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Turns All Year Trip Reports
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Author
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Topic: TAY Ski Reports Declining- Why? (Read 787 times)
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TonyM
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Posts: 229
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TR's per year: 2019- 53, 2018- 67, 2017- 82, 2016- 94, 2015- 84, 2014- 106, 2013- 124, 2012- 149, 2011- 161, 2010- 141, 2009- 174, 2008- 202, 2007- 158, 2006- 121, 2005- 98, 2004- 103, 2003- 93, 2002- 43, 2001-43.
High month number of reports per year according to stats listed on site today. Mostly increasing up from 2001 to 2008, then flat to down-ish from 2009 to this year. Snow years have an impact to be sure from year to year, but is BC skiing sliding downhill (sorry!)? Is detailing every last aspect of an adventure declining in popularity? Or is something else leading to a decline in TR's?
Seems there have been some site issues too.
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mountains will add years to your life, and life to your years
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Lowell_Skoog
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Posts: 2091
WWW
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Possible reasons:
+ Growth of social media
+ Clunky old TAY software
+ Episodic trolling
+ Overcrowding in the backcountry
+ Aging TAY community
+ Others?
I'm one of those who has become more active on social media in recent years, though I'm not very active there in terms of trip reports. I think social media (e.g. Facebook) is a lousy place to post trip reports because it's really hard to find them after a short while. As an amateur journalist and historian, I value looking up old reports and social media really sucks for that.
I think if you look at a histogram of TAY trip reports and compare it to the usage of social media, you'll find that the former went down when the latter went up.
I think updating the TAY platform would help, though it might not return to its former stature without injecting some serious marketing and community building effort. There's too much competition for eyeballs out there.
I think there's a place for storytelling in the ski community that social media doesn't satisfy. I'd like to see TAY continue to provide that.
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xmatt
5Member
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Posts: 20
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I think maybe the current online culture is changing so that people only tend to post about the most impressive trips, leaving out the simpler trips that everyone else has done like "just skied Silver Peak in May" or whatever. Ironically, those simpler trip reports are often the most useful though, as it's most likely that someone else will want to do them.
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Snowboy
5Member
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Posts: 32
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Social media has taken a lot of users away from the site but think the proposed redesign could invigorate the community. TAY is highly recognized in the ski community and has to potential to flourish. Good history here. There are young users but dont post much. Personally not a fan of FB and hope to shift things back to a ski specific site. Only way to change it is to post more trip reports directly on TAY!
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Good2Go
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Posts: 274
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Another factor is that the "kids" today strongly discourage posting TRs on social media. That's why you don't see may TRs on the FB version of this site.
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Scottk
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Posts: 156
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Although it could be improved, I still think TAY is the best platform for sharing information regarding BC skiing. It's a shame that use of the site has declined as social media has exploded, since none of the social media platforms organize the content and posts are quickly lost as time passes.
My favorite place to post trip reports and research for mountain climbing is now peakbaggers.com. Mainly because trip reports are associated with a peak, making it very easy to locate all the trip reports ever posted on that peak. That approach wouldn't translate well to BC skiing since most trips aren't associated with a peak, but the search function on TAY is a pretty good system for researching past trip reports for a particular area/peak.
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DG
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Posts: 299
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I think some great reasons are mentioned above, along with good rationale as to why it is valuable to have the TR's archived here.
I would add that often when a report is posted, it might garner a lot of views but little or no comments (I'm guilty of not leaving comments very often too). If you post a report and get 500 views and no comments, it sort of leaves the impression that what you did wasn't very interesting to others, so why go through the effort?
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PhilH
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Posts: 166
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Possible reasons:
+ Growth of social media
+ Overcrowding in the backcountry
There is an observable correlation between the growth of social media and overcrowding in the backcountry. Have you tried to find a parking spot at the Colchuck Lake trailhead on any summer weekend? Tried to get a permit for the Wonderland Trial or the Enchantments? Seen the graffiti and broken windows at High Rock Lookout? Dodged scantily clad Instagramers at Artist's Point? Tried to take a photo of Snow Lake without unicorn floaties in the frame? Skiing in the backcounty is NOT this bad...yet. But I think backcountry skiers see TAY as social media and are terrified of what the future may hold. This could be why TAY'er are increasingly shy about posing TR's.
Snow Lake will never get as many skiers in the winter as it does hikers in the summer. But how many BC skiers does it really take to make our favorite places feel overcrowded? On a nice weekend in May there are moguls on Pan Face.
I treasure TAY and the community it represents. Maybe Lowell is on to something when he suggests that TAY could be the place for storytelling in the ski community, rather than trip reporting.
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arb
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Posts: 112
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I think that in general more people are moving to the FB version of TAY, and also moving to just post on their FB feed, Instagram, etc.
Speaking just for myself, I have stopped posting most mid-winter trip reports due to my perception of crowding in the BC/competition for limited Route 2 Corridor parking and snow. Now I'll only post trip reports for objectives that hard to access, unlikely to see many repeats, or so popular already that I feel that I'm not making things worse (for myself). Given the evolution of light weight ski gear my threshold for "hard to access" keeps getting raised. I fully recognize that this behavior is both selfish and self serving, since I find other peoples trip reports super useful, but there it is.
Some of you may remember a William Nealy cartoon depicting the evolution of relationships between kayakers as the sport became more popular: I think his cartoon sums up my attitude towards other skiers in the BC these days.
All that said, I would hate to see TAY go away, and I love its clunky, old-school nature.
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frankfrank
5Member
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Posts: 60
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Let's get the new site software running, as demonstrated by MtnPavlas. That should help greatly, improving ease of viewing on mobile, uploading photos, and new user creation. (Right?) Who is operating the current site?
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JimD
Member
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Posts: 250
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I agree with most of the comments above.
As a long time reader and contributor I miss the good old days when Jason and others posted magazine quality TRs with lots of eye candy. As a photographer I quit posting here infact because of the photo posting limits, but would still drop links here to NWHikers where I found a user friendly platform. I saw posting my own TRs as paying back some of the value I got out of the site, and still do, but over the years many of my partners complained about increasing crowds on our favorite runs and blamed my pretty pictures, so I have tapered off. Now I mostly post simple conditions reports (esp. about bad or dangerous conditions) following Silas's lead (which I greatly appreciate) to post area conditions reports with out specific run beta.
All that said, here's some pre-season eye candy of one of my favorite areas taken last week - not enough snow to ski yet.
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