The bottom of the main screen lists some board statistics, including how many “Active board members” there are. It’s about 3400 right now. I assume “active” means that they have posted within the last month or so, or something like that – is that right?
Do the mods or administrators have statistics on how this number has changed over time? If so, can they share rough numbers – like how many active members, on average, per year, for the last X years? Maybe we could look at those numbers, along with any changes to board policy or culture, to see if we can find any correlations to the ebb and flow, and also consider how we might ensure the long-term social health of the board.
I don’t have any statistics to share, but message boards all over the internet have been declining significantly in recent years. We have fared better than many, but we aren’t getting the traffic that we used to get.
One thing that has really hurt us is google. They changed their algorithm a couple of years ago, and we dropped significantly in their results. Google doesn’t give out details about their algorithm, since they don’t want people to be able to game the system. They do at least give some rough guidelines. As much as folks have complained about our mobile skin (and rightly so in many cases), the main reason for its implementation was that google now drops you significantly in their ratings if your site isn’t mobile friendly. So, Ed made sure that our site was mobile friendly. The mobile theme definitely has its faults, but having it as our default ranks us as mobile friendly, according to google.
Even with the mobile skin, we still are ranked fairly poorly in google’s results, and google won’t tell us why. All we can do is read through their guidelines and guess.
Other than google royally screwing us over, as far as I am aware, there haven’t been any policy changes that have significantly altered our usage statistics. There has been a slow decline in message boards all across the internet, and we have followed the same trend.
Message boards are mostly seen as something your 'rents did, or your grandma does, it’s not what the cool people are up to. I’ve actually had people find it hilarious and stupid that I work here.
Most anything long form on the internet has decreased in popularity; it’s Short Attention Span Theater these days. Anything more than an image and 280 characters is “TLDR.”
Be different! Go Old School! Fight for your right to Dope!
I guess I’m just an old-school sort of guy. I love following conversations on Twitter, but try finding something you saw three days ago that is relevant to a conversation you’re having today, but you didn’t bookmark it or anything.
Blogs are in between message boards and Twitter in terms of how long they’ve been around, but the conversation at most blogs I’m familiar with is downright weird: when one of the front-pagers puts up a new post, the entire conversation moves to the comments of the new post, regardless of what the old post and the new post were about.
For me, the message board format works. There are more or less defined conversations that you can return to as time allows. There are many conversations going on at once, and you can take part in those that interest you, and skip on past those that don’t. They stay around long enough that you can participate in one, then go get some work done or live your life, then come back to it later on.
I’m glad this one is still around. The Dope is still a great place to hang out online, whatever the kids might think.
Maybe not recently but pay to post ten years ago probably lopped off a limb, as opposed to the slow bleed everyone else was suffering. Pop under ads undoubtedly scared away some newbies. Always being 5-10 years behind software updates and features surely wasn’t beneficial, especially when blogs started to explode and we didn’t implement it here.
Message boards are obviously on the decline but there’s no doubt in my mind that we missed opportunities to bulk up before the inevitable thinning began.
Wasn’t pay to post closer to 15 years ago? I do agree that certainly caused an exodus of users. Another thing, at least at my job, is more stringent web filters. For years, I could easily access the SDMB at work. A lot of my job is basically sitting around waiting to respond to any outages, so there’s always been plenty of idle web surfing time. It’s true I can access the SDMB on my phone, but typing a multi paragraph response gets very old on an iPhone, it’s far easier for me to use Twitter with short responses.
Wow! I registered here in 2003, but I knew I was a fairly irregular user for several years there. Still, I didn’t think that I went that long without posting. Was there some small amount you could post before you had to pay?
I agree that the message board is a well-designed system (I still lament the closing of the IMDb boards, a real cultural travesty). Reddit does come close in many ways, but having threads close after six months or whatever it is is a mistake IMO. What I loved on the IMDb is that I could see a post someone made in 2003 and reply in 2014…and they might actually reply back, after they got the email notification!
Wow, you went 4 years without posting? That’s crazy.
I know I posted during that time. And I have definitely responded to posts directed at me from 11 years ago. Thank you for resurrecting threads from 11 years ago so we can read your wisdom.
Also I believe, you could post 50,000 times before you had to pay. Now I am not an expert, so don’t quote me on that.
Ten years ago we had about 140 questions on the GQ page (and some complained it was staler than it used to be). Today we have 48, with declines during weekends. (We could expand the time frame on GQ from 48 hours to 1 week, but that’s for another thread. GD has a 10 day window by default.)