vBulletin predates the big shift to persuasive design and lacks elements which directly and intentionally target the reward centers of our brain.
Features of sites like Reddit and Stackexchange like up-voting or likes intentionally target the same dopamine signals that can lead to drug misuse.
The industry is just starting to address the ethics of persuasive design:
It is expected that what I personally view as “more ethical” sites like the SDMB are having a decrease in traffic even if the changes to search engine placement is accounted for.
If you are unaware that likes, notifications etc… are intentionally targeting these types of human behaviors to increase engagement time I encourage you to read this paper and seek out information on the “Fogg Behavior Model”
I don’t know where all of this will land in the future and I am not saying that vBulletin based boards don’t also result in some of these same behaviors but as the impacts of persuasive design weren’t called out above it is a subject that all Internet users should be aware of even if they don’t care about the impacts to their personal behaviors.
Anecdotally I don’t doubt that. I get a charge when I hit like on twitter. Currently, when I see a post I like at the SDMB, I feel an impulse to “Like” it. This is a manifestation of habit.
That said, this board can be quite the time sink, more so than twitter in some ways.
Of the traditional message boards that I routinely visited in the last 10-15 years, this one is by far doing the best. I just now visited a couple I hadn’t been on in years. One has had new 10 posts all day today. It was never as big as the SDMB, but wasn’t ridiculously far off. The other one, which was always pretty niche, has had zero posts today. So, I guess it could be worse. And eventually, it probably will be. It’s the nature of the internet.
I would definitely like to be able to “like” something someone posts, if I have nothing to add—instead of quoting it and adding “This” or “QFT”. I think that’s just a useful feature.
Huh. Interesting, thanks. And what if you posted and then came back a few months later? Is it possible to do a daterange like on Google and see what I posted between 2004 and 2008?
You didn’t post anything between 2004 and 2008. You posted to 5 threads in 2003 and then did not post again until 2010.
You can’t do a daterange, but you can do ascending and descending order, which will get you your first and last posts. You can also search from one to ten years ago in one year increments, and can search either forward or backward from that date, and can display the results as threads or posts.
Very interesting! Thanks. Wow, hard to believe I didn’t post for that long. I would have bet the house against it, especially since I posted so much on the old AOL board in the late ‘90s and around the turn of the millennium, as well as on AFC-A. Or at least I believe I did!
So apparently I posted a few times, drifted away for several years, and came back with no inkling that there had been a pay-to-post regime for four years of the interim (which definitely would have dissuaded me from posting). Wild.
ETA: Is there any way to analyze the board stats to determine how rare it is for someone to have a hiatus of several years and then come back to be a frequent poster?
I have taken a couple of hiatuses over the 19 years I have been a member. One was during pay to post, another was due to a confluence of job change and board burn out. I don’t remember the specific “when/how long”, but I would guess it’s a fairly common occurrence among old timers.