Have you actually used any of these websites? :dubious:
…I have used all of those websites to various degrees and don’t really see anything wrong in his wording?
Yes they’re for different purposes. But they all fulfill the same larger goal of humans seeking human interaction online.
Their different means to the same end reflect the differing preferences of their audiences.
SDMB has been losing members, posts, and page views for years as this style of interaction fades out of style.
It is, but the fact seems to be that message boards, including this one, are seeing a steady and meaningful decline in activity, while activity on other forms of internet interaction is increasing. The new forms mentioned by CCitizen don’t do exactly what a message board does, but they are where people are going to interact. His statement that SDMB is part of “the previous generation of social networks” is accurate, regardless of SDMB’s diiferences from the newer media.
ninja’d by LSLGuy and others. damn i’m slow
Well, in 1997 when I first joined up, my average age was 38. On average, it’s gotten substantially older since then.
noooo!
I am aware of this more lately - new thread posts just don’t happen as quickly as they used to.
I don’t use Twitter, FB, Instagram, SnapChat, etc., but I can see how they can occupy mental bandwidth in a way that cannibalizes messageboard traffic.
Sigh. Time marches on and I appear to be watching it from a fixed position.
Well, I won’t argue design but I see discussions happening all the time on Tumblr, Twitter and Reddit. They’re often shorter, but I’m not sure that just because a conversation doesn’t take up 100+ posts that means it’s worthless.
Believe me when I say I wish it twarn’t so.
The older we each get, the less excited by change for its’ own sake we each become. Eventually places like this will be like bridge clubs: a small flux of young nerds who individually pop in, stay a month or so then leave forever, plus an ever-dwindling collection of ever-older over-80s.
Huh? There is use of language on Tumblr? All I see are photos.
Each photo occupies the screen, and below it is another several screen-fulls of nothing but identical lines, saying only one thing: “username likes this”.
I don’t get it…What am I missing?
For example, look at : http://fluffy-kittens.tumblr.com
Where are the comments? : say, on who is the cutest , or how old they are, or advice on where to adopt them and how to care for them, or any discussion whatsoever?
And after you click on a photo, why are there SIX pages of nothing but “I like this” and “I reblogged this”–each on its own line of text,with wide blank space between them?
Do people click through all 6 pages, and carefully read all 250 of the usernames?(there’s nothing else to read!). All those names could have been compressed into a couple of lines of small fonts printed underneath the photo, on one page, anyway.
Harumph. I reject your reality and substitute one of my own.
Now, please stay on this lawn. 
To paraphrase some unknown poster in another thread, “The average age of a Doper is geezer”
I think this board is dominated by people who recall ye olden days before message boards, social media, and their ilk. Although I’ve only minimal exposure to other forms of social media it appears this board is quite a bit more serious than the alternatives. That makes me wonder what I’m doing here since seriousness occupies such a small fraction of my life these days. Perhaps I’m even more different than the rest in that regard, I have become less serious as I progress towards senility (or am I senile already?). I would have thought people tend to become more serious as they age, at least until they reach the who-gives-a-shit stage, and I guess that’s where I am now.
A tumblr like fluffy kittens was created for the sole purpose of sharing photos and kitten memes. There are many of those types of tumblrs. However, people create tumblrs for all sorts of reasons, including use as a blog/friend network. There are conversations happening all the time on tumblr (and twitter).
I never said that you can’t post nothing but pictures on Tumblr. Just that not everyone uses it the same way. There very much are communities on tumblr and they interact and converse. Look at Hank Green’s tumblr, as an example. Rarely does a conversation last beyond 4 or 5 posts but after some of the gargantuan threads here, sometimes that’s almost a relief.
Can’t believe there’s only been 6 20s :eek:
Well, for one thing, Tumblr is a blog/essay site. You can post a ton of pictures, but you also have descriptions. You can write whole articles. And you do in fact have the ability to comment and carry on conversations. It’s basically what MySpace used to be.
Reddit also does have conversations. They’re just threaded.
No, the real difference is that those are all 100% general purpose sites. We’re just a web forum, like many other forums. Reddit is the closest, but it’s a forum system that happens to all be hosted on the same site. It contains multiple forums. Hell, if we needed to, we could even host there. For the comparison to be remotely valid, you need to compare us to a subreddit.
The others compare even less. We’re not a social network. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr–they all have pages that are just about you and what you want to say. There’s this web of connections between these pages. That’s what makes them social networks.
What little of that we had, we pretty much nerfed. It’s not how we interact with each other. Unlike on those platforms, neither the person saying it nor the audience is important. We discuss topics.
How do I compute my average age?
Well, considering the oldest members here (and I mean “old” in the sense of “have been here since he '90s”) initially knew Cecil either via the Chicago Reader or one of his books, it’d stand to reason that the average Doper is in his/her mid-late 40s to late 50s. There’s overlap, of course. I know one longtime Doper who started here in high school!
The Dope was my very first online community. I found it via one of Cecil’s books. I was a little late to the party seeing as I didn’t own my own computer until the very late 90s. Plus I was on dial-up for the longest time, so it was difficult to surf the web without incurring a huge phone bill!
From what I understand via several friends who use Tumblr, you can blog there but responses aren’t more than a couple of sentences. Most people “like” stuff the way they do on Facebook. I have one friend who’s since moved her blog from there because she wanted more in-depth conversation. Tumblr also tends to skewer on the side of fandom and my friend found it incredibly annoying.
I poke around on Reddit occasionally and this is true. It just depends on the subreddit. I’ve found the more popular the subreddit, the less intelligent the conversation.
And the fact that most of us who are active here – I think – are either on a laptop or a desktop. I find the more mobile your online experience, the less you converse because it’s easier to look at all the pretty pictures (I know you can access the Dope via TapaTalk but god, it’s incredibly convoluted. Ergo, I never access the Dope via my phone/tablet).
If I have MPD is my average age calculated from the number of different personalities?