Hello readers! I’ve decided to create a new thing, here are the potentially contextless updates from this thing that I hope will keep me grounded.
28.5.20
From now on I will be documenting my thoughts on this project day by day, just to clear space in my brain and understand better what I’m trying to do here. So today I formally went through my survey after sending it out a few more times, and as of now it has 82 responses which is awesome. I also re-downloaded a VPN and instantly discovered this startup called jumpstart.me. It already has a forum feature so I signed up to see how it worked. I know it’s just a start up, but I don’t think the forums would reach their full potential to be honest. I found it super suffocating. As far as I know they DO have an anonymous posting feature, which is neat. I like that you can’t exactly access someone’s profile. I like how neat it is, but I feel like it seems far too ‘rounded’, like I could easily see the entire website in one go and that’s kind of off-putting in my opinion. The rest of the people on jumpstart, particularly the general thread, love it. It’s kind of obnoxious that it’s sealed off from other people and you need to log in to access it. In my opinion, forums like this should be open access, kind of like reddit is. I think people love the q and a tool but hate the fact that the forum isn’t really the priority of this business model. For my project (which still needs a name!), I hope to make the forum the central space, exactly like TSR. On a break from this site, I took to researching any others that were like it. They were very hard to find, I assume someone looking for something like this wouldn’t be able to find it if it were out there, which is really what I need. I did stumble upon a research paper (lol) on the efficiency of using discussion boards. I found some useful quotes from it: “ Online discussion boards are discussions that occur between students but do not occur at the same time. Students submit postings on a topic and other individuals can respond to that post and/or other student comments.” I think this is the wrong kind of discussion board though, more like the one we had in ENV 303.
I then looked up the student room and looked at its wiki page. To be honest, this is the best possible future model I can think of for how I want my website to be designed. Also moneysavingexpert has a pretty cool design. The forum needs a second to spot but the fact that it is basically a blog from the front is an interesting concept. Back to the student room. The features which stick out the most are the bold sign up screen the second you go on the site and the ‘latest discussions’ plug at the bottom of the page. Very grasping things. You are essentially launched right into the conversation which is neat af. The layout of individual posts is super clean as well, it feels very friendly. It feels modern and genuine, like there are people on the other side. Quickly looking through stackoverflow, it appears that they offer jobs and a forum/q and a type thing. This is neat, and definitely a model that we can work with. Trip advisor is definitely also worth checking out. I think from tomorrow we should really focus on building this thing, or at least designing it. To summarise, what I want is predominantly an open forum with the genuine integrity of TSR, with the widespread openness of reddit, and the professional aspect of linkedin. All built for young people by young people, serviced from the top down with a community feel of ascension. I don’t really know what i’m looking at yet, but the clear and identifiable problem is the fact that applying for jobs and internships is not a transparent system. It’s daunting and exhausting, and we have no idea what to wear. We should be supported and uplifted in our baby steps in the professional world, but not in the patronising way that makes us feel like we are being pushed into a pageant show. The only way we can do this is through each other.
Tomorrow I’m definitely going to start pursuing the more technical aspects of this project. How the hell do I build it?!
paradox 