soompi), it exists begrudgingly, and I don’t blame them for not caring about it.

Quite frankly, most of the time forum users act like they are entitled to having a forum, and as such they just shit all over it, which is a reason I don’t want to make one of my own despite requests to do so. I side with the companies who run these forums, because to me, they are more of a headache than they’re worth.

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