Hi, Lee - at some point, I will probably have a business making tools among other things, but this is less about that - it would cause a problem if I were talking about tools and showing what I made for discussion and it was for sale.
Where that breaks down and where sites like Reddit better SMC and have probably killed it is you can put your name in reddit (as in business name), show something you're making and never really have an issue. If a major advertiser on the site makes the same thing, it's not going to be a problem unless you post something that is essentially an advertisement and don't engage discussion.
It's also never been clear whether or not SMC is for profit. The contributions go to Northwind associates and the discussion around donations with a .org site will lead a lot of people to believe it's not for profit. I don't see any information suggesting that it's not for profit or has been.
I asked Keith to ghost my ID on the way out, but I was unhappy about something unrelated (highly experienced users there became a magnet for discontent from the peanut gallery, and no weight was put on content). Thankfully, Keith did just that. There was a moderation bias at the time - not that the moderators are biased, I don't think they are or ever were - but bias for moderation finds users who may be liked by 90% of the population and disliked by 10% who rarely post and who show up to complain. that would've been George's profile. George ended up leaving out of apathy because you couldn't make any differentiating comments or refer to poor advice from external sources without drawing that 10%.
That gets to the core of the site. George is valuable to a few people. Advertisers need beginners, and so the result is what it is. It looks like there is less moderation and no adherence to the real name policy, as folks who get banned seem to pop up with an alternate name a few days later, cause trouble and do the same.
Lastly, the non-competitive environment must be a little bit more than just non-competitive. In the middle of the LN / Woodcraft debacle, I received some PMs from people at corporate Woodcraft. The group there sort of sided with LN (ultimately, I would, too), but the underlying issue is Woodcraft wasn't an advertiser which didn't just prevent them from advertising, they were rather ghosted from being able to respond to any public posts at all, even if they had information that people would've found useful to know. That's the account I received - maybe people don't always tell you the truth and there's more to it than that - as in, maybe inability to post came from attempts at promotion, though that's what wasn't communicated to me. I don't think LN was an advertiser, but the policy exempted a lot of people from getting any non-advertising information in what smells like pay to play, and when you start collecting suppositions that nobody will confirm as fact - that the forum operates under a .org, it employs a lot of moderators who often post public appeals for money - though employment loosely used here - I gather the moderation team is volunteers, but appears to have a gate for people who could be advertisers to prevent even factual posting. Not good for some - plenty of others don't have an issue with any of that and that is their choice.
(that post from above was from 4+ years ago, by the way - peter is plowing the fields, so to speak, stuff from the soil is coming back up).
Added later 41 min 06 s:
Resurfacing this discussion from 2019 as we step into 2024. The ongoing challenge persists for smaller websites striving to stay significant amidst the acquisition of major "social" giants by even larger corporate entities, or their influx of funding in the millions (perhaps billions?) from venture capital. This dynamic contrasts sharply with my solitary efforts, working independently in my underwear in front of an aging ThinkPad computer (circa 2008) within what used to be a spare bedroom. 
Peering into your predictive lenses, what do you anticipate for woodworking platforms, publications, and the overall trade/craft landscape in 2024?
Reddit and facebook? Starting to forge tools this past year much more seriously, I traveled around to the different forums. if you arrive at them and you post something, you'll get responses pretty quickly. there's little traffic, though, and you can't tell at first because the folks who read occasionally will respond to new posting and it seems like there's more going on than there is. I haven't gotten on Facebook since 2008 or something and wouldn't do anything that gives them a penny of revenue.
Reddit strikes me more as a forum for people who are on the couch and who just want to scroll. The ads are often the worst of the corporate stuff (drug lobbies posing under a name that looks like a community non profit and trying to get you to write politicians and protest that your health care system won't give them a blank check), or endless ads about meds that have nothing to do with you and show some 60 year old in a swing smiling and say "you might want to consult your doctor about". I guess they know what they're doing - people google it? Who knows. 4 million supposed WW users, and something like 10 posts an hour - with the strange dynamic of someone who may be a professional custom interior joiner showing a 100k job seemingly at random, no real discussion on the job, and in 10 days, it goes off the radar. 1 post per member per year would be about 45 times the post volume that's there - maybe the plan is to retain people who selected a community to segregate and advertise (of course it is) and showing the number of users who visited or interacted with a sub is not that great.
Traveling around briefly to blacksmithing sites this past year when switching to fully hand forging much of my hobby output found not much different - blacksmithing sites with a tiny fraction of folks left, there is interaction if you post something but you can go find that you posted a question in August, for example, and it remains the last post. Predictive guessing is like weather - predicting 2024 to be mostly like 2023 is. Reddit may claim increasing traffic, but you can anecdotally google their name and traffic decline and find subs where people have monitored traffic rather than taking reported metrics to report pretty steep declines.
Theory - most of the traffic is people with enough interest to see what a topic is about and maybe even get into things as a beginner, and then the fun wears off and people move on. Looks like there is a semi-retrenchment strategy there, too - to pull all revenue in through reddit - I registered there long ago and didn't really go and missed all of the excitement when they apparently walled the site up so that everyone has to access through their app. Went there four or so months ago and the constant popups and limited access through normal means to push toward app traffic will wear even the young folks down. I installed the app for 1 day and tried to use it - the volume of advertising is obnoxious.
There is a lot of older information on the internet that's very useful if people can get away from the crack-like addition to instant interaction in an app. Seems to be more on google books and archive.org than ever, and the reprints of the texts are usually cheap giving a paper option. Not good for forums, but very good for things like design, varnish making, etc.
