I think it would help the troll situation, partly ironically. The non-ironic part is that since the mods would be freer to wield the banhammer. The ironic part is that because the community could get so large, you don’t get to know people enough to truly troll them. New actual trolls (as opposed to returning trocks) wouldn’t get to know the lay of the land before they get sent away, and like you said the downvoting would make sure that they don’t clutter up a discussion with their pointless interjections even if it comes at the expense of a discussion feeling like a conversation.
I think it’d mostly be forgotten by most people. Folks wouldn’t look at an SDMB subreddit unless they already knew about it, and I doubt any of our threads would be popular enough to reach /r/all . Anyways, I think it’d be a fine idea, but it would make things different due to nested threads as opposed to chronological.
Well I hope the optimism from most posters pans out, but I survived through three acquisitions of the company where I spent most of my career and I am not optimistic. I even survived the last one while the rest of the office staff started disappearing one by one, until I decided that I had better leave before I had no choice. I was going to be “disappeared” soon too. Nothing will suddenly change because it is not important enough, the SDMB that is, the accountants will not pounce quickly. That is not how it works. When you are told “the rumors that we are selling the company are not true”, the company has already been sold. When told that the new owners will make no changes, it just means that they are not ready to announce them yet. Ed Zotti realized this several months ago when he was exploring his new, bad, money making ideas. The writing was already on the wall.
You can be sure that no business or corporation buys something with the goal of just leaving it alone and letting it ride. Certain parts get attention quickly and other parts wait until later, but all will get looked at and this board just can’t be much of a money maker, nor does it have the potential to be one. From Ed’s somewhat recent posts I gather that this place doesn’t even make enough money to keep one person interested in maintaining it.
And change, whenever it comes, will be swift. The idea that NPR will be sympathetic is uninformed. Like The Godfather movies, it will not be personal, it will be just business. The year is winding down so major decisions will wait until after the holidays, but absent some announcement from the new owners, I do not expect the SDMB to see another Spring.
Avatar checks out
~Max
Just a quick counter to that. The Straight Dope’s ownership has already changed several times and each time it has somehow survived. So while it might go this time, it is just as likely to stay.
Doomed again? 
While I hope that the SDMB goes on forever, I realize how long it was been going on already. Are there many others that have lasted since the 1990’s? In message board years we are 103 or so and doing much better than any of us should have expected.
Delphi Forums has us beat, they’ve been online since '83. The Well since '85.
~Max
Is that right? Was it a BBS?
1980 - 1982 - founded by Wes Kussmaul as Kussmaul Encyclopedia
Encyclopedia, email and a primitive chat. Added newswires, bulletin boards and better chat in early 1982.1983 - 1992 - Delphi online service, General Videotex Corporation
Forums are text-based, and accessed via Telenet, Sprintnet, Tymnet, Datapac (Canada).
All of these older forums have changed hands multiple times, it seems.
~Max
Delphi Forums is a collection of over 8000 individual forums under an umbrella hosting organization. Anyone can pay to start up a new forum.
The issue is the ownership of the brand and the archives, not the platform. It’s easy to start a new Discourse forum, and I suspect there are people who would donate enough to keep it up. But I doubt the owners would be willing to allow a volunteer to port the archive anywhere, nor to use the brand.
That’s like saying Reddit isn’t a forum.
~Max
I agree. The attitude that “we’ve survived this long, so we’ll be fine” (to paraphrase some of the optimistic posts in this thread) doesn’t have any underlying logic beyond inertia. And the idea that NPR will love us because we love them strikes me as hopelessly naïve.
I was a regular on the Television Without Pity forums, a much larger and more popular site than this one. The owners, NBCUniversal, couldn’t figure out how to monetize it and couldn’t find a buyer, so they pulled the plug. Nobody on the boards saw it coming. I can imagine the same scenario unfolding here; I hope I’m wrong.
When IMDb shut theirs down, they did the decent thing and gave two-weeks notice that it was going to happen. Gave us time to save all our brilliant observations, and we were able to lay out our confessions and go down with a clear conscience.
The thing with Reddit is that it’s all dependent on the subreddit you’re reading. Some are absolutely fantastic- basically communities of enthusiasts who share tips and support each other. The cocktail, barbecue and grilling subreddits are great helpful places. Others are more toxic; most video-game related ones are pretty terrible, and for some reason, the pizza-making one seems to be full of toxic pedantic hobbyists who get persnickety about “authenticity” and a whole raft of idiotic stuff.
The biggest problem is the Reddit user interface that tends to show thread responses by the number of ‘likes’ so that you never really get the whole picture of the thread. That drives me insane sometimes.
Yeah, it’s unremarkable that some groups will be supportive and others bitchy. But i hate Reddit’s interface. I can’t ever find anything. All you get is what’s hot today.
And the one person that could change that doesn’t seem to care enough to do anything about it.
You get my problem with it.
I don’t hate Reddit, in fact I have the app for Reddit installed on my phone. It’s a useful site with some good info and I’ve participated in some discussions, but you can’t go in and browse all the conversations easily like you can here. It hides too much and your ability to be seen is based on your popularity. It’s an awful platform for what we do here and if that’s where the SDMB tried to move to it would die.
It’s like replacing a boat with a car. A car is great until you try to sail it across a lake.
I think it would. Think of all the problems we had and people that left in the switch to Discourse. And Discourse is much closer to vBulletin than Reddit is. A lot more people would just give up.
You and me both. That’s why I find Reddit to only be useful to me for factual information. Conversations with different points of view are a real slog with upvote/downvote.
You couldn’t be more righter.
Yep, I agree. I think that people that don’t already use Reddit would never make the transition.
I agree. Moving to Discourse was a trivial change compared to what moving to Reddit would be, and we saw how much disruption and angst something so comparatively simple caused.