by Benjamin Haines » Sat Jul 07, 2018 2:12 pm
^ That kind of private discussion on Facebook is insular by design, though. People join private groups and then segment themselves off within those groups and then most of the conversations are confined to private message inboxes.
Not everyone who visits MZ posts every day or very much at all but that doesn't mean people don't still browse the forums whenever they have the time even if they don't log in. The overall board activity is about the same now as it has been for about a decade. It goes through spikes and lulls and right now it's in a lull. Activity always spikes whenever there's something new to talk about while most of the other board sections have just had a few active topics here and there whenever folks get into them. Ten years ago the activity spiked around the Classic Media DVDs and the Godzilla: Unleashed vidyagame, then a few years later it was the announcement that Legendary got the rights to Godzilla, then four years later it was the release of Legendary's Godzilla and all of the new BRD/DVD releases riding that wave. In between all of that there were varying spikes in activity around new toys and collectibles, the Gamera releases from Shout! Factory and Mill Creek, Godzilla from Criterion, and Destroy All Monsters and Megalon from Media Blasters.
Right now the Godzilla anime movies aren't drawing nearly as much buzz as a new live-action release but we just had a big stretch of spiked activity with the release of Shin Godzilla, the long-awaited DVD/BRD debut of The Return of Godzilla, and the release of Kong: Skull Island. Things are sure to pick up again when Criterion unveils whatever they're cooking up and especially when Legendary's Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong are finally upon us. Longtime users who may not be posting today will be able to log back in after however many years and discuss the new Godzilla release with everyone else, and anyone can start a new topic or reengage an old one from the board's 15+ years of archived discussion. That's something that an old-fashioned public forum like this one offers that the big social media sites just aren't matching. The biggest difference between the MZ of 10 years ago and the MZ of today is just that a lot of the folks who posted the most on MZ 10 years ago have since taken their kaiju discussion to Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit and other sites, but the MZ community is still here for everybody who wants it.