inside you will find the most in depth dissertation of clutchfansology ever conducted

The prime time to visit the GARM is between the time our season ends and draft day. I avoid it when I'm online.

I posted in D&D for about 2 days then realized it's just liberals vs republicans in a never-ending cycle of proving who has the bigger dick. No point in debating or "discussing" if the only people you can get through to are people who already share the same views as you. It's more like the positive reaffirmation forum for men with shortcomings.

The Texans and Astros forum is quality if you are a fan of either.

Which leaves the Hangout, or the forum for guys who can't get girls but have unlimited knowledge on all topics concerning women. Gets entertaining when delusional middle-aged attention whores like "Fatty b*stard" talk about how they have a future in comedy and you can't handle him because his ignorance is actually the "truth". Yeah dude, you're hilarious.

In conclusion, it's good to be young and smart. Best of both worlds.

 

I read the GARM, seldom post however. Anything anyone writes will get flushed out in a few hours. Plus it's full of attention seeking kids thats constantly making new threads and polls.

The Hangout can be similar to the GARM at times, you have the Rookie-just-turned-Member making 2-3 threads a day for 3-4 days then suddenly disappears. But nevertheless, the Hangout is a nice place to converse during the day when you find yourself with a gap of free time between work.

 

You're doing it wrong......work is something you do when theres a gap between good threads on ClutchFans!!!!

 

lmfao.

 

I love the hangout... It's so much better than the GARM.

The only poster that I recognize that posts in the GARM a LOT and in the hangout a LOT is DD. It basically consists of him arguing with a bunch of 13 year olds. He's yet to realize they don't care about his opinion, but he still has to voice it, leading to his 50k posts.

I find myself lurking the GARM a lot more, and seeing idiotic posts, but I'd rather not waste my time replying to them. Need to do that more.

The NBA Dish forum is also vastly underrated. Lots of quality posting goes on there.

aaand Mango only posts in the Stock Market thread...

 

Good analysis, cabbage.

I'm mostly back to where I was in 97 or whatever when I first started visiting the site: lurking.

The sheer volume in the GARM makes it impossible to know if I'd just be repeating something someone else already said. Also, I almost always watch the games on DVR, after the fact due to work, so by the time I freak out about something 10,000 other people have already had the same idea.

The volume in there (coupled with the reactionary nature of a lot of the kids there) also makes it difficult to stay involved in a discussion. I have to wade through 100 posts before I get to someone whose opinion I can care about.

But I think you're right too that it's an age thing. I just don't get as heated about sports as I used to. I'm still as passionate a fan; I just don't need a bunch of strangers to agree that my opinions are "right." That's a function of age and also of being very busy with my job. But I just don't feel like arguing anymore.

Same goes for D&D, actually.

I'm still here every day because I enjoy the familiar personalities, but debate of any sort (especially over the internet) has really lost its appeal with me.

 

**** you *******

 

I rarely post outside of the hangout.

Yao fans really changed the board in both good and bad ways. Where would we be without "Some joke about rockets from china"?

 

the GARM is a pain in the ass to sift through, but it's still our rox.......i wish more old-timers would represent in there....

 

Reported.

 

Seems fairly accurate. I have noticed when I log on that I glance at the GARM briefly and usually move on to the other forums.

The D&D is good to hear different points of view and whatnot even when posters like bigtexx and others get old.

The Houston sports is pretty good. Aside from all the "Is (random person just released from another team) a good fit for the Texans?" threads. Not a lot of traffic there though, which is good and bad.

Hangout is pretty cool, but I'll only check out a thread if it really grabs my attention i.e. tinman's "Radiohead is awesome" thread.

Most though have a pretty good amount of people and posts get lost in the shuffle a lot of times. At least you always have a good chance that DD will respond. Still a good read though on most days.

 

What sucks is that I used to lurk this site around 2000 and I used to really enjoy the GARM, and when I finally got around to registering the GARM went down toilet. Man the discussion on this board used to be high quality...too bad.

 

So what changed in the GARM? Is the average age of posters still about the same? Are there less pure Rockets, and more fans of individual players like Yao and McGrady? Are posters, perhaps, just more fed up with all the losing for more than a decade and that's made them less patient when the team is playing lowsy?

 

I guess I'm kind of a newcomer, but as far as the GARM is concerned -- I've tried to get into it, but its really pretty poor. Not much quality discussion at all, and I'm probably just going to give it a rest.

I feel like there are good threads every now and then; I really like watching "No Layups", and there are select posters who have good opinions and start good threads...But there's just way too much nonsense. (This isn't a knock on Clutch or the staff, who I feel do a pretty good job) its unfortunate that the quality threads get lost in a flood of nonsense and ridiculous opinions

I like to lurk around the Hangout, but there's way too many inside jokes between you guys

I like NBA Dish.

 

Hey, I resemble that remark!

BTW, can you imagine the GARMites (GARMians? GARMonians?) in D&D?

Yao_Fan1245322: Republicans got PWND
GradyLadyShady: LOL WE SHULD TRADE SOUPREME CRT 4 ISRALI KNESSET
TMacAttak: If Obama doesn't balance the budget and finish the Iraq War by 2010, TRADE EVERYONE.
LowryRoxDaHouse: Greenspan sux!!! JVG for Head of Fed!!!
DaDakota: I think you mean Bernanke.
LowryRoxDaHouse: wut screw u azzhole

 

Yeah, the GARM isn't worth posting in anymore to me. It's too chaotic in there.

The Hangout is where I do most of my reading and posting. Hell, I practically read at least the OP of every thread.

 

haha.

or conversely...


basso: "Yao Ming's left big toenail is larger than his right big toenail... THIS ADMINISTRATION IS IN CHAOS"

 

I still like the idea of rookies can't be eligible to become members until a full year of posting.

 

I usually just post the occasional one-liner or when I believe my opinion matters... I feel that posts on GARM are usually pretty crappy, but if you dig enough, what needs to be said is said. I rarely venture past the first page of a thread... I usually just like keeping up to date with news and watching the videos/listening to podcasts (props to DD, Nuno and Raheel)

 

i used to lurk back then and never joined because I felt I couldnt contribute anything worth while to the GARM...oddly I ended up joining when the GARM was starting its trend downward.

I think a lot has to with the addition of Yao and McGrady to the team. Back then the team really had no superstar, it had a star in Francis, but he wasnt really looked upon at the same level as a Kobe, McGrady, Duncan, Shaq, KG etc. You probably would be hard pressed to find just fans of Francis outside of Houston.

So what you had basically was a group of Rocket fans who primarily discussed about the Rockets and really just talked about things in a somewhat future type perspective because at the time the team was starting to rebuild around Francis after Dream retired. While everyone wanted the team to succeed I think it was pretty obvious to the average poster that the team wasn't going anywhere without adding a few more pieces. The expectations for the team were low.

Now then there was a huge influx of posters who came in after Yao was drafted whose primary concern was how Yao would do. I can understand where they were coming from as Yao had unbelievable expectations on him when he was drafted. This caused issues when people would get mad that Yao had a terrible game despite a rockets W or they would be happy over Yao having a great game and the rockets losing.

You can say the same thing for McGrady fans (though not on the same scale as the Yao fans) as well when he got traded here in 2004.

Especially now in the past few years with the core of Mcgrady-Yao the expectations have been higher than ever especially in the last season and this season. I think this year's have been the highest since the 97 season. Whenever there are high expectations even the slightest misstep it is going to cause a lot of "knee-jerk" reaction threads of "we need to trade X player to x player is the greatest thing since sliced bread" A lot of these threads really bring down the quality of the GARM.

I would also argue though that some features of the GARM have improved greatly since the 99 days. There are lot of new neat things like R2k's videos, HillTopper's post game videos, Nuno and Raheel's no layups show and radio shows, Jason Friedman's articles, batkins super quick video highlights, and even carmichael dave's shows with artest.

But I would say yes that the age demographic of the GARM is probably lower than what it used to be, but I personally attribute that to more of a change in society and bbs culture around the world.

for example: one of the reasons why I didnt post in 99 and just lurked was that I was still on dialup, broadband internet was for the most part unheard of in most parts at an affordable rate. Now you have almost everyone with broadband and hence an increase in general internet surfing for everyone especially the gen "y" crowd. and I believe in part of that with more and more people on the internet and the huge boom in the trend of social networking sites/tools like myspace, facebook, blogging, twitter everyone is much more comfortable about sharing their opinions, whether they are good, bad or downright terrible. Moreover some people feel like their opinion must be heard regardless of what that opinion is, there really isnt a better place to do that than on an internet forum.

There isnt a way to really regulate this unless you have a private forum but then that defeats the purpose of having a forum where different thoughts and ideas can come and share.

The GARM was the easiest to "take down" because 99% of the posters here came to the site because of the Houston Rockets. and they may or may not visit the other sections as much. (I am not from Houston and do not care about the other Houston sports team so I never visit the astros/texans section)

The Hangout is relatively still good because the majority of the time you have a lot of the older poster posting here the most and like someone said there are a lot of inside jokes from a while back that may go over someone's head and if cabbage's theory of age estimation holds true then you also have a lot of potential teenagers not posting because they are a different stage in life than most of the threads that are posted in there.

ok wow i think my post is longer than the OP...sorry about that looks like I had some time on my hands at work