Why do we keep making this (fish keeping) so complicated?

[Daniel]

35 minutes ago, Maggie said:

This makes me think of the commercial where you tell Alexa to fill your cup, which just so happens to be conveniently placed under the faucet, with 8 oz cold water. If only she could do water changes. 

She can. I used have Alexa to do water changes. But just like the cup conveniently already placed under the faucet, my system was already automated and all I had to do to enable Alexa was put a smart switch on the main water pump.

The best Alexa thing I have done so far other than lights was to follow @Bill Smith's advice and get an Alexa enabled iLonda automatic feeder for the discus tank. It is very hard to get to the top of the aquarium to drop in fish food by hand. But now I just ask Alexa to do it whenever I think about it.

 

[Bill]

If I could have one set of "gadgets" on all my tanks it would be the following: 

1. Heater monitor to shut off the thermostat if set temperature is exceeded (currently have some Inkbirds).
2. If using a canister, a leak detector to shut off the filter if a leak is detected.
3. Automatic light controller that simulates sunrise and sunset, and lets me control the brightness.

If I was injecting CO2 I'd want a detector / shutoff for the same reasons I want the heater monitored, for safety. Even if I didn't have a planted tank I would still want to control the lights if nothing else but to simulate a more natural environment, and avoid having sudden rapid light changes. Especially since I have tanks in my basement. I also want this to be much more cost effective than it currently is. I'm putting my engineering skills to work to see if I can do something about that... 

Edited November 5, 2020 by Bill
typo

[Lemon]

22 hours ago, Cory said:

I don’t see any benefit to a discord server to a forum. We have tested chat functions, I am familiar with discord as a gamer. 
 

There is a long list of reasons why I don’t want one. 

what games do you play?

 

[Nataku]

16 hours ago, Ken Burke said:

Thanks for the input.  It really illustrates what I’m talking about.  Aquarium communities definitely can help, but they are not all equal.  And it’s hard to build a forum to maintain the interest for intermediate and advanced fish keepers, that is helpful for the new blood.  After all, how many times have you given the same ol’ advance on the nitrogen cycle, algae, ich, etc.  After a while it start to get redundant. Stale.  Helping others succeed is really rewarding, but only takes you so far.

 

BTW, with a name like discord, not sure it is for me.....

You're so right! It can get tiresome after a while to answer the same 'how do I ~insert same twenty beginner questions here~ ?' Over and over.  Google is a thing. All of these things have been answered already. I rarely ask questions myself anymore unless I've googled and can't find a conclusive answer, or its an opinion based question to begin with. I guess people just don't think to google? Which, just seems like an odd thought nowadays. 

Hah, yeah its is an interesting name to be sure. But its just a chat platform that also allows photos and voice chat and screen sharing. So, basically it could be a youtube stream, but all the time, where multiple people could speak or type. Its useful to get responses in real time - providing of course, others are online.

14 hours ago, RovingGinger said:

 

But there’s also just a ton of merit in having community wisdom in a more indexable way. Discord to my knowledge wouldn’t lead to the same discovery via search (Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing etc) for specific problems. 

Yes you can't search conversations on discord via Google. You can search for things inside discord via their own search feature. But its not something with clearly defined threads and topics like a forum, and it isn't something someone who wasn't  on the discord server could just google and find a response that occurred on that discord about 'what are hydra' or what have you. Its why I think they could run concurrently and not get in the way of each other. Some people prefer the slower pace of forums, and I think more info can be conveyed more clearly here. But some folks like to chat and can find quick answers to simple questions on a platform discord.

[KoolFish97]

Really been interesting to read all of these inputs this forum is awesome for stuff like this. 

But a bit to the original point. Does more knowledge and technilogy scare/bar/reduce people from the hobby. To that I have no real answer I work in a pet/aquarium shop and I see very similar numbers of people leave bewildered as I do people buying it all as they love the high tech stuff. 

I will say that globally aquarium keeping has massively grown in popularity and Marine keeping (a now very heavy tech areas) has had some of the greatest increases. 

If technology barred people we wouldn't see this kind of growth .. or I could be wrong and we would have more without it. I'm afraid I don't have any data on it it's all conjecture from my experiences and talking with others. 

[Daniel]

I think the bewilderment is more due to that biology is complicated and it takes time to get a handle on what is important to keeping fish alive than mastering the technology is some sort of new barrier that didn't exist in the past.

I worked in a fish store in the mid 1970s and people then where just as bewildered and bedazzled by 1970s technology.

I think your @KoolFish97 point about the reef keeping community is spot on. The technology to keep a coral reef in your living room is as much of a draw as are the corals. Certainly the fish in a modern reef aquarium are almost incidental.

I have been researching aquarium keeping in the 1930s and they basically had all the same stuff we do now. Here is an ad from 84 years ago this month, the November 1936 issue of 'The Aquarium' magazine, offering glass internal heaters, linear piston air pumps, and even an early canister filter.

There were also ads for brine shrimp eggs and rice fish! And my favorite, 'Radio-Activated' fish food (right above the ich cure 😉)

Have things really changed. Personally, I think we are as gullible as we ever were. I know I am 😇

[Ken Burke]

28 minutes ago, Daniel said:

I think the bewilderment is more due to that biology is complicated and it takes time to get a handle on what is important to keeping fish alive than mastering the technology is some sort of new barrier that didn't exist in the past.

I worked in a fish store in the mid 1970s and people then where just as bewildered and bedazzled by 1970s technology.

I think your @KoolFish97 point about the reef keeping community is spot on. The technology to keep a coral reef in your living room is as much of a draw as are the corals. Certainly the fish in a modern reef aquarium are almost incidental.

I have been researching aquarium keeping in the 1930s and they basically had all the same stuff we do now. Here is an ad from 84 years ago this month, the November 1936 issue of 'The Aquarium' magazine, offering glass internal heaters, linear piston air pumps, and even an early canister filter.

There were also ads for brine shrimp eggs and rice fish! And my favorite, 'Radio-Activated' fish food (right above the ich cure 😉)

Have things really changed. Personally, I think we are as gullible as we ever were. I know I am 😇

Too cool