I think that the cg society is gone, I see great works with few views, cg society is irrelevant today, unfortunately. I may be mistaken, but that’s the impression I get.
Irrelevant
Tiles
#2
I would not call it irrelevant. It has just become a niche platform. Like many other forums. In the good old days a forum was the only way to forge a community and to provide valuable informations. But now we have Instagram, Artstation, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube …
sacboi
#3
Indeed, although generally social media in my opinion tend too provide a somewhat ‘casual’ point of view so if one was to pursue an explicit aligned perspective, discord and slack would often supplement alongside those online communities ccurrently with an engaged active membership, when seeking and/or sharing feedback.
Tiles
#4
Discord is really a thing nowadays. My forum looks dead. But my discord community is happily growing and highly active …
Srek
#5
I fear this is correct. Compared to the first ten years of CG Talks / Societies existence the current state is a muddy shadow. I do not have the feeling that the owners are actually much interested in making it better. They updated the technical platform, which was long due, but neglected the community. The active forum leaders, many renowned business pros, that made this a helpfull community are long gone and so is the spirit of community.
Tiles
#7
It is imho not this simple. The leadership may be a nail in the coffin. But i have seen the relevance of forums fading away in all areas. As told, i have a forum running. And my users prefers to use Discord instead. I am also still active in lots of other forums. And the active usership has dramatically decreased nearly everywhere. A community lives from its users. And most prefer other platforms nowadays if available.
Srek
#8
For Cinema 4D there are still active forum communities alive, mostly due to the forums owners and mods being very active. Artstation is another example for a successful non social media CG platform. Yes social media and other new channels take their toll, but it does not have to be as bad as here.
Crotalis
#9
SrekSome guy1h
For Cinema 4D there are still active forum communities alive, mostly due to the forums owners and mods being very active. Artstation is another example for a successful non social media CG platform. Yes social media and other new channels take their toll, but it does not have to be as bad as here.
I was going to say something similar. For a long time I was one of the people saying that this was happening to all forums to due Social Media, but I’ve come to the realization lately that this is incorrect. I am on a bunch of forums that have been around as long as this place has (some are CG related, some are not), and all of them are fairing very well except for this site and two others. One forum was hacked and the owner just walked away, and the other was Conceptart.org, which sort of just mismanaged itself into the ground.
But with the exceptions of those two places and CGSociety, the other 5 or 6 forums I regularly participate on are going very strong. I really think Srek is on to something when he talks about the original pros leaving and taking the heart and soul of the place with them. This used to be THE place where I sent newcomers to get info and ask questions, but now I no longer recommend it. I come here out of habit and a (possibly misplaced) sense of loyalty because I credit this site and those early pros with helping me get my career started and going on a good path, but I don’t post much. I’m just as likely to come here and see 5 spam posts about essay writing at the top of GD, or to go into a thread about a topic I’m actually a SME on only to be called an “idiot” by someone who’s never actually worked in the industry as I am to come here and find solid discourse anymore.
Running a site like this is no small feat. It is, at times, a monumental task, so by no means am I taking it lightly, but I do think the current leadership has kind of dropped the ball since taking over. Things just seem to be languishing, which is a really sad state of affairs considering how awesome this place once was.
sacboi
#10
Dedicated DCC app forums are a different category, in terms of active userbase. I know for example that the volume of traffic BlenderArtists attracts, especially over the past 12 / 18 month period alone has exponentially shot up, possibly due in part too an increased 2.8xx version adoption rate or simply just that more people are interested fostering a 3d art hobby since entry is 100% free and I definitely agree that this site is but a shadow of it’s former self although when I’d first joined back in 2013, activity was already beginning to falloff in comparison to the early 2000s when lurking around here and elsewhere for tidbits as a clueless noob.
Anyways, similarly to @Crotalis comment, I only now occasionally visit out of a sense of loyalty because this place for me paved the way toward exploring digital art, whether career or purely a desire to progress as a creative.
Srek
#12
I am not sure there is much that can be changed that would undo the damage.
A good start would be more responsiveness to requests and problems, getting any kind of answer from CG Society management is like pulling teeth, it shouldn’t be.
The biggest problem to me is the loss of pro forum leaders, something i don’t think is possible to fix. When new management took over and turned out to be nearly impossible to work with most form leaders left, i held out a bit longer than most, but i tolerate being ignored only for so long. Travis, who bought CG Society from the previous owners, promised to bring on seasoned industry pros to liven up the community, i don’t know if that happened lately, but it certainly did not happen for years after the takeover.
In the past it was the forum leaders that pushed the community by helping users, organizing competitions, especially things that went beyond the scope of single applications. While CG Society/CG Talk always had a strong focus on App specific sub forums the challenges brought everyone together and the leaders of the app forums did their part to increase visibility and participation. I don’t see anything like that anymore. It seems this is a collection of ever shrinking islands, not a community.
Crotalis
#13
Tiles
Just out of curiosity, what change do you think would be needed?
I often think about this. I’ve tried to come up with different things that could be done and would even be willing to volunteer to help make it happen, but honestly, I think @Srek nailed it.
He is one of the few of the “old guard” who still comes here so he’ll understand what I mean when I say that I think the loss of the original forum leaders was pretty damaging. I think a lot of people really underestimated what that was going to do. This was a very unique community and I’m not sure it can be recreated.
There was a vocal minority who really hated hearing things they didn’t want to hear, but a lot more of us really appreciated the signal to noise ratio the original leaders were able to maintain. When they left that went away, a lot of the people who had been complaining about the stricter nature of parts of the board got what they had been asking for, and it lead to where we are today, which is really disappointing. I’m not really sure what I would classify the current site as.
I wouldn’t recommend any new-to-the-industry, budding pros come here as, with a few exceptions, it’s largely inexperienced hobbyists giving the advice now. Which is fine except they will never tell you they’re not pros. At one point in 2018, I held the keys for hiring in a 200 person studio. I can tell you EXACTLY what you needed to do to get hired, stay hired, and excel. But during that time, if my answers didn’t involve Blender, or if my answers were things like “If you know Max and they want Maya, you need to learn Maya BEFORE you apply”, etc, I just got shouted down and called names so even I stopped giving advice. They’ve made it not worth it, so what you’re left with is people who have never worked in the industry just kicking around in an echo chamber.
I think, if anything were to work, it would probably be something like relaunching and attaching bigger names to the site. Travis (if he still owns the site - I don’t actually know) would probably need to use his contacts to attach some big names to the forum. For example, imagine what a character modelling sub-forum at least partially moderated by Jason Martin would look like. Problem is, a lot of those pros at that level don’t have time. The “original” mods were doing this out of love - convincing new mods to do it would be hard I think.
Next, once you had some “names” lined up, you would probably need to line up some consistent reasons to come here. Contests, chat with the pros, amas (the old "Meet the Artist series was amazing and it makes me sad that it’s gone and I never archived it), critique sessions, etc etc. You would also probably need to attach other forms of media to it. A CG Society podcast etc.
The classes that use to be offered through here were awesome as well. Robert Chang’s class literally changed my life and the trajectory of my career. Some of those got moved to the CGMA and some just got eliminated, but not having them HERE anymore also hurts. It was great to be in classes with people you knew form the forums and really increased the feeling of community. At one point when Travis took over, they were on the right track with some of this. The monthly membership that got you free assets and discounts, meet-ups and local CG Society chapters etc., but it all kind of just stopped when the old leadership walked.
All of this is so much work though, and right now it seems like current leadership is struggling to just prevent the top posts in some forums from being spam posts about essay writing, so they probably don’t have the bandwidth to handle a task that large, nor the money that would probably be needed for the marketing effort. Sadly. Were something like that to get put together, I’d be happy to help in whatever way I could, but I don’t even know if all of that would even do the trick.
EDIT:
As I posted the above and went back out to the main GD forum - 3 of the top posts are “Delete My Account” and the other one is this thread. I think that says a lot. Sadly. I keep expecting to come here one day and just find the site gone with no notice (like what happened w/conceptart.org), and if/when that day comes, I will be sad about it, but this place hasn’t been “this place” in a long long time.
Tiles
#14
Thank you both for the detailed answer and thoughts 
I was mainly interested in your opinions since i lead a small 3D community. And no matter what i did, the community got smaller and smaller over the years. For us the social media and youtube was definitely the killer. There you find all the answers nowadays.
But when the ones who drives the community leaves the ship , and the owners refuses to react, then this is of course a different chapter. Sad.
Crotalis
#15
Thank you both for the detailed answer and thoughts
I was mainly interested in your opinions since i lead a small 3D community. And no matter what i did, the community got smaller and smaller over the years. For us the social media and youtube was definitely the killer. There you find all the answers nowadays.
But when the ones who drives the community leaves the ship , and the owners refuses to react, then this is of course a different chapter. Sad.
Honestly, most of the forums I’m on that have remained relevant and successful are ones that have been around for ages and managed to maintain that original semblance of community. I think, where YouTube and Social Media do the damage is to preventing NEW forums from getting off the ground. So if your forum was made in the last 5-6 years, it probably had no chance regardless of how hard you worked.
cookepuss
#16
Datasettes. 5.25" floppy disks. 3.5" floppy disks. Zip drives. CDs. DVD. Blu-Ray. Flash drives. Cloud storage. I love dedicated forums and have enjoyed being both a member and working behind the scenes with them for nearly 23 years. However, time stands still for no one and the march of progress moves in just one direction, forward. I would no sooner “die” for a forum than I would the old school dial-up BBS newsgroups that preceded them, which I also loved. It’s just the way it is.
As people whose work is creative, but are still knee deep in the tech world, we know more than anybody else that nothing lasts forever. You have to keep moving and stay up to date. The moment you stop, you’re dead in the water. It’s the same reason why I don’t get attached to 3D apps and refuse to argue over which one is better. 25 years ago, I swore by Caligari trueSpace. 18 years ago, I swore by Cinema4D. 7 years ago, Maya was where it was all at for me. Today, Maya has to share HDD space with Blender, my new favorite. Today’s treasure is tomorrow’s trash. You can’t grow too attached.
The slow death for forums has been a long time coming. As people here have said, social media & the death of global comps have been instrumental. That’s true. Facebook now reaches 2.7 billion users world wide. No single forum has that reach. More over, the Great Recession largely killed global challenges some 8-10 years ago. It was a catch-22 situation. High traffic and membership drive competition sponsorship and prizes. However, without sponsorship and prizes, traffic and membership both take a nosedive. Global recession forced these companies to prioritize their resources. Competitions and forums paid the price.
It’s bigger than that though. It’s generational.
In 1997, I was 23 years old. Forums like Planet3DArt were the new “it” thing for CG art as social media hadn’t even been born yet. As a 23 year old, I would have scoffed at the BBSes that were common throughout the 80s and late 70s. They were “old man tech,” the stuff that my dad’s generation might have used. Why use BBSes where the wait between post & reply might sometimes be a week and your audience would be a few hundred people? Forums reached thousands or hundreds of thousands of members and you’d often get a reply within minutes or hours.
It’s 2020 now. I’m not 23 anymore. I’m 46. Even the well trafficked forums move too slowly by today’s standards. We have a generation that prefers more active content over pages of text. Gratification has to be nearly instantaneous to be considered valuable to some younger artists and media consumers. We’ll get to a point where it’ll be preemptive.
I’ll put it to you this way. My 8yo niece is a huge Roblox fan. During this summer’s quarantine, she got bored. She was tired of using somebody else’s content. She wanted to make her own content and Roblox’s editor wasn’t cutting it for her. What’d she do? She downloaded Blender & fired up YouTube to learn how to make here own CG art. It’s gotten to the point where she’s texting/emailing me for tips to improve her modeling & texturing. She’s only 8yo and has gotten really good at CG. I’m not sure that forums would have helped her as well as YouTube or some random Twitter post.
Even if she had been allowed to post online, which she’s not at her age, I’m not sure that forum members would have treated her the same. Self-education via YT & social media has been a blessing for her. It’s the way her generation consumes content. ATM, she’s even freaking my brother (her dad) out by talking about creating her own YT art channel and strategies to monetize. Again, she’s only frickin’ 8yo. 
It’s a generation thing, I think. My generation… My dad’s generation… We never thought such things when we were her age. How we consumed & created content was different. My niece turns 23 in 2035. The kids of that generation will probably look back at social media with the same level of disinterest that today’s group looks at forums and how my generation looks back at BBS.
Video killed the radio star and so too did social kill forums. It’s okay. I’m fine with it. Even if the Great Recession never occurred and made global competitions impossible, things were going to change. It’s the only constant in a tech dominated world. CG Talk isn’t dead just yet, but it will be at some point in the future. Planet3DArt died. CGChat/InsideCG died. GameArtisans died. CGHub died. To all good things an end.
CG artists, follow your audience wherever they may be even if it’s somewhere other than a familiar haunt. Create good art and post it where it will be seen. Seek advice where it will be heard and answered. Most importantly, accept that the ground beneath your feet may forever shift, but the creative spirit is eternal. BBS. Forum. Facebook. Telepathic group share. All means to the same end. Relevance is ephemera.
mister3d
#18
I can only echo the aforementioned opinions. I think time has changed a lot over last 15-20 years, which needs to be considered.
The industry has matured, as well as the cumulative body of online and offline knowledge. Most troubleshooting can be addressed via Google conglomerate.
Had the top-tier pros stayed, it would definitely keep the interest. The moment they left, it became an abandoned place without any leadership and propelling vibe. It happened abruptly and swiftly, and that was the main reason why.
It’s an interesting fact, how just a handful of people influenced thousands.
I can only say thank you for what you did, and I personally miss those valuable posters.
mister3d
#20
Leigh Van Der Byl: a lot on shading and texturing, especially in the early days of Cgtalk. Her insights were significant, when there was a scarcity of information.
Christopher Nichols: an amazing lighter, and his DVD’s were a sheer inspiration, as well as rare, but comprehensive posts.
Jeremy Birn, the Lighting Challenges creator, and the Lighting forum leader. Also Kanooshka, who contributed a lot, and took over the Lighting Challenges forum, helping it to exist.
Soulburn3d (Neil Blevins) - a lot on materials and scripting.
Some amazing forum leaders: Kanga, Steven Stahlberg.
Playmesoomthns (sorry, I don’t know the real name), contributed a lot on physics and optics in CG discussions.
There were people, who helped to liven up WIP forums, posted long and detailed reviews, helping others, but were neglected by forum leaders, and never appreciated. They posted with nicknames without real names, so I can’t say who they were.
I think everyone is inspired by different artists and posters. But those great artists are seasoned veterans today, and might have lost interest in teaching others, enjoying other aspects of life.
Those were the days, when 2000 people at the same moment being present at Cgtalk were the norm. But time has changed, the internet has changed, and we have to move on and embrace it.