Touch Ruminations: Maintaining a community
In the first edition of Touch Ruminations, former DS and Wii Fanboy Lead David Hinkle talks about the transition to Joystiq Nintendo and why maintaining a community is so important to him. The opinions expressed here belong to the author and don't necessarily reflect those of Joystiq, Weblogs Inc. or its affiliates.
When my peers Andrew and Richard wrote their pieces earlier this week, I thought about what I needed to say here that hadn't already been said. Redundancy of echoed posts is a dead horse that I dare not beat on any longer, and I've tried to answer questions as best I could through the comments section of various posts. My mind remained blank.
So I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'm going to get personal and talk about what I liked most about the Nintendo Fanboys and what I hope gets even stronger as time goes on here in our new space: the community.
One of the things we've tried to do with the Nintendo Fanboy spaces is incite dialogue and encourage our readers to be active in posts. We've learned things from comments, and even fired off our own fair share of opinions there throughout the near-3 years the Nintendo Fanboys existed. Nowhere else on the net have I found a place where the commentators were so willing to volunteer intelligent debate and insight, regularly.. Most folks were more than willing to stay on topic and offer valuable input on the subject at hand, and that's one of the things I felt really helped us stand out from other Nintendo-based blogs and even the other Fanboys.
This was something especially prevalent in our daily topics, Wii Warm Up and DS Daily. While we're still thinking about how to incorporate this into our new space (DS readers won't care to toss in their two cents on Wii topics, and vice versa), the willing participation of our readers is something we don't want to lose. You guys keep us in check, when the occasional typo or mistake makes it out on the site, or when you feel our criticism/praise of a certain subject is unfounded. We love the transparency there, and hopefully you still feel encouraged to participate as time goes on. That's a top priority for me, here at Joystiq, and very much important to the rest of the gang I work with.
Going forward, I know this change can be difficult to get used to. With this being the end of our second week with the redesign, hopefully you're starting to become accustomed to everything, but if you're not, let me know right here in the comments. I (and the rest of this awesome Joystiq team) am working my buns off to make sure the experience you've come to expect is made harder, better, faster, and stronger. I'm confident we can be better than we have been in the past, and even better than we are now. And I look forward to trying.
