Should we bring back New Beer Sunday?

Oh I definitely miss the food and pet pics! And honestly I felt like all the 'peripheral' stuff folks shared about their lives was valuable given the subjective elements of how one perceives a given beer on a given day. Yes, I know the goal is to be as objective as possible when evaluating the beer, but to not acknowledge the subtle elements of influence from other aspects of ones life is perhaps to ignore an important part of the holistic experience one has with said beer on that particular day. After all it doesn't occur in a vacuum. That 'peripheral' content (in my opinion) gave the thread a personable/community feel that can be rare in online forums.

For me personally, my participation drop off in the weekly thread was most defintely pandemic centric. Too much forced screen time left me trying to reclaim time offline. Sadly participation in the NBS/NBW thread was a casualty for me. Hoping that reverses course as I get more time away from my devices on a more consistent basis.

I do feel the vibe to the thread is changed. Possible origins for the perceived change in the thread vibe/feel have been presented by others. I'm no more nor less likely to return based on the number of days the thread runs, but completely understand the greater flexibility the current approach affords those with recurring Sunday conflicts. But I'm defintely far more likely to reengage with the dedicated host model (which I personally feel doesn't need to include an actual beer review out-of-the-gate) AND greater latitude to allow the dialogue on the 'periphery' of the beer experience we're choosing to share with others. My unsolicited $0.02

 

Having followed this thread from nose to tail, I'm good either way. I voted only to see what the general 'vibe' was for NBS vs. NBW, but I'll try to show up in any case.

For many of us, being "here" was our desert island during the last year+, so I'll continue to look forward to whatever format is selected or maintained... and try to do better on reviews.
I like the idea of doing thematic NBS or NBW, however, so you could call it NBS/W #54 Saison Special or something like that, to attract folks to a particular style and set of reviews.
Otherwise, here for the banter, and for the community-of-learning and sharing around here.
Cheers!

 

I'd prefer it be just on Sunday. It's too unwieldy as a two day thing. I've stopped participating and I've actually stopped even reading it. I stick to WBAYDN now.

 

WBAYDN is less unwieldy???

 

Hey! It' STILL is special.

 

Lightening in a bottle is volatile and precious. Chalk up another piece to nostalgia. It's funny but the good old days are always closer than one thinks. Time just simply flies by as I get older. And business is business after all.

 

Just make it New Beer Week, otherwise known as BeerAdvocate.

I don't participate, so my vote doesn't count, but I always liked following NBS and don't follow NBW, for whatever that's worth.

 

Certainly quicker to scroll through.

But beyond that — and back to the one-day vs two-days thing — with WBAYDN regulars, if you reply with a question or witty retort, there’s a good chance you get a reply black while you’re still scrolling through the thread having a beer. And even if you’re reading in on other people’s side convo, it’s easier if it’s all within a few posts and not spread out over multiple days.

(Not to say that people restarting conversations 9 months after they started isn’t a big part of the BA experience.)

I’m sure! Who’s got the butt pad now?

 

I disagree here. All the videos, etc. make it a chore to scroll through. It is one of the reasons (chore to scroll through, not videos especially) that I quit.

Well, killing the side conversations was damaging to NBS/W, no doubt, but I don't get the WBAYDN is better because it is "within a few posts and not spread out over multiple days." WBAYDN is almost always twice as many posts/pages on a single day as the two day NBW. IOW, WBAYDN is much more spread out.

 

I know you do a lot of work to try to make BA a fun and functioning space @Roguer, but another way to read this is: “If people are upset that the mods shit-canned the dedicated volunteers who spent hours every week making NBS what it was in order to attract theoretical new users who never showed up anyhow … get over it.”

I don’t know what conversations you and others had with CJGiant and LordoftheWeins before removing them, and what letter of thanks and special swag and other gratitude BA ownership showered on them for everything they did for this site — not only hosting the best thread on it, but teaching people how to review beers, which built up the review database, which is ultimately what makes BeerAdvocate have legs. But hopefully that happened. From a user’s point of view, it seemed like they were very abruptly and disrespectfully kicked to the curb.

 

I think you're downplaying the significance of the change and dismissing legitimate observations as just free floating angst about any change whatsoever (even if you're of course correct that - as with most things discussed here - it's not a very big deal in the scheme of things). There were three things that made NBS special/unique:

1) It was constrained to discussing first time beer experiences

2) It took place over a constrained time period that increased the likelihood that the group of participating posters were having a somewhat communal experience (that is, the person whose post you were reading at any given moment was more likely to also still be actively participating in the thread themselves).

3) It was curated by hosts who could mold the feel of the thread each week depending on what kind of non-beer experiences they wove into the kickoff. Every week had at least the potential to be interestingly different from the last, and it gave you insight into fellow posters that you don't get from other threads.

Two of those three things are no longer the case. I blathered a bit about the significance of #2 in a previous post, but reading through this thread has made me realize that it's actually #3 that matters the most. The new way may or may not be better, or inevitable, or necessary, but it is meaningfully different. I think the passion and thoughtfulness with which so many people have written about what the thread meant to them testifies to this.

And for the record, I never made any choice to stop participating in NBW because of the change. But I did find myself just sort of drifting away from it over time (both reading and posting) for a number of reasons and the current version of it has less appeal to draw me back in fwiw.

 

Brevity in most things is good, but New Beer Sunday allowed one to really get to know people and how their minds work. It was, simply, a very good experience that I'm glad that I participated in fairly often.

 

Love me some Ranger....Gotta send him a Boilermaker scarf.

 

Me. It got misplaced (wife cleaned), found, and I wanted to hit somebody with it, but for reasons not to be mentioned, I need to hit somebody else with it...

 

I might suggest that any time you include the line "just get over it" you are not inviting a sympathetic reading of your points as that colors the entirety of the argument. Nor does implying I only gave a surface level knee jerk reading of your post. More importantly why isn't the host issue likely to come back? You're just hand waving that away when the entire point of this thread is "Should we bring back New Beer Sunday" (and presumably the things that made New Beer Sunday New Beer Sunday). If there is no chance of any aspect of NBS Sunday returning then what are we doing here exactly?

As to the time constraints, you're being needlessly nitpicky here. A thread that encompasses Sunday - which for all intents and purposes is going to be very heavily participated in from mid Sunday morning to early Sunday evening due to when people are active on Sundays, is indeed a different beast than a thread that includes the entirety of a Saturday night. Again, maybe it's better this way, but your insistence that things aren't meaningfully different is not helping your argument.