Closure of the Steve Pavlina Forum

This blog is supposed to be about a more rational take on the Steve Pavlina personal development approach.  Basically, I like to fillet out the good bits and drop all the crazy stuff.  I thought that it might be useful to share that kind of thing with other people.  I think that I might not need to do that so much any more.  It looks like Steve is moving a bit more mainstream himself.  This is most obvious in the closure of the forum that he ran linked to his blog.


There was a problem that came up that triggered this off.  It turned out that a couple of the moderators he had appointed were combing the forums to find people to invite to their own personal development site which also had a forum.  Steve was not informed, felt betrayed and decided to close the forum altogether.  I read all this with a sort of amused disbelief.  As a story of betrayal it was a bit on the lame side.  I don't think Wagner could have got an opera out of it.  And by the standards of the kinds of things that go on in internet forums it hardly seemed to be all that particularly bad - though there clearly was a breach of trust in there somewhere.  But the forums were closed and are now in a read only form, so none of the wisdom posted on there has been lost.

To be frank, there isn't a huge amount of stuff on there that really justifies being preserved for prosperity anyway.  I speak as someone who made the odd contribution.  I am not sure I would have cared if the whole thing had been deleted.  The most interesting thing about it was just how few people who follow Steve Pavlina closely enough to be motivated to join his forum could write anything of any interest.  There were a few things I enjoyed on there and I think I got a couple of links to some other interesting stuff.  But on the whole it was page after page of meaningless gobbledegook.

I think that the real reason Steve closed it down was that it was going in the different direction to the one he is now following.  He obviously wants to become more of a mainstream self help professional and having a lot of eccentric and alternative types hanging out on his blog was probably alienating more normal people.  Although he has left it in existance there is no way to get to it from his blog any more.  In some ways I think Steve's problem is a bit like that of Ron Paul.  Ron Paul's supporters are highly enthusiastic and get all over the internet.  If you judged things just on how they played out online you would assume that Ron Paul was a big player politically.  Of course, in the real world his presence is much less impressive.  In fact his supporters may well be positively alienating the less committed.  I think Steve has a form of this problem in that anyone checking him out is quite likely to hit on stuff that is quite a long way from what most people consider normal.  Steve can work on his own output and tailor it for a wider market.  And part of that is dumping his weirder friends.