If you find this thread interesting, take a scroll through this one:
http://www.animemusicvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=70&t=102020I imagine this will become one of those threads where longer posts like mine get skipped over or go unnoticed, but nonetheless:
AMVs look to me like they're becoming much more popular nowadays. Some are racking up millions of views on YouTube, other editing communities are growing (amvnews, especially, looks like it's gaining membership quickly). Earlier this year, when I attended a local AMV showing at a convention, I had to stand in the back of a packed and lively room.
Since the topic's moved to whether this site is "dying," well, of course it is, and maybe that's because everybody knows it. These forums are hardly constructive anymore, which has been pointed out repeatedly, and therefore anyone with any hope of continuing AMV-ing has to look elsewhere. But what's even more striking is how stagnant the site outside of the forums is now. Take a look at
PaperHeart, which earned 6 VCA awards including 2013 Video of the Year, but doesn't qualify for the
Top 10% List list because
it hasn't gotten the minimum amount of opinions. What does it say about the org when a video earns less feedback than it does VCAs?
Most viewers simply prefer not to decipher the org's old and clunky layout, and so the forums have increasingly been left with older editors who became accustomed to it before YouTube came up. About three years ago, this topic was addressed and people decided to
do something about it. The whole site suddenly seemed more alive. Users actually debated at length and shared opinions on how to renovate the org in order to encourage activity. The "Org Redesign" was what many of us were hoping for, and for awhile it looked like something exciting was gonna happen. It didn't, not yet at least, but it needs to if this community doesn't want to shrink further. trythil may be busy, but if someone picks up the ball on the Org Redesign then that'd definitely stimulate the site. Until then, we can expect to see less and less activity, especially since the general vibe is "yeap, the org's dead, watcha gonna do bout it" and that's detrimental to the forum's sense of community.
qyll wrote:I’ll cling on to this community as long as I can because seven years in Tibet spent anywhere will make one a bit nostalgic, but if I wake up one morning and find the site shutting down, then … so it goes.
Same here (and, heck, I agree with the rest of your post). There is room for growth with AMVs, it all depends on how much time and effort one puts into being creative. Taite, while I don't learn as much through editing AMVs than I do through film and animation, perhaps that's partly due to how dispirited I am at how little criticism there is here. I'm still hoping to see some developments on this site, but I won't be - and haven't been - visiting too much for the same reasons everyone's been posting.