is Two Plus Two dead?
saw this tweet today. interesting perspective
He's not wrong
confirmed busto.
I guess the tweet doesnt qualify as a "view"
2+2 is as dead as poker is.
Which is to say it's not, but it's changed over time, as all things do.
We're just past the bubble.
Yes Two Plus Two is very dead.
Most countries that allow online poker don't speak English as their first language.
Twitter is the same as LinkedIn. A bunch of people posturing and talking about themselves into the void. If you get a bunch of birds with nice feathers and put them in a room they will behave the same way. It has a lot of traffic and activity but it's been dead for many years now. People are not excited to go there, they go there out of habit/boredom. The people you want to be around on the Internet are on social media sites when they are fun to be on, and when everyone arrives, it becomes frustrating to use them and they leave. Facebook was fun in the beginning when it was just college kids, but once everyone's parents and children and coworkers were on it, it became hard to use. Addressing everyone you know at once severely limits what you can say but more importantly what you would even want to say, and people go a bunch of different ways (none of which make the site a good destination). Some delete it, some adopt the "idgaf if ya don't like what I post that's your problem" attitude (more self-indulgent posturing), some just stop posting anything and it becomes a feed for family photos and news articles, etc. The point is, if you are in a room, and everyone gets added to that room, at some point you will want to leave.
Sure there are celebrity accounts and businesspeople and media types have gotten grandfathered into having to be on Twitter, but it's not where they want to be. It happened to Xanga, Myspace, Facebook, etc. Instagram/Reddit/Twitter are hanging around longer because the brands/companies have been so absurdly big that no one can really take over, but they are all becoming worse by the day. When they began the sites were free and they weren't making any money. The innovations implemented were to make the sites more convenient to use; there were new features added for people. Once everyone arrives and makes an account, they know they won't lose most of the people no matter what changes they make, so they shift into getting ad dollars and selling marketing data in order to make the site finally profitable. This is the stage FB/Reddit/Twitter/Snapchat/etc are all at now. Twitter is not dead until something replaces it, but as more and more of the actual cool people shift into just having Youtube channels or having no social media at all even though this is now seen as half a hipster thing), it should be clear to people that it's dying.
The tweet is an interesting read, but it's more of the same "I had a thought about how the future might go and I want attention for my ominous phrasing" bs that appears all over the internet. "Saw this article today, I'm worried about where our country is headed" "Had this personal experience once, so this unrelated situation is probably going to go the same way" "Ate a waffle and it wasn't good, IS THE FOOD INDUSTRY DOOMED?" It's alarmist and self-indulgent, even though the person writing it didn't intend it that way. 2+2 is a tiny forum and it died because poker died. Poker died because of the UIGEA, and we can all line up and blame training sites but making the largest market and largest media source in the world operate in the black market playing against unbeatable rakes/cheaters/bots will doom any industry. You vilify people and then expect them to promote the game? Many of our heros ended up being villains, and the actual heros like Ivey and Dwan ended up shells of themselves. We lost $ to shady payment processors, paid exorbitant crypto fees just to play, and had zero recourse when we got ****ed over. Poker is a net negative on most people's financial situations, and a large portion of those simply moved on to other things. The profitable players are likely all still on 2+2, all still active on poker Twitter, etc. That is another drain though. The world needs lots of types of people to be interesting. If everyone in the room is pretty much the same, it'll be nice for them, but boring for everyone else considering entering that room. That isn't the real problem that's limiting 2+2's traffic nor Twitter's traffic though.
Forums are dead because attention spans are dead. If you want to look at people's consumption habits, look to the forefront of the internet, porn. Porn went from photos with articles, to photos, to videos, to surfing through multiple videos, to going to exact spots in videos, to having those spots labelled so you can go to them quicker, to compilations of those events, to compilations of your favorite actors/actresses in those events, and now there are straightup seizure inducing hypno videos because people's dopamine structures are so burnt they can't even get excited unless the screen is literally flicking them in the receptors 10 times per second. The same chutes and ladders progression happens with media sites. Reddit is a site you can really set up to be just media and conversations about things you're interested in, yet almost all users spend at least 20-30 minutes a day scrolling the "Popular" feed even though it is filled with the most absurdly curated clickbait posts to the extent that after enough scrolling it will literally make you exit out in disgust in the same manner that porn will. People come to 2+2 to get away from that. You can come to this site and see everything relevant that has happened in the poker world in like 5 minutes. I don't think the site is dying, but it's not going to generate new customers unless something significant happens in poker or the gambling world, and the way that world is structured right now (i.e. how gaming operators/oversight committees/politicians/casinos/bookmakers operate) that's not even something most of us would really want for the world, even if it would pad our pockets.
Twitter is a wild one because the people complaining that it's changed are the ones that changed it. It's universally regarded (in a somewhat playful way) as a hellhole. The old "no politics no religion" rule has been a poker table mainstay forever, but that's what Twitter is largely regarded as. "A place to argue" "the woke mob" "the far right" "shills" "misinformation" are the stuff people hear about Twitter all the time, and you expect people to want to try it out? I don't see any site continuing to expand rn except Instagram, and 50% of that is because of how much thirst-trap and tiktok caption (YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT HE SAID NEXT!) style clickbait there is constantly being pumped on that site. People are willing to be bombarded by garbage as long as they don't have to click much, and scrolling Instagram is pretty simple. As much as I think the good creators/cool people are shifting towards Youtube, that's also turning into LinkedIn. People are flooding it with "Enlightenment with Jeff!" channels and the AI content scraping channels are popping up at a mile a minute because of the ad revenue. If you think bot-farms are just going to stop at mining World of Warcraft gold or whatever, just think of how much $ they can make mass-producing AI content on Youtube.
In the end, I think 2+2 is doing fine. The internet is overcrowded right now, and I wouldn't be so alarmed if my corner of it stayed relaxed for a bit. We all saw how annoying NVG instantly got when those bot (BIG TIME HOT SHOT LADIES PHILIPINES MACAU TITTY DELUXE) accounts were spamming. Quality not quantity will be the end decider of what sites do well anyway. Marketing dollars have ruined most big sites, but most societies end up being a meritocracy once everyone's greed and ignorance gets done ****ing the place up.
You have more avenues and a much larger selection of content to choose from for whatever it is that you want to do - so everything gets diluted.
2+2 is doing pretty well, relatively speaking, when you start factoring in all the places that no longer exist.
2+2 is doing pretty well, relatively speaking, when you start factoring in all the places that no longer exist.
When you look back at internet forums that were around twenty years ago, I doubt that many are still busy (or even exist).
If I had to guess I'd say the average user of internet forums get older 9+ months per year.
2+2 is as dead as poker is.
Which is to say it's not, but it's changed over time, as all things do.
We're just past the bubble.
You have more avenues and a much larger selection of content to choose from for whatever it is that you want to do - so everything gets diluted.
2+2 is doing pretty well, relatively speaking, when you start factoring in all the places that no longer exist.
When you look back at internet forums that were around twenty years ago, I doubt that many are still busy (or even exist).
If I had to guess I'd say the average user of internet forums get older 9+ months per year.
All of these, IMO.
But one bit of new knowledge I gained from this thread is what jbouton's Twitter handle is. Not that I'll be reading any of his posts beyond the couple I saw in that thread, because the only time I'm on that site is when I get linked there.
I think 2+2 ain't that dead as they think.
who owns 2+2 now?
Is 2+2 pwned?
Nobody owns a cat.
it's like fleas arguing over who owns the Dog...
:p
cats. plural.
