Popularity of Tea - Forums and other Outlets

[Noonie]

After just reading @karma post where he/she said "Isolation cabin fever made this post way longer and more technical than it needed to be" I wanted to put something out there for comment.

I typically enjoy internet forums that are aligned to my interests. Over the years and right now in my life I have the following hobbies/interests: tea (#1 of course ), music, cycling, golf, photography, hiking and backpacking to name a few. For most of these interests the popular internet forums have a lot of activity. Like in a music forum I follow, I just checked and their are 2,200 people in the forum right now (vs. 25 here). I would love to see more tea posts--any thoughts on why as an interest (beyond a simple beverage) it's like 1% as popular as music? For me, they are equal and I usually combine them...enjoying music while drinking tea, often coming to one of the two forums while doing so. I realize tea and music are very different 'things', but these days there are forums for everything. I realize there are other tea forums and internet avenues for sharing and exploring tea, but I confess to not being a fan of social media, so my exposure to them is rather limited. Bottom line, I would love to read and watch more online content online related to tea. I feel it heightens my connection to tea.

[Chadrinkincat]

1.Tea isn’t a western product
2.The majority of enthusiasts are located in Asia

Because of this, many of the forums and places to discuss tea are not in English.

Music is universal. Tea not so much

[faj]

The structure of supply for tea compared to, say, music, is very different, and I think this deeply affects interaction between amateurs.

Each tea has limited supply. I cannot enjoy a specific tea from a given supplier... along with 2 million other fellow tea drinkers. So either I become part of a small community (small enough that we can try some of the same teas and share about that), or I talk in broad terms (I like green tea! So do I!) to a larger number of people, which is kind of pointless, I feel. Because discussing tea entails destroying the thing you want to discuss, and discussing only broad categories is not really interesting, the scale of the community is limited by the scale of supply of specific teas.

Music is a different thing. A given singer, say Taylor Swift, can have hundreds of millions of fans, yet they can have discussions very specific to the one interest they share in common. You can have a forum of Taylor Swift fans with millions of contributors, they can discuss all things Taylor Swift 24 hours a day, and they will not "run out" of Taylor Swift. That community can scale while keeping the focus very specific, not needing to start drifting to broad categories (I like pop music! So do I!).

So while I would expect tea-related online communities in Asia to be bigger than those in the Western world, I think by nature you cannot expect to have very focused communities built around tea at the same scale as you can for music.

[mbanu]

As you use music as an example of another interest, I can use an example from that field for tea. Tea has a "payola" problem. There are a few different places online where you can talk about tea, but you will find certain teas, vendors, etc. are given preference depending on the mods of that place. One advantage of this forum is that even though there are vendors, the mods seem to understand how to keep appropriate separation. (Kudos to them for that, by the way -- it can't be easy.) So the vendors are clearly identified as vendors, and don't get special privileges. This gets rid of a lot of problems that other tea forums have related to guerilla marketing and "regulatory capture" (a term that seems a little silly being used on something like a tea forum, but I don't know if there is a better casual term for this).

If you keep all this in mind and still want to go adventuring, there are a few other active online tea-spots.

Instagram has its own tea-culture, although I am not too familiar with it.

Reddit has /r/tea which has a lot of disguised ads and mods that actively shape the conversation to head in certain directions, but also a lot of folks who just like tea and want to talk about it.

TeaChat isn't dead yet, although since a lot of the folks here came here due to dissatisfaction over how they were running things over there, this might not be a good choice.

There is also the world of Facebook tea groups, although some folks are uneasy about the lack of pseudonymity (even for a relatively harmless topic like tea) and they have the same moderator and vendor issues mentioned.

A fun one if you are willing to get weird is LinkedIn groups, as these seem to be populated almost entirely by Indian tea planters.

[Noonie]

Great responses so far, keep them coming!

A behaviour I’ve observed about myself and others partially led me to post this question; I don’t have a strong opinion about what I’ve asked and I’m not posting to persuade others to share my opinion. I’m trying to be less biased (conscious or unconscious) and thus when I have an observation I’m doing what seems to be uncommon these days, and that’s ‘not’ forming an opinion or view. I’ve seen such posts in other forums and they lead to a narrow discussion. Whereas here I’m like, I don’t know, what do you think? And as I hoped, so far some interesting views without anyone professing to have the answer.

Comparing to music is tough mind you, but they’re topics that interest me equally. A better comparison may have been forums on wine, cheese, whiskey or some other food/beverage (but I have zero ideas about such forums).

[karma]

I think /r/tea is relatively popular and the tea discord is fairly active, though only maybe 30 active users. I think teaforum is, in some ways, a subset of a subset of the tea discussion and might better be compared to a music forum dedicated to an obscure genre or artist.

However, I do have a a point of evidence that points more to what others have been saying about the limited nature of online discussion.

The tea-YouTube scene is about as large as the coffee-YouTube scene. In doing market research, I came to discover that both coffee and tea seemed to max out at around 70k subs. Meileaf being the big one for tea, and coffee supporting about 3-5 such channels, though this was quite some time ago that I did the research. Overall I think coffee has a much larger following but not a proportionately larger online community.

Another thing in my interactions with people in the online community that has surprised me — most people I talk to on these forums are largely solitary in their tea drinking. Perhaps because I came in to this hobby through local shops, perhaps because I’m (college aged) significantly younger than some of you guys and specialty tea is more popular with my generation than any before, maybe it’s because I live in a hippy city but either way, my tea experience was largely a social hobby with friends until a few months ago. I have about 10 friends who all like some form of tea and they’ll come over or I’ll go over and we’ll have tea, usually groups of 3 or so. I think coffee is largely similar: a hobby done largely in person at coffee shops and local roasters where you can taste what everyone else is tasting and talk about it like that.

I think maybe, just maybe, there’s a chance that the online tea community is largely made of people who don’t enjoy their local community or don’t have a local community. But most people in this hobby who are serious enough to talk about it do have that community.

I remember being surprised how many people attended Austin’s communiTEA hosted at Guanyin. While I wasn’t fond of it, at least 60-70 people showed up.

I don’t think many of those guys and gals talk about it online.

[aet]

One advantage of this forum is that even though there are vendors, the mods seem to understand how to keep appropriate separation.

Who is vendor? Which admin/s? What and where they sell? I didn't know that. I thought this forum is built only by tea enthusiasts not also the vendor.

[debunix]

I thought this forum is built only by tea enthusiasts not also the vendor.

The tea enthusiasts who built this place allow vendors to be participants, but the founding enthusiasts are not vendors and not profiting from this forum.

[pedant]

please see about

[Ethan Kurland]

I thought this forum is built only by tea enthusiasts not also the vendor.

The tea enthusiasts who built this place allow vendors to be participants, but the founding enthusiasts are not vendors and not profiting from this forum.

Or perhaps for some we should say, "... this place allows participants to be vendors."

I will only speak for myself. Now in 2020 I only sell tea through the forum & I have more $ going out than coming in. I am not complaining. Though I do mention teas that I sell often, I am writing to be busy I suppose; trying to make a bigger deal out of my hobby.

I think even vendors who have proper websites that make it easy for customers to complete transactions (unlike me) do not sell enough to bother with this forum solely for potential profit. Most who obviously came only to make $ stopped posting.

Teaforum usually = no worries. I do worry about a lack of humor Cheers

[Noonie]

Reviving this ‘not too old’ thread.

I was comparing in my head tea and music again. Specifically the relationship between teaware and audio equipment (the vessels that deliver the goods!).

I looked at the music forum I referenced above and compared their music thread posts to audio equipment posts, to our tea posts vs. Teaware posts:

Music 13.5MM; Audio Hardware 1.7MM

Tea 6,300; Teaware 7,500 (I excluded general sub forums).

I wasn’t looking at the total numbers of tea vs. music, just the ratio of posts between the pairs.

Before I had a look I would’ve guessed that with music there would be a higher ratio of hardware posts (audiophiles spend $$$ and bad system = bad sound, and lots of questions about what to buy, how to hook things up, etc.). And I would not have thought teaware trumps tea (Ceramic/Porcelain = tea as good, sometimes better, than expensive and elusive clays that are known to pair well with particular tea).

Anyway, I didn’t have a point going into this other than curiosity. And that was satisfied

[mbanu]

Part of the difference is that tea goes stale, while music does not. A common mistake when people first get into tea is to buy too much, then they end up with pounds of flat tea. Teaware doesn't have this problem, so a common trick is to channel the urge to buy tea into buying teaware. It is also a little easier to talk about teaware than tea, because teaware is less likely to have seasonal variations, and now that there is video it's not too hard to explain teapot ergonomics or pouring issues. With tea you really need to taste it to discuss it well, and that means to do it online you'd need to do an organized tasting with mail-outs, etc., or have a vendor with such a large market share that everyone is drinking the same teas habitually. Even then, you can end up with issues because everybody has different water.

So I think under normal circumstances, many people save the tea discussions for the teahouse.