Welcome to the New Macteens

by Dan Pourhadi • 09/02/2007 at 06:47 PM

“I’d love to have you open our relaunch with an article,” Dan Hollister told me last week.

Hmm, relaunch? I click over to Macteens.com. “Meet the New Macteens” reads a headline on the homepage.

Apparently Hollister and his foolish ilk are attempting to resurrect the once-reigning, now-decrepit teen hangout.

“You’re still the name people know on this site in terms of writers,” he continues.

That is true.

“Perhaps this article can be a statement,” he suggests. “A foreword, if you will.

“A virtual toast to our inevitable success!”

I laugh. Right. Too bad it ain’t gonna work.

When I was your age...

I remember The Good Ol’ Days, Macteens’ shining era: the forums were abuzz, the content flow was steady with great articles and columns—I’m particularly fond of that...what was it? the “Perspective”?—and the site itself was widely recognized as The online hangout for teenage Mac users.

The forums were Macteens’ bread and butter, rife with political commentary and heated debates, some posts going up as quick as IMs, some threads hundreds of posts long. I spent hours—2, 5, even 10 straight—arguing, bashing, defending, and attacking everything from the War to politicians to PC users to Apple news to random crap that I swear would make even the most immature single-digit roll his eyes.

Sometimes it was insanely frustrating.

But it was always insanely—sometimes amazingly—fulfilling.

The Socratic method works...

You learn a lot from your peers. Most of my knowledge of technology and politics developed as a result of my participation on Macteens’ forums. When you’re caught in an uphill struggle to prove You’re Right and Everyone Else is Stupid and Therefore Wrong, you want to have your facts straight. So you research. Then you make some stuff up. And you research some more.

Then you post about what you researched.

And you read others’ research and insight rebutting your post.

And then you research some more to rebut their rebuttal.

And before you know it, your heart’s racing, your mind is focused, and you unintentionally learned more about politics in a one-hour thread-battle than you did your entire first semester in Government class.

You meet people from all over the world. Your writing improves. Your argumentative and persuasive skills develop.

And, oddly enough, you have fun in the process.

It’s the content, stupid

Macteens’ forums wouldn’t have developed such a great community without a key feature of the site itself: the content produced by the dedicated, educated, skillful, and talented teen writing staff.

Chris et al spent countless hours managing staff, coding pages, monitoring the server, and making sure respectably-written, enjoyable, and yes, sometimes even informative articles were outputted on a (semi-)regular schedule.

Articles brought readers. Readers went to the forums. The community strengthened.

‘Time is the fire in which we burn’

On September 12th, I turn 20.

If you go ahead and say that aloud, you will notice my age no longer ends with the suffix “teen.”

Viz: The beginning of the end. The teenagers who infested...er, inhabited the once-flourishing Macteens.com are dying off, slowly succumbing to the inevitability of adulthood—to college, to jobs, and, sadly, to Responsibility. The care-free days of high school life, of vandalism, under-age drinking, and late-night 7/11 Slurpee runs, are coming to an abrupt halt.

It’s happened to almost everyone already: Chris Saribay, Clark Mueller, even Hollister himself—all passed the Age of Ascension, all stripped of the “teen” brand.

R.I.P.

If you’ve ever worked on a high school newspaper, you know what every Macteens editor learned in the trenches: keeping and motiving young writers, thus maintaining a regular publishing schedule, is nearly impossible.

There’s always the spark in a newbie writer that motivates him to churn out two or three really great pieces. But after that, the fire dwindles. The kid gets bored, distracted, unreliable.

A Macteens editor’s job is one of the hardest, most time-consuming jobs on the Mac Web. When you’re not badgering a bored writer to please, for the love of God, write SOMETHING, you’re cranking out a hastily-written article of your own to fill a scheduling gap.

When the “dedicated teen management staff” loses the “teen” qualifier and is hurled into the hassles and responsibilities of adult life, they can no longer fill the size-15 shoes necessary to keep content flowing. The exhausted team tries its best to keep things afloat, to keep the site fresh and new. But it’s just too difficult.

So the articles stop. The community shrinks.

Macteens fades.

Charging...clear!....ZAP!

Dan continues to tell me about this “new” Macteens.

“Right now it’s rough,” he says.

Of course. We’ve all been there. Promises of more content, a better design. Yeah, yeah.

“We’re configuring a new dedicated server and moving everything over...”

Wait, a new server?

“...doing a total site redesign...”

Well, sure, but...

“...getting new forum software, moving accounts over to that, inventing a new gallery from scratch...”

Uhm...

“...and, of course, hiring a new teen staff.”

Aha. Bingo.

Enter the New Guard

Fortunately for Macteens, the world’s supply of teenagers isn’t going anywhere.

As Chris, Clark, Dan, and I grow out of teenhood, others are eagerly growing in, ready to pick up where we left off.

The Mac community is ballooning; the iPod “Halo Effect” is real. More and more high school and teen college students are buying Macs—to surf the web, to write papers and, yes, dammit, to play games.