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Sunday, April 10, 2005
Responses to your responses. | Thanks for your replies, everyone. But I think I should clarify a few things.
Tony: I know that the age thing is not enforceable. But that's not what I'm talking about. I am talking about creating an environment that attracts a generally older audience. Applying a basic age restriction is certainly a part of that - if nothing else, it warns parents that children under 13 are not permitted on the site. This way, if we ever have complaints about something a parent finds objectionable, we can cite that point.
Secondly, there's no spin away from what I've said before. Quite the contrary.
Most active OB users are in their mid-to-late teens. What I was saying, as Desbreko mentioned, is that myOtaku is the site that has a much younger average age. My point was that OB is in a niche, because it tends to appeal to older audiences, as a result of its strong emphasis on quality.
So, OB can be part of a general appeal to older audiences network-wide. I hope that clarifies my point.
Desbreko: My comments about the network didn't directly include OB - I was referring to theO/myO. Out of all of our visitors (sans OB), about 20% are 18 and over. My whole point was that OB is somewhat seperate from that. So yeah, you are right in terms of what I was saying.
I'm not sure what the status is today, but I can tell you that we've never restricted people under 13. Restricting those people is an option provided to us by Virtual Bulletin. We've simply never taken up the option, but we will in the future.
Annie: I would really have to disagree with you on that. As a matter of fact, within the last few months, I could probably cite two dozen or more "New Members" who have truly outstanding post quality. This has been going on everywhere, but I think it's become particularly noticeable in Play It and Otaku Lounge, as well as The Arena.
Perhaps people just don't notice these things, but it's something that has been a constant surprise for me. So, I am not at all concerned about OB somehow slipping backwards - as long as we maintain our focus on quality, we'll be fine.
In the end, it is a bit like an uphill battle. Most of our visitors are sourced from theOtaku.com. If most of those people are quite young, then obviously, we are always filtering out a lot of people at OB. But that's just how things are. I still think that OB tends to be sitting in a very different place than the rest of the network.
But as I mentioned, that's something we'd like to change, by deliberately encouraging an older audience to the network. As you can imagine, that is very difficult, considering the size of the site and the number of visitors. It's a gradual thing that doesn't happen overnight.
But I think it's definitely doable, considering all we've accomplished so far.
Baron: Well, it's not that I want discussion to change. I think that I do risk being misinterpreted when I talk about this subject.
My intention isn't to make OtakuBoards into some kind of highly-adult discussion site. When I talk about "maturity", I think people often think I am talking about the content of the discussion. But I am not.
I am simply talking about quality - quality in terms of how people write their posts and how they contribute. But the topics themselves? I don't really care. It's possible to discuss totally inane and stupid things with a sense of quality about your posts. Just look at that Moderation thread in Otaku Lounge for a perfect example of how I want OB to look like.
In that thread, you had stuff going slightly in and out of topic, you had things shifting all over the place...it was very relaxed. But why was it okay? Because the whole time, people were paying attention and nobody was jumping in and spamming.
I don't want OB to be all about serious debates. I've never said that. I want us to be able to discuss anything - even totally inane stuff. But the point is that it should always be done with some level of care - that is, at least make your posts relevant and readable.
But to be specific, you asked why we would want to increase the age range in general? Well, it has little to do with content (at least on OB). It's more about attracting a broader audience than we have before. In many respects, we have cornered the market for younger people. The next logical step is to look for people who haven't been as interested in us before.
And when it comes to anime, as Dagger has mentioned, there are a lot of older anime fans who are very passionate about the subject.
In addition, this has added benefits for the future. If we have more older visitors, we also have more potential subscribers for our premium services. So this has a flow-on effect, I suppose. It means that we can continue to grow and we can continue to spend money on new sites.
Right now we are working on new sites and one of them is going to receive a lot of financial investment from the network. It's costly, but I think that when it finally arrives, everyone will be most impressed with the results (and it will be primarily adult-centric, or at least focused on those who are 18 and over).
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