What's up with the Cool Wall?

  • Thread starter MDDeGrande
  • 9 comments
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Why is no one posting new cars, voting and commenting?
Running the cool wall takes a lot more time and effort than you'd expect. A member takes it on, runs it for a while, but eventually the enthusiasm runs out as the realities of running something online take their toll*, and it goes quiet for a while. Then someone else takes over and the cycle starts again. Make an offer to run it and be the change you want to see!

*You'll get complained at. Frequently and often.
 
Roo
Make an offer to run it and be the change you want to see!
Not sure that'll help with people voting and commenting. Just clicking through the 45-ish pages of Cool Wall threads, and interest has clearly declined irrespective of the effort made by whoever is running the coolwall.

The V12 LMR was cool wall thread 1526. Maybe people are just bored of the concept.
 
As someone who used to run the Cool Wall, I can think of two immediate problems that can't be readily fixed.

1. Lack of interesting cars to nominate. Given the sheer amount of threads, well over 1,000, most cars which people have an interest in have already been nominated. The exception being very new models. It's just not as interesting if the cool wall is inundated with everyday cars like a Toyota Camry for instance.

2. Less "car people" on the forum. It's no secret that in terms of diversity of membership and contribution, the Cars and General forum as a whole is less active than it used to be, and this is only continuing. Many of the members who made very thoughtful posts in cool wall threads during it's peak (2013-2015) simply do not post here anymore. New members aren't just going to come out of the woodwork, and I highly doubt many of the inactive members will just return.

There are other reasons, too. As @MatskiMonk mentioned, it does get tedious after a while. Also, in most recent threads, fierce debate about the coolness of a car is absent, while this was much less the case in older threads. Part of this had to do with there being members with outlandish opinions about cars (JMoney, W & N, The87Dodge) not posting anymore, but I do genuinely believe that members were inclined to give more critical analyses of cars in threads years ago.

I tried to facilitate the Cool Wall by reducing effort needed by the nominator (I would find pictures and stats for the nominated car), and having it get its own sub-forum. While these changes were beneficial, they simply didn't increase turnout to the Wall, and unfortunately, I think the chance of it coming back and flourishing is slim to none.
 
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Let me preface this by saying no offense to Snikle at all when I say this. Under his tenure it was run just as well as it was ever run under anyone else.







But outside of some outliers here and there the interest in it was pretty much dead by the time he took it over from GranTurNismo just like this entire forum's activity in general has been down a lot; and even by the time GranTurNismo took it over it was years removed from when Top Gear itself even had it as a segment.
 
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Also, in most recent threads, fierce debate about the coolness of a car is absent, while this was much less the case in older threads.
Just my personal observation, but at some point the debate became more about what actually makes something cool, and what doesn't - rather than the car itself, and then every thread ends up becoming the same discussion, which gets boring. The epitome of this is probably something like "SUBRC". Maybe that's a fair sentiment, maybe it isn't, but it doesn't really invite discussion, not more than a couple of times anyway.
 
As someone who used to run the Cool Wall, I can think of two immediate problems that can't be readily fixed.

1. Lack of interesting cars to nominate. Given the sheer amount of threads, well over 1,000, most cars which people have an interest in have already been nominated. The exception being very new models. It's just not as interesting if the cool wall is inundated with everyday cars like a Toyota Camry for instance.

2. Less "car people" on the forum. It's no secret that in terms of diversity of membership and contribution, the Cars and General forum as a whole is less active than it used to be, and this is only continuing. Many of the members who made very thoughtful posts in cool wall threads during it's peak (2013-2015) simply do not post here anymore. New members aren't just going to come out of the woodwork, and I highly doubt many of the inactive members will just return.

There are other reasons, too. As @MatskiMonk mentioned, it does get tedious after a while. Also, in most recent threads, fierce debate about the coolness of a car is absent, while this was much less the case in older threads. Part of this had to do with there being members with outlandish opinions about cars (JMoney, W & N, The87Dodge) not posting anymore, but I do genuinely believe that members were inclined to give more critical analyses of cars in threads years ago.

I tried to facilitate the Cool Wall by reducing effort needed by the nominator (I would find pictures and stats for the nominated car), and having it get its own sub-forum. While these changes were beneficial, they simply didn't increase turnout to the Wall, and unfortunately, I think the chance of it coming back and flourishing is slim to none.
I think all this is very much true, especially the fact that anything historically interesting or controvercial has probably already been nominated.

I've noticed that the Cars in General threads have been much quieter in recent years anyway, so there's less foot traffic to catch punters. Not sure why the CiG sub forum has become so quiet, you'd think fans of Gran Turismo would be fans of cars in general too.

I don't think that making it's own sub forum has actually helped. New threads/nominations are hidden behind another layer of clicks and have become out of sight, out of mind. I used to always contribute an opinion or at least vote on the Cool Wall, but i just forget about it now more often than not. I know the amount of threads was making the CiG sub forum look 'messy' so i can see why it was created, but i just think it's maybe been the final nail in the coffin.

I also think the current culture in cars has changed. ICE is dying out and electric or hybrid cars are still a bit new for people to have an opinion on how the new 'norm' will pan out. Supercars are all uncool now as the manufacturers have pivoted their target away from enthusists and towards the very wealthy or influencers. They've become too much, in cost and performance for the general population and the roads they are driven on to use to any real degree. Hot hatches and performance saloons are just too accomplished now. Sports cars and coupes are a dying breed and even an average EV would destroy most cars targeted towards the average enthusiast. All the old potentially cool cars have been nominated and there's very little new out or coming out soon that has any edge to it to create opinions other than seriously uncool or just plain dull.
 
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I don't think that making it's own sub forum has actually helped. New threads/nominations are hidden behind another layer of clicks and have become out of sight, out of mind. I used to always contribute an opinion or at least vote on the Cool Wall, but i just forget about it now more often than not. I know the amount of threads was making the CiG sub forum look 'messy' so i can see why it was created, but i just think it's maybe been the final nail in the coffin.
The subforum was created due to some members taking issue with the CiG forum being overcluttered by Cool Wall threads. This was especially due to the fact that I made threads more frequently than my predecessor. In terms of traffic, the new sub-forum didn't really change anything; those who already participated in the Wall continued to do so, and very few new members were brought over.
 
Hi, sorry, just saw that this thread existed at all.

Anyway, I want to say that I am sorry about how the wall fizzled out over the last year or so. A lot of the reasons people said for the absence of new posts are correct. It isn't hard by any means to do this, but it does take time and energy. I'm a junior in engineering school now (versus a freshman during the pandemic, like when I started) so time isn't as kind to me now. I didn't want to potentially lose any of the very little participation we had left nominating cars by forcing everyone to find the pictures/information themselves again, but perhaps I should have because that really became a bear on me after a while. Especially when it was like 3 semi-obscure racecars in a row and information wasn't common. I thought numerous times about reinstating all the old rules about nominations, despite how I disliked them before when I was just a voter. When I first found the cool wall and read through most of the old threads (which was most inspiring to me at the time), I thought banning race/concept cars was the dumbest thing ever and "SUBRC" people were being obtuse asses ruining it for everyone, yadda yadda. But after running it for a while, (and maturing more, I was 17 when I was reading all this for the first time) I totally understand and sympathize with the reasoning behind all of them. Even with all that in mind though, I still didn't want to reinstate them because, again, I was worried about losing participation.

It's kinda like, back then when dozens/hundreds participated, the curator could afford to potentially piss off a few people with rules that made the wall better overall. When there only are a few people though, you gotta make sure they don't wander away.

I am also of two minds over the Cool Wall being a separate forum. It solves every problem people had before. The regular Cars in General forum is no longer inundated with CW threads, and having them all in a forum together by themselves is nice to look at/peruse. But it definitely did hurt participation. GranTurNismo's threads in CiG weren't as popular as the ones from 8-10 years ago, but they regularly got 50+ voters. The average for his tenure was 47, and I don't remember exactly where we got our separate forum (Around the Audi TT poll maybe? That seems to ring a bell for some reason), but the votes clearly tapered off by the end of his tenure. His last 25 polls only averaged 30 voters. My entire tenure as curator averaged 29.

Part of it is just enthusiasm too. When GranTurNismo brought it back, I thought the cool wall was the coolest thing ever. Ranking and rating cars was fun, yes, but also seeing what had and hadn't been done before, and the prospect of adding my own cars to the list was awesome. I wanted to add obscure cars, I wanted people to be able to learn about weird new cars they might not have otherwise known about. I wanted to see what other people would nominate too. When they nominated something I had never heard of, (Aznom Atulux, anyone?) or something famous that was absent, it was extremely interesting to me. I don't agree that we've run out of cars to nominate, not at all. There are all of 62 cars on the 1200+ wall from before 1950. This is an era of car design that is just as, if not more diverse and varied than the 70 years after it. Even past the '50s though, there are a treasure trove of lesser-known but still interesting car models yet to be walled-off in my excel file. I used to exclusively nominate cars like that. But eventually I had to mostly give up obscure cars, and pretty much entirely give up prewar cars, cause they always got such terrible voter numbers and discussion. I rarely (if ever?) nominated a race car, because they did the same thing. Vote counts admittedly don't matter much, it's honestly kind of funny how close some similar polls are in outcome despite voter turnouts*, but the lack of discussion did bring me down. The final coolness ranking is less fun than the discussion that gets you there. The old threads were good because of discussion, and that does have to do in part with some outlandish people being gone, as GranTurNismo said. But look at the first page of the subfourm right now, the most replies on anything is 15. The lack of discussion and engagement kinda hurts. Ultimately, there were times in the past where the curator had a little less work and a lot more rewarding discussion to make up for it... and towards the end for me I was scouring around for information on other people's obscure nominations in addition to my own and getting all of 8 replies and 20 votes to show for it, and one of the replies is telling me I put the wrong racing league because the geocities site with the only information was hard to read lol

*The 1953 Corvette got 1.167 from 36 votes, the 1957 Corvette got 1.228 from 101, for instance. I recall something similar about the Schuppan 962 vs the real one, but it's late and I don't want to go looking for the stats right now
 
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