Surveying currently active GCers...

[shadokat]

My personal opinion:

1. Back in the early days, women came here to get recruitment advice and share their stories. Members became obsessive with it. THEN, we had to tell PNMs not to use real chapter names or tell where their school was because members would figure out their schools and chapters and impair their recruitment experiences. It was sad to watch poster after poster leave before finishing her story because someone PM'd them to say, "Hey, I know you're at UCF and your final two chapters are Alpha Phi and AGD" or whatever. That's CREEPY! And word gets around!

2. This place became FULL of just mean-spirited people. Someone would ask a question, and people would jump down their throats. I was often times shocked at how rude someone could be to a person who just asked a simple question about something they heard or what not. Like, touch grass people! Greek Life isn't that serious!!!

3. This forum, unlike GreekRank, is not fully anonymous. You can say what you like about GreekRank, because it's a cesspool, but it is also a pretty realistic view of a campus's greek life climate. In helping daughters of friends with recruitment, I always go there to get the lay of the land.

4. This site, while great for us old heads, doesn't seem to attract any college-aged members anymore. The posts are all by alums who are far removed from the collegiate experience in most ways. I stay because I like the recruitment thread, and when irishpipes left, I figured I'd keep it going. I know I'm not as good at it as she is, but everyone wants to know that stuff.

How do you fix it? I don't know...get some younger blood on board?

[sigmagirl2000]

Originally Posted by shadokat

My personal opinion:

1. Back in the early days, women came here to get recruitment advice and share their stories. Members became obsessive with it. THEN, we had to tell PNMs not to use real chapter names or tell where their school was because members would figure out their schools and chapters and impair their recruitment experiences. It was sad to watch poster after poster leave before finishing her story because someone PM'd them to say, "Hey, I know you're at UCF and your final two chapters are Alpha Phi and AGD" or whatever. That's CREEPY! And word gets around!

2. This place became FULL of just mean-spirited people. Someone would ask a question, and people would jump down their throats. I was often times shocked at how rude someone could be to a person who just asked a simple question about something they heard or what not. Like, touch grass people! Greek Life isn't that serious!!!

3. This forum, unlike GreekRank, is not fully anonymous. You can say what you like about GreekRank, because it's a cesspool, but it is also a pretty realistic view of a campus's greek life climate. In helping daughters of friends with recruitment, I always go there to get the lay of the land.

4. This site, while great for us old heads, doesn't seem to attract any college-aged members anymore. The posts are all by alums who are far removed from the collegiate experience in most ways. I stay because I like the recruitment thread, and when irishpipes left, I figured I'd keep it going. I know I'm not as good at it as she is, but everyone wants to know that stuff.

How do you fix it? I don't know...get some younger blood on board?

100% this. I also will add that I stopped posting when certain moderators began imposing their political beliefs onto others and saying some pretty unacceptable things about the lgbtq+ community. They also used their power to shut down other posters and threads that differed from their views though there was nothing in the threads that would merit closure.

If this space is not safe for anyone with a differing viewpoint, then why would the next generation want to join?

[John]

Thank you to everyone for sharing your views & opinions. All of your comments are very useful, informative and most greatly appreciated.

Please keep the comments coming if anyone has more to share or if anyone hasn't commented yet.

I've taken lots of notes as I read through this thread up to this point. Pretty much every post since all of them were so helpful.

I'll be posting more on the various comments soon, but for now let's see if we get some more views / opinions being shared in this thread.

[UVASquirrel]

Originally Posted by shadokat

My personal opinion:

I stay because I like the recruitment thread, and when irishpipes left, I figured I'd keep it going. I know I'm not as good at it as she is, but everyone wants to know that stuff.

I think you're doing a great job! I stay mainly for the recruitment thread and the extension/closure one. Thank you for keeping the recruitment one going!

[PhilTau]

Haven't posted in a long time - but do check the site occasionally. My impression is that when a Facebook site was started, it drew people away from the greekchat website. Now I can't even find the Facebook page due to the large number of greekchat or "greek hat" sites on Facebook for those interested in Greecian culture and language.

More importantly, I think there has been a shift in how 19-22 year-olds communicate and interact with each other. To them, we might as well be using quill pens and scrolls. They likely peruse this site for rush information and what to do and not do for rush, but are uncomfortable composing a lengthy post about their experiences, when it is easier (for them) to just produce a short TikToc-style video on the same topic.

Oh - and shadokat's post is right on point.

[Cookiez17]

I also will bring up another point: reddit’s fraternity and sorority boards have kinda taken the place of this. Many questions that would have been posted here like “I’m rushing at Anytown U what is it like?” Or “I’m going through COB I need advice” usually end up there. The sorority board is actually pretty active there and assume it’s the same for the fraternity board.

[AGDee]

I think it was a combination of the bullying. I mean, one person actually had their membership suspended because a GCer told a higher up person in their organization a bunch of lies. The prunetacos thing was scary. The people who were doxxing others was scary (doxxing wasn't a word back then, was it? LOL).

But we hit a point at one time where the bot activity was completely nuts and you couldn't hardly read it. That was before the Introductions posting process was implemented. That slowed the bots, but I feel like a lot of people quit trying at that point and forgot about it.

Reddit is a bigger competitor than TikTok in my opinion as there are subs for sororities and greek life and, I imagine, fraternities. The people who made friends in real life moved on to Facebook for staying in touch, for the most part. Other forms of social media have taken over. Although I liken this forum more to reddit than to other platforms. I know a lot of us are on Reddit too. We could probably push more traffic this way by referencing it often.

[PhoenixAttain]

I come here for the chapter establishments and closures and recruitment results as well the AI journeys. There is a subreddit for AI but I haven’t seen the other information that GC covers showing up as much on Reddit.

[John]

Thanks again to everyone for sharing your thoughts in this survey discussion thread.

I've had to redirect my focus away from GC for a short bit, but will be right back at this not too long from now.

As this was a survey for currently active GCers, my plans are to next reach out to GCers who were very active in the past but have not been active on GC for quite some time. Goal will be to learn directly from them why they stopped being active on GC and what changes they might want to see here at GC in order to regain their interest in becoming active on GC again.

Reaching out to these previously active GCers will require some database programming to basically build a list of these GC accounts, filter out any who opted in their GC profile to not receive admin emails from GC, etc. Then I'll reach out and see where it all leads. This will very likely be the next mini-project I do soon as I can get back to focusing more again on GC.

[AGDee]

There might be some on the Greekchat facebook page. I can post something there if you have a google form or something they can fill out.

[John]

Originally Posted by AGDee

There might be some on the Greekchat facebook page. I can post something there if you have a google form or something they can fill out.

That survey I plan on doing via discussion thread here on GC like this one as well as via email for anyone that just wants to reply to the email that I send out. Once I get that survey going & the thread is posted, would be great if you could post a link to that on FB as well. Thanks.

[AGDee]

Will do!