I don’t use Reddit myself, but found this by chance: Some interesting views.
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This
.
brought smile on my face.
However the topic is archived so you can’t vote neither comment on it on Reddit anymore.
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Mae’n wir. I think there are a few other references to SSiW which I was pleased to see as well.
I was talking to someone about forums in general, and how they seem to be going out of fashion.
Probably a reflection of the trend away from computers / laptops and towards mobile devices, i.e. towards less-geek-oriented means of communication. There was a time when everyone and his cousin seemed to have a computer, and some people did fine, but others struggled, and now that alternatives are available, I sense that a lot of people are happy to leave computers and all related geekery behind. (However, there seem to be a lot of IT geeks in the language world, who also tend to inhabit language (and other) forums, so we (or at least I) don’t totally relate to the anti-computer feeling, but I think it’s there. Ditto anti-email. I’m amazed at how many people (it turns out) hate email, but they do. (I’ve recently taken over as secretary of a local organisation, and am surprised at the number of people in the membership list who said they don’t want any emails thanks. (Not sure how they expect people to contact them - most people don’t want to be cluttered with paper either, not that we have the resources to be sending out paper newsletters all the time). There is of course social media, but not everyone likes that either, so … what do to…
Anyway, this person reckoned that Reddit was a bit like Geek-central and I think I see what she means… 
Sorry for the ramble. That’s what Sunday morning does to me apparently…
From the discussion:
If I didn’t have to worry about work/money I would be back home in no time
That, I’m afraid, pretty much sums up Wales and the Welsh language and the current state of both.
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Geek-gaming central … gaming it is maybe still a bit, geek, I don’t know about that. I never was a member of that one despite I was member of quite some forums, pages … I even had 3 forums of my own and adminstered two of them, but they all have gone except one. By the two it was the case that the host shut their servers down (what tells a lot about popularity of forums aswell), the others are abandoned (one more sign of forums popularity). So I’m very pleased that SSi forum is crouded and active and I hope it’s the way to stay for a long time.
Regarding e-mails: well most of people in our country like social media and SMS as a contact the most, then Skype which is not suitable only for chats but can also be used like kind of messenger and the last thing is e-mail. Who writes on paper? Well some still do…
To be honest, I didn’t read all comments so I didn’t see them all. I was pleasantly surprised upon those two already and both are good opinion of SSiW so I was extreamly happy to read them both.
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Interesting Tatjana. This was something that I had not until relatively recently realised. (I’m often always a little out of touch with popular culture, admittedly). But it hit me when someone who was a very active member of the organisation I mentioned, and I was trying to get him to use their forums on the national member website, and he (metaphorically) ran a mile…said it was “too technical for him…”. (And yet he’s an active computer user as far as I know). For whatever reason, they obviously don’t appeal to a lot of people nowadays (even if Facebook is just another kind of forum really (with a very poor user interface in my humble opinion, but I’m probably in a minority of 1 there …).
And I guess a lot of people are still more or less forced to use computers and emails in their daily work, and when they have free time and an alternative, they are more than happy to leave emails and computers behind them.
I had to wonder about these people who had signed up (almost certainly online) to an organisation, and left an email address, but then later said “please don’t contact me by email”, what exactly did they expect us to do? I can only assume they meant they didn’t really want to be an active part of the organisation.
I think some of it is to do with the probable fact that when they do get emails, they now get them on their phone and not on a computer (which used to be the way everybody got email). And while even the most modern smart phones are good for a lot of things, I suspect they are still not actually all that good for handling email in quantity, or anything like a large email, for which you really need a decent sized screen and a physical keyboard.
It more depend on the app which supports the e-mail provider. I am very happy with Gmail app which appears really nicely and even marks/sorts emails with big first letters differently colored depends on the sender of the e-mail. But I agree, not all apps are so nicely structured and reading e-mails on smart phonw still can be kind of nightmare sometimes.
Well, I actually can’t imagine why then those members of one organization left e-mail for the contact at all if they don’t want to accept/read them.
And forums … they are not used as widely as they were once before and no matter how you as admin try to hold members active it comes to one point when membership activity decreses and eventually fade away. I was admin of one very populated and active gaming/LEGO/Doctor Who forum on which we discussed not only those themes but also as popular stuff as rugby is but there came a time when people just drupped off or they weren’t so active no matter what we tired to do for the forum to be more interesting.
I guess it just comes the time when one pice of technology has to go to be the history and something else comes up to replace it. Twitter, FB and what’s more to it is a kind is more like newsboard to me then kind of forum and yes, with quite poor interface and even poorer translation no mater what language …
To get back to Welsh sadly one forum that seems to have quietly gone to sleep is the Forum Wales (or at least the discussions on the Welsh language there). There is still a lot of useful stuff on there from old discussions, but I’m not sure if posting a question on there would elicit much of a reply these days.
Another view of Welsh (a 2 year old article) from the New Statesman:
(Did we discuss this once before? Seems vaguely familiar - Of course, SSiW is the very antithesis of the problem she is talking about, so I’d hope she’d be supportive).
(I had to zoom in quite a lot in Chrome to make it readable)
OWOWOW … this is tinny text in deed. Zoomed in 250 % to make it readable for me but didn’t do reading yet. Might be I’ll include my Ivona reader to read it for me …
Another robust piece about Welsh (robust in its defence): (not from Reddit).
Another interesting article (but a bit negative) with lots of interesting comments (including at least one SSiW learner):
http://www.clickonwales.org/2012/08/pidgin-welsh-confronts-mutations
I remember thinking this article was more than a bit odd when I first read it three years ago. I know he has gone to the trouble of learning some Welsh, but the whole thing seems to be a complaint that a Welsh is not like English. Feminine and masculine words, irregular plurals? Words covering different meanings and not being absolute translations of English? - different from English, therefore ‘difficult’ and symptomatic of a “very old language”! (Like every other language on this earth of ours. [different, not older!])
And when you get opinions like “But first I would suggest that you have to look at the problems inherent in the language. If you were to think of it in terms of efficiency of information transfer, that is conveying meaning, then obviously Welsh suffers from many problems.” Or “There are other Welsh attitudes to take into account as well.” I think you may be up against a bit of a wall there.
I’m not blaming him or saying he is particularly obtuse compared to others- I just wonder why cliconWales thought his opinions were worth publishing ahead of other peoples.
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He gets taken to task pretty thoroughly in the comments below the article.