Dyestat shutting down?

i think this whole idea (which i've heard over and over again) that the dyestat model is anachronistic is overblown. especially at the HS level, kids/coaches simply are not going to be using twitter/fb presences to satisfy the interests of fans. and that's probably a good thing. should an 8th grade or frosh phenom be expected to use twitter and fb to share post-race thoughts with fans? no way.

the action in hs is also happening way more spread out and big performances/match-ups can happen in unexpected places (compared to college/pros), so there's really a need for a centralized news location people know they can turn to to see what is going on, rather than hunting down meet results themselves.

and while i think facebook and twitter have taken away the uniqueness of dyestat being the only real option for elite and sub-elite high schoolers from around the country to get to know each other and talk, there are still benefits to forums.

if you're a kid who isn't super into running but wanted to check on the recent times of some other team in his conference, looking up results on dyestat could really suck you in if you stumbled across the forum discussions on your league's thread or state's board. i know that's what happened to me, and i'm sure countless other people. we would not have sought out lots of running information or followed anyone on twitter or friended/followed an elite on facebook. we just wanted to check on some local results and then saw how awesome dyestat was.

but i think without dyestat and its forums, that kid just finds the meet results on milesplit or espnrise,, looks at them and moves on.

millions of tweets have drowned out letsrun, dyestat,... Letsrun will be gone soon.

The biggest thing was the changing of the forums. I posted on the original dyestat back in the day. Public discussion on results, training etc was amazing in 2001. I remember talking to Josh Spiker and Bobby Lockhart on the original forum.

It's the samething for letsrun. If the forums were removed, people would flip out.

When ESPN removed the forum it killed the site.

Can't stop wrote:

millions of tweets have drowned out letsrun, dyestat,... Letsrun will be gone soon.

Blech. I have no interest in following some runner on twitter. I want a place I can go to where someone else has consolidated all the tweets/news/etc onto one page. I only need the important stuff ("Webb running 5k in Indy") not every flipping tweet from someone about what they ate for dinner or how much their bowel movement weighed. Seriously.

Best for John is to buy a Canon HD5K videocam and record top races at 5 MILIION PIXEL video size with little commentary or stats. John should stay out of the meet directors, coaches, and athletes way and let them blog on their own at wordpress, facebook, twitter, after all that's what they do.

why do we need for john dye to start his old forum again. it's 20 years later. do you want results faxed to you from escalon ca by trackwire ? how about a crapy toilet paper magazine with 12 out of focus picts mailed to you from mountain view ca ? it's 2012. millions of free forum sites exists. you can start one on your own or start a GROUP on LinkedIn.com for instance.

I totally disagree that social media drowns out the websites, most people are not that personally attached or interetsted in any particular athlete that they would bookmark their social media sites. How would it look for a 50 year old man for example to be searching around Jordan Hasay's facebook page -or to be tweeting about Mary Cain? What most people are looking for is news and stats on the community of t&f and not just individuals.

I agree with Charles H and Track Coach. There is no way that Twitting drowns out the other sites.

I don't need in depth articles, but I would prefer to have a single site at which I can view FULL results from many meets. I don't want to follow every runner in America to see what they ran so that I can piece together what happened in a race.

What value does "runner X" tweeting "OMG 4:09 FTW! Stoked!" provide to me? If that is the future, we are all doomed.

Rojo,Put Rob "Watchout" Monroe in charge of anything high school related you'd be interested in doing. If all the work he does had a website attached to it (a la Meylan at Tullyrunners) it would be huge. Meylan is also a resource but I think he's moving away from the game. Aside from the forums, the dyestat attraction was/is the coverage kids and their friends and heroes get. They love competing in or watching a meet and then knowing they can go home and read about it. Guys like Gonzalez helped kill the site by not knowing much about the sport and still trying to be self proclaimed "experts." Underwood was good for the most part. As a coach with NXN aspirations, I have used dyestat to scout the competition for years. Tremendous resource. The national elite system is probably the best part of the site now that the forums are hanging on a vine. The regional nature of the forums is also a great idea.

rojo wrote:

Can someone tell me why the current ESPN version of Dyestat isn't as good as the old version?

I don't get what the differnce is in terms of editorial coverage.

I've always wondered if LetsRun should have a high school site but we are focused on elite running and haven't had the time/interest to try to cover it properly. I mean I don't know where I"d begin to figure out what amongst the 50 states was elite. I know how to do it for the pros but I know who the top pros are. With HS, there is some random new kid popping up every week.

Besides the forums (which is about a community), did people love dyestat for it's coverage, for it's results, for it's enthusiasm?

I agree. The impact of facebook iPhones and flicker, blip.tv, youtube has taken down dyestat and flotrack.

I'm confused. I'm a media- and tech-savvy millennial. I'm on Facebook and Twitter. None of these technologies you speak of has taken away from what I get from Letsrun and Dyestat. Has it from the previous posters? Or is this just some kind of guess as to why ESPN is shutting down its HS sites?

You've got to be nuts to think that twitter or facebook could replace what a site like dyestat or letsrun offer. Dyestat was efficient. You could go to the homepage (like you can here) and find all the news you want in a centralized location. Links to results, pictures, videos, and solid editorial content (and written with considerably less snark). The focus on regional content is huge for high school kids who are, primarily, focused on competing only regionally or just within their state.

The forum was the biggest draw of dyestat, though. It was organized and moderated. The playground was fun and kept all the nonsense and off topic posts in one area, so if you wanted to read threads about the latest fast races, you didn't have to sort through so much crap to get to it. Having individual sections on the forum dedicated to states was super important too. The New England section of the forum was always buzzing and constantly full of runners ready to talk to each other about day to day happenings in their state. We were able to get updates about duel meets during the week which otherwise would have never been known about unless some kid popped a national level time. We were able to meet other runners from neighboring schools by posting on the thread dedicated our state. It was a very close community and that probably helped all of us become better runners and have a lot more fun competing against people we knew. I have several close friends still from dyestat that went to other schools in my state that I would likely never know, or at least not nearly as well as I do now. That's something twitter could never offer. Its a shame that current high schoolers can't have the same experience.

that guy wrote:

I'm confused. I'm a media- and tech-savvy millennial. I'm on Facebook and Twitter. None of these technologies you speak of has taken away from what I get from Letsrun and Dyestat.

You're probably a normal human being that has a life outside track and field. I can't imagine anyone taking the time to follow all the twitter feeds and facebook pages of athletes for news, unless they are in high school/college, have no job, no girlfriend, and live in their parents house (or basement).

Sites like Letsrun provide normal, employed human beings with real-world responsibilities the perfect aggregation of news.

I'm so sick of this same bitter guy posting over and over under different names the same stuff in various forms. It's so obvious to me it's from the same guy. As many of you pointed out there is a need for a central editorial place of coverage for fans. So under the same logic ESPN will disappear because of twitter.

The post above and the ones below are all from the same guy.

wejo wrote:

I'm so sick of this same bitter guy posting over and over under different names the same stuff in various forms. It's so obvious to me it's from the same guy. As many of you pointed out there is a need for a central editorial place of coverage for fans. So under the same logic ESPN will disappear because of twitter.

Seriously. Take over dyestat and go back to the original format. Dump the Gonzalez crew that started the demise and pick up the only ones who matter like "watchout" and maybe Nepolitan. Letsrun and a revamped dyestat will be popular as long as the model that made them successful stays around.

Whoever it is perhaps signed up for his or her own blog that he and his fellow graduate students shared and then they decided to make a facebook group instead. And then all they talked about over some fancy italian dinner was how social media is taking over the world and globalization...get my drift?

What happens when facebook and twitter virtually connect everyone? It gets too big and no longer serves the purpose of a social medium. People will ALWAYS fall back on mediums.

synergy wrote:

Looks like Flotrack and MileSplit are teaming up to fill the void...

http://www.flotrack.org/article/12900-FLOCASTS-SIGNS-STRATEGIC-PARTNERSHIP-WITH-MILESPLIT-NETWORK

That press release doesn't say much in plain English but from the best I can tell that is an advertising relationship. Milesplit is a lot bigger in size than flotrack, flotrack has a lot of videos and needs to reach a bigger audience so they are partnering up. Milesplit doesn't have a lot of videos. I assume also milesplit will encourage people to upload their videos and it will go to Flotrack's platform on the backend.

A milesplit guy sent me the press release. I wrote him back saying we usually don't cover editorially when running sites partner up for advertising. I asked him if the partnership was anything else and I didn't hear anything back so I'm assuming that's what it is.

And it was announced before the Dyestat news so they aren't related.

EPSN grabbed Dyestat to kill it in the first place. Same way MySpace was actually bought up to kill it.

Bantazmo milesplit wrote:

Why is it a mess?

I am so sick of you and the other 50 sheep of milesplit guys coming on to letsrun every time we talk about dyestat and telling us how great milesplit is.

IF IT WAS THAT GREAT OTHER PEOPLE WOULD BE TALKING ABOUT IT.