Are you friends with the SDMB?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Several unrelated and otherwise unremarkable posts in disparate threads have led me to this poorly phrased question.

Basically, I want to know how many people think of the SDMB as a place where they have friends or where they go to interact socially.

I would also like to know if others feel the boards are a place to merely entertain oneself.

Are you personally offended if someone is not part of the community or if they treat other posters as just another poster on just another message board?

I find that some members and charter members come off as trolls who just learned to tone it down enough to stay around, yet other posters seem to react as though they just nailed a unified field theory.

On occasion I have broken out the proverbial beach blanket because the sun has gone down and the fireworks are about to start. Someone posts some self-pitying bullshit or takes offense at the implication that they are anything other than a brilliant mind saddled with incompetent boobs all around and I’m sure they’ll be taken to task. If they were a guest, they’d be dragged through the pages of some pejorative thesaurus and pummeled by the fighters of ignorance. But the fireworks never come and I wonder if I’m not eavesdropping on a chat between friends instead of participating in a broad conversation.

I have very little experience with message boards. I don’t visit them often because of the sense that what I perceive as an open message board is really a group of friends chatting in a slightly different format.

So, what’s your take on it? Are you friends with the SDMB? Is it friends with you?

2

I like to let the SDMB braid my hair. Then we try on each other’s clothes…

Perhaps a little bit of both. There are people here I consider friends. One was already a friend before I came here (and indeed is the person who introduced me to the SDMB).

3

Friend? No.

Place where I interact socially? Yes.

Place to entertain ( and educate) myself but not take things too seriously, absolutely.

4

I do consider some poster my “on-line friends”, a term I use when referring to them. I don’t kid myself that these relationships serve the exact same functions as my real-life relationships, but then again, my real-life relationships don’t serve the same functions that my on-line relationships do.

I can’t (or won’t) call my real life friends at 3 in the morning when I can’t sleep and chat with them for hours until I get tired again, and abruptly hang up on them and go to sleep, knowing that they’ll still be my friends in the morning. OTOH, I’ve done that like three times in the last week or so in the SDMB.

I won’t scream like a bansidhe at my real life friends in one room and then go into another and have a sincere and hearfelt conversation about another topic, then go back into the first room and scream again. I’ve found a couple of times where I’ve been doing that here without even realizing it - have a bloody debate or pit with the same user I’m gushing over Buffy with in Cafe Society or new babies in MPSIMS. It’d be bizarre and bipolar IRL, but it works here.

I can say things on here I wouldn’t have the guts to IRL. I shared my worries and fears about my micropreemie daughter much more openly online than I did IRL. IRL, I was carefully optomistic and chipper, here I gave vent to the occasional scream of anguish and fear. And I got emotional and verbal support here for those feelings, where my IRL friends were busy blithely pretending everything was going to be fine, fine, fine!

I’ve been sent physical gifts from Dopers - preemie clothes from one, some red ochre and a beautiful personal gift from another. I see threads where people exchange gifts or paypal a Doper who needs cash or pay for memberships for one another. Those threads give me warm fuzzies.

OTOH, I can’t get a real hug from a Doper. I can’t ask a Doper to come over and hold my baby while I clean the kitchen. I can’t hear a laugh, wipe a tear or see a smile. We can’t share the warmth of a campfire or the beauty of a forest, except through words.

So I like having both in my life. But yeah, some Dopers are my friends, even though we’ve never met IRL.

5

I refer to Dopers as my “e-friends.” Everyone knows what that means.

6

Exactly.

7

What Eureka said. There is one person who I met through this board that I consider a friend; there are a number of others here with whom I carry on email correspondences (if that’s a word). But for the most part, this place is entertainment to me.

8

I don’t think of the Dope as a place to go to interact socially. I’m not sure why, because I am interacting with other people when I create or reply to a post, but I guess I still consider “social interaction” to be that which happens more deliberately and/or in person. If my interaction with someone is limited to just this messageboard, then no, I don’t consider him/her to be a friend.

However, there are a few people I think of as friends who I wouldn’t know if it weren’t for this place: Dopers who I’ve exchanged several e-mails with, and/or who I’ve met and hung out with one-on-one (i.e., not at a Dopefest). In fact, just last night I went out dancing with the very cool, very sexy – but, alas, very gay :wink: – Licentious Ectomorph, and that wouldn’t have happened were it not for a Dopefest that Gadarene organized (but didn’t attend) almost 2 months ago.

So when I come here to read and post I don’t think of it as spending time with friends, but the boards have affected my social life. And add me to list of people who agree with Eureka’s sentiment of the Dope being a “place to entertain ( and educate) myself but not take things too seriously.” :slight_smile:

9

I would like to think of the board as a place to meet friends and talk to them. Engage in profound, inane and silly discussions and meet up with some from time to time.
I would say I was friends with several posters, hopefully they feel the same way.
I would also hope to be friends with a larger number of posters.

I like so many people on this board and would like the opportunity to hang out with more of them IRL also. I will avoid posting names as it would be a long list and I would still forget some people. A few have already posted in this thread. :slight_smile:

Jim

10

What Eureka said.

11

We are Friends of Cecil. That’s the codeword for Dopers who suspect someone they meet in public may be a Doper themselves.

By having a codeword, we can ferret out those who are One of Us without fear of exposing ourselves to the uninitiated (who will just say “Huh? Who’s Cecil? What are you talking about? You’re kind of creeping me out. Please leave.”)

I don’t know why your topic prompted this thought, but I just feel like it’s important to have a codeword, and “Friend of Cecil” seems fitting without being too obvious.

12

It would be pretty sad and pathetic if I considered people here friends since I haven’t been here long! :smiley:

I do post on a board where I consider the members friends. It’s a small, private board that we’ve all been posting at almost daily for 6+ years. Most of us have met at least a few of the members IRL. They had a big meet in France two years ago that most of the members from Europe attended and quite a few from the U.S.

It was an offshoot of a game forum and we’ve all pretty much stopped playing but we’re still all friends.

13

It would be pretty sad and pathetic if I considered people here friends since I haven’t been here long! :smiley:

I do post on a board where I consider the members friends. It’s a small, private board that we’ve all been posting at almost daily for 6+ years. Most of us have met at least a few of the members IRL. They had a big meet in France two years ago that most of the members from Europe attended and quite a few from the U.S.

It was an offshoot of a game forum and we’ve all pretty much stopped playing but we’re still all friends.

Here’s something odd, that I just thought about. I’ve never told them I post here. Not that it matters of course, and it’s not secret. Just strange.

14

Well there are some people here I’m quite fond of but I wouldn’t consider them my friends.

In other words I’m not gonna tell one of my drinking buddies: “Ya’ know I was talking to my friend Alice_in_Wonderland the other day and she…Blah, blah,blah…”

Really I categorize the SDMB as a kind of drug. I mean think about it. You Can satiate any kind of intellectual desire you want; whenever you want.

IRL you just can’t do that.

15

Friend, no. Buddy, yes. Too many nice people around here to just be entertainment.

16

Thanks for all the replies. Sorry I started a thread and then never came back to see how it was doing.
Very well put WhyNot. I hadn’t thought about it that way.

17

WhyNot nailed it, and that’s how I feel. I talk about - well not so much anymore, but I did - my mother a lot here, something that I try not to do IRL because I don’t want people to know how much she affected me and how much she hurt me. But here I’ve gotten a lot of advice.

I like MPSIMS for the interactions, but CS I go solely to find other people’s viewpoints on stuff I like, and I also have gotten a ton of recommendations for new stuff.

The SDMB fills many needs that don’t get filled IRL. Where else do I find 20-50 different posters on a book I’ve recently read?

18

Eureka put it very well.

That said, there’s a number of people here I’d really like to meet, if I ever get the chance. Of course I know the relationship is different “irl”; for starters, being in Spain is much harder on my spoken English than my written English. I do owe Mouse_Maven lunch if we ever happen to be within a reasonable distance of each other.