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misteraven

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Everything posted by misteraven

  1. Explain what you got going on here with this fish please.
  2. My theory I since you're on the shit list, the system is designed to just hassle you. The old forum had a 'shadow ban' type feature. If I set your account to that classification instead of just banning the account, it made the user experience miserable by serving up 404 pages randomly and severely lagging the connections. Made it unusable. If some bullshit forum software is capable of that, imagine what the deep pockets of Facebook / Instagram can engineer. What I know is this... They essentially have a monopoly with social media, which represents a massive swath of all internet traffic. They've been given unfair competitive advantage and they now have tentacles deep enough with their authentication and tracking systems that they can just about box you in as far as what you're able to do online. Literally these companies can make or break your business after years of moulding people's behaviors and how they consume content, and now shop, online.
  3. Those stats are arbitrary as you don't know how each site defines 'active'. The old 12oz defined active as a member that logged in within the trailing 7 days. There was even an option to change the time span for the published metrics so back then, the logged in user list was actually anyone that logged in within 3 hours I think. That's how it got to numbers that showed 1200+ users logged in at a time. On this forum, its actually concurrent and honest... It's how many people hit the forum within a few minutes, but will show all users within the hour, sorted by activity.
  4. So Facebook / Instagram is fucking us again... Suddenly half the 12ozProphet shop is back under review with most of what is being reviewed now rejected. They're also playing games with the 12ozProphet Stadium x 1984 release and not allowing it to be published on Instagram as a shopable post. Same thing happened with the Bandwagon Bitches tee, which ended up hurting that release pretty badly. This is why its important to take motherfuckers like them out of the equation. Bad enough they're amassing billions by invading everyone's privacy, but now they're censoring anything that poses any type of threat to their business or personal ideologies. 12ozProphet needs your support... Please help me spread the news about all this... Also that the forum is back and lastly, if you dig what I'm trying to do here, dig the product we're making and can afford to pickup a tee or two... Purchases from our shop is the sole revenue stream for this forum and the 12ozProphet brand. Obviously we dropped all third party advertising a long time ago. Sales on our web shop is how all of this gets paid for. If nothing else, please help spread the news about the forum and what we're doing here.
  5. Just a heads up that the discussion on forum features (font size, etc) was split off and appended to another thread that is more on topic. You can find it here: https://forum.12ozprophet.com/topic/87056-forum-update-status-feedback-and-bug-reports/page/2/ Hoping to keep this thread more conceptual or at least strategic in regards to the topic, which is discussing a post-social media world and where we might be able to carve out our niche.
  6. Everyone has their own reasons for leaving and their own thoughts on just how to do it. As far as my own position (at the moment), is I'll probably just delete the app when the time comes. Not sure I see a point is canceling it since they have all your data anyways and cancelling it wont cause them to delete it. Though I don't see myself going back afterwards, options don't hurt. I'd love to make a statement and delete it, but doubt it'll ever even get noticed. Rather, my plan was to request copies of my content, which I've done several times already with zero response, and then edit my feed down to a bare minimum. Once I exit, I'll put up a last post explaining what I did and why and encourage people to come over here and continue the conversations. As far as my own experiences with business... Its been a dismal failure almost since the beginning, but especially in the last few years. Despite having operated a professional photo studio and having all the best kit and plenty of cool stuff I could shoot, its hardly worth the effort. Can't even imagine being a company paying someone to do it for me. You can audit just about any account on Instagram right now from Kaws to Kanye West and note that the ratio of followers to likes, is typically under 1%. Literally all you're asking for is a double tap and only 1% (usually half or a quarter of theta 1%) will bother. So consider an actual conversion like a sale or email signup and you're talking a fraction of a fraction of 1%. Works I guess if you have millions of followers, but honestly metrics like those... You might as well by blocks of millions of emails off chinese hackers and start spamming, cause those are the conversion rates spammers see. I don't have specific metrics in front of me, but you'll recall that Futura release we did years ago. Not entirely a valid comparison, but the sell through on the stacked logo from that release is almost 10x better than the best release we've had through Instagram. When you factor in how long it took (under 24 hours) compared to how long the average sale runs now, as well as consider the active users then (active defined as users that logged into the forum in the trailing 7 days, which was about 18,000) compared to active followers on Instagram now (about 54,000), the math on it was that conversions were many thousands of times more than they are through Instagram and Instagram seems to be performing worse and worse each week. I've had a lot of conversations with industry colleagues and its not just 12oz. Brands across the board from small to fortune 100 are all seeing this and it seems to be accelerating. Real problem is nobody knows what the next move really is. Further to the above, and again not entirely accurate data, but the forum release tee is an anomaly so far, largely thanks to all of you guys. Every release of the last 18 months saw 98% of referrals coming from IG. The forum release almost inverted that completely with IG only referring something like 7% of the sales for that tee. Likewise, its the second best selling release of the last 18 months. Again, not truly a valid comparison cause I was promoting it heavy here on the forum and was offering those coupon codes through the forum, but I was hugely pleased to see that experiment play out and how quickly and effectively I was able to switch things up. The obvious goal being to remove Instagram from the equation and no longer put them in a position to middle man the dialogue (or sales) between 12oz and its following. I'm considering ways of continuing that, as well as further encourage both the growth of the community, as well as the build up of the brand, since its literally the shop sales that are the sole revenue stream for the site as I've chosen to no longer run commercial advertising.
  7. Another interesting legacy post from Hypebeast themselves in regards to their now completely gone forum -https://hypebeast.com/2014/8/the-wild-wild-web-the-colorful-past-of-the-hypebeast-forums
  8. Here's another community I stumbled on by accident that I was fascinated by. Reason is A. I've never head of it before and B. That its an entirely paid private community. http://www.clickinmoms.com/ In an age where some people still claim that social media is the end all be all and forums and other platforms have no chance in going up against it, I personally have been claiming that I expect things to go more directional. Same way nobody would have predicted a platform like https://stockx.com/ could ever go up against the likes of https://www.ebay.com/, here we see that they've planted the flag of ownership over specific segments of the resale market and have not only put up a threat, but for most intents and purposes are owning these directional market segments. Anyhow, this private paid community mentioned above is successful enough to have dedicated mobile apps and seem happy enough with their momentum to not even bother with a free tier or trial period. In fact, their membership costs are more than I'd expect. Not expensive, but costs more than the intro plans for Hulu or Netflix. Again, super interesting and precisely what I expect to see replace more and more demographics that currently congregate on platforms like Instagram most of the time.
  9. I came across this article discussing the Hypebeast forums - https://blakplague.wordpress.com/2017/07/26/hb-we-out-dis-risedecline-of-the-hypebeast-forums/ It's still interesting to me that they chose to first disable their forums and more recently, pull it off the internet altogether. As I was discussing with @Kultsjust this morning, it would seem that like so many other brands and online properties, Hypebeast has ultimately lost a lot of its identity by investing in social media platforms like Instagram at the expense of focusing on its own property with their site and forum. Honestly I'd love to have more insight into what exactly happened there, especially when for the longest time there was a note on their closed forums saying they were working on developing a new online platform. So far that has not come to fruition, but I do predict they're seeing many of the issues we've identified with social media and I'd expect they're working on a plan to counter it. Will be interesting to see what they end up doing. No doubt most of the Hypebeast forum migrated to Reddit once it was shut down. Curious how much of that community held together over there? Likewise, as their forum peaked in the years that ours was dying, curios how many of you guys were posting over there. Don't think there ever was any credible graffiti conversation happening on their forums, but then again, they did turn focus to street art at a time when that was slowly replacing graffiti in the streets.
  10. So there's been a lot of conversation about the changes to online life these days. Think the first major thread on the subject was the Weigh In: Has the social media revolution devolved conversation? thread I started a ways back, but there's been a few threads and comments popping up including the comment I responded to from @Fist 666below and Unfollowgate 2019 started yesterday by @Mercer. Perhaps we could just as well consolidate conversation into one of those threads, but to keep the conversation clean, I though I'd start a sort of new chapter in the conversation by way of a new thread. We can still go on and debate whether Instagram is dying or Facebook is over or if the days of social media in general is coming to an end (or at least the largest changes since its inception), which we'll continue in those other threads. Rather I'd like to use this thread to explore what a post-social media 1.0 world might look like, as well as provide some insights into what we're experiencing here on our very own 12ozProphet forum. I think many of you guys remember the dark age of the forum when it was all but dead. Some of you would pop in from time to time, likely we're unable to login due to the massive technical issues or maybe didn't bother trying when you saw it was a grave yard (assuming you checked in at all). Then later, whether through social media or word of mouth, you found out something was happening with the 12oz forum. No doubt even then, it was a pale ghost of what you remember it being and probably poked around and then left again. Slowly but surely we saw the logged in member count go from 2 or 3 people to maybe 5 or 6 and occasionally spike up to a dozen or so. Then with some pushing and promoting, we managed to get to 12 - 15 logged in basically 24/7 and sometimes spiking to twice that. Meanwhile we're all starting to pick up on that low grumbling of discontent in regards to privacy or censorship or just plain feeling of staleness that has crept up and consumed social media. Personally I think we'll see radical change over this next couple years. I also think we're getting pretty close to yet another turning point in the story of the 12oz forums and have been predicting that if we see the exponential growth we've jhad in this last year again over this next year, we'll likely reach a full tipping point where the forum really takes on a life of its own. There's a lot of reasons that I believe are evidence as to how or why this will happen, but mostly I think more and more people are waking up to what was lost with the advent of social media... The in depth conversations and subsequent online relationships that came to be as a by product of exploring concepts with strangers over the internet and discussing / arguing / solving / learning that goes along with it. Anyhow, I have many ideas about where I'm hoping to take this forum. Some are just vague concepts born from instinct and experience and others are more specific development direction based off what I think is needed based on the evidence in front of me. Obviously all of you guys are a part of this journey and so it only makes sense to kick this off and explore the topic. I'm not saying this is a design by committee, as it's likely more easy to herd cats and truth is I probably don't hjave the resources to even begin to map out and execute a group plan, but likewise, I think this is the perfect forum (pun intended) to discuss whats next for the 12oz forum and the future of online community. I'll follow up this introductory post with a few references I've come across in relation to all of this. ------- NOTE: This is a repost I decided to turn into a topic. The original comment appeared here. Pretty interesting to see how many more people are doing exactly that. Wasn't going to post this publicly, but no reason not to. This week in particular I'm seeing a significant uptick on here. Obviously a few threads almost feel like the old 12oz. Seen @seekingdrop through, @blood farthas recovered her account and is posting again, seen OG mod @sofarokregularly maintaining the travel and UK train threads, @STYLEISKINGstill swings through and throws in on a bunch of threads (be great to see him throw into the Toys thread and keep holding down the Burners and style thread, Seeing @One Man Bannedand @micahhawaiiessentially making the new forum about the best place to look at frights on the internet once again and certainly awesome to see how @Jokerwent from thinking he was just too busy with life to post regularly to almost single handedly holding down the Toys post here thread (freakin over 2000 pages now), and then there's a few new people and semi established lurkers (including @Limeliciouz, @aufand @ndvto name a couple) that have been logged in most days this past week or three for most of the day. This morning saw a massive spike in my start of day activity feed (165 new updates) which is substantially more than I generally see between the time I leave off before bed to start fo day each morning. Based off my own experiences with the forum, I believe the tipping point will come at anywhere between 3 - 5x the current traffic levels, which is actually an exponential increase smaller than what we've experienced in the last 12 months. Not specifically saying it'll happen in the next year as there's just too many contributing factors that can shift this wildly in either direction, but for example, when we released the forum reunion tee, there was a very large increase in activity that has mostly sustained itself since. Crazy that I still regularly get messages form people that are just finding out that forum is back, but I still get them regularly. I do think that the clear (and getting more clear each day) decline of Instagram presents an interesting opportunity not just for our forum, but for online culture in general. Obviously I'll keep pushing to the best of my ability, keep spreading news, likely put together an another tee that celebrates the forum somehow and other programs that give us and everyone else an excuse to talk about the forum (outside the forum), come check things out and register or recover accounts. I also communicate with @Dirty_habiTon a daily basis and am constantly looking into server and software tweaks or other methods / references / ideas on how we can perhaps improve the '12oz experience'. (Actually planning a big site update for the main site so it isn't just an online store, that I believe will make swinging by the site in general a more compelling thing that in turn, should also bring additional attention to the forum as well). Anyhow, you guys should remember vividly where we were 2 years ago... Literally 2 or 3 people logged in and even the popular sections showing threads that didn't have responses for days or even a week. Admittedly it does feel slow to me sometimes, especially when I have a bunch of extra time to pound the forum, but then again when I start exploring sections and threads I don't normally look at, I also come across some really interesting stuff. You guys might have also noticed that I've made it a point to contribute to the content as well. Not just posting comments, but taking the time to pull from daily life and interest and build out proper new threads. I try to think through a topic I find interesting, aggregate a few links and / or files that relate to a specific POV or help frame up the discussion and then release them. Sometimes they take off pretty quick, other times I need to sort of baby them along and cultivate them, but I will often hit up a handful of members I talk to pretty regularly and shoot them a link to go check it out. If I had a little more time on my hands, I'd treat some of these threads like blog entries and include a leading image and maybe some supporting images so it reads almost like an article. Perhaps even convert that into an Instagram post like other news sites do with their feeds so we can pull traffic over. Anyhow, point is that its pretty amazing that we're here having this conversation at all considering people had written off the forum as entirely done back in 2014 or so and it was essentially dead only a couple years ago. At least at this point we can all acknowledge there is a true community on here, even if for now its still a little small when comparing it to the old forum or the major players like Instagram. But we'll get there...
  11. Oh man, you just solved my costume woes...
  12. Not sure man. Has to be a huge liability for a corporation with massively deep pockets. Seriously doubt the dozen or so cars camped in the lot even hint at scratching the surface of sales for a mega store like that.
  13. Fun fact: Walmart allows people to park / sleep in their vehicles overnight at all their store parking lots. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/14/us/walmart-parking-rv.html
  14. Buy 1 get 1 free 25 - 35 content peeled and deveined frozen shrimp.
  15. Not 100% the same thing, but overlaps quite a bit... Overlanding - https://overlandjournal.com/what-is-overlanding/ and https://www.onallcylinders.com/2018/07/12/overlanding-101-what-it-is-and-how-to-get-started/ Thinking @6Penniescan share a bit on the subject.
  16. Oh man, Sprinter vans are huge out here. So many amazing conversions out here that are really super sick. Will try to photograph some as I come up on them.
  17. There's a lot of truth to the statement above, but something to consider is that at the end of the day, there is almost always an ROI (return on investment) that gets factored into the drive to do this (or anything else). All these layers of protection require an increasingly sophisticated skillset and computation power to achieve the same end; access to private data or the origin / destination. In fact, its often exponential amounts of computational power, like when you go from a password that is a dictionary entry to suddenly introducing special charters and numbers. Or when you go from a 6 digit password to a 32 digit password. Whereas the first might be cracked by a script kiddy with a little bandwidth and a dictionary file, the latter could take all the resources of a super computer a prohibitively long time to crack, if at all. Much how your own computer (or smartphone) will bog down as you run more processes, the same happens as more and more people decide to add layers of complexity / privacy to their online experience. If you're being singled out specifically, this is obviously orders of magnitude simpler, though not easy. But if you're just another user on the network sending and receiving packets of data, amongst millions of users sending and receiving packets of data and more and more of those packets are being abstracted through layers of differing encryption and then being rerouted in ways that defy standard protocol, then the task of intercepting something, reconstructing the data and then tracking it back to an origin and then a specific user, becomes a shit ton more difficult. When the vast majority of users aren't actually doing any insidious, let alone illegal, you've created a massively diminished return on the investments required to accomplish the task. That return becomes increasingly smaller to the point of simply unmanageable as more and more users on the network adopt increasingly sophisticated privacy protections. Here's a link that discusses a little I'm referring to in regards to password from the perspective of password length being mathematically more complex than introducing randomness : https://blog.renditioninfosec.com/2017/09/password-length-or-complexity-math-says-length/ Obviously here we're discussing passwords, but a good password (random string of alphanumeric charters, variable capitalization and spacial characters in lengths over 15 characters) is an import step as its often the point of failure in most breaches. But you couple a good password, with a secure password manager (https://1password.com/), a secure and private email (https://protonmail.com/), a decent VPN that also allows for anonymous payments and accounts (https://nordvpn.com/), a secure browser (https://brave.com/ozp230), implemeting two-factor authorization when its available (the 12oz forum supports two-factor authorization) and a patched OS (especially that stores its drive encrypted and requires a password to login to, then you have a system that is exponentially more secure than the average user. Unless you're being targeted, it's simply not worth the ROI to peek at your data as it requires way too many resources for little to no gain. But when everyone else is doing the same as you, its simply becomes unmanageable as the computational power required is just not there. Even if you are being targeted, you've just bogged this down to a degree that it becomes a significant issue to access that data. Indeed you can install Tails (https://tails.boum.org/) which is orders of magnitude more secure (especially for PC users), but I'd suspect its overkill for most people.
  18. About half way through our winter wood. About 3 or 4 heavy days and we’re set. At least I gave the rest of the timber we need scoped out. IMG_7489.mp4
  19. No sales tax out here and a significant part of the local economy is farmers markets and https://www.mountaintrader.com
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