Ed has denied that this is coming from anybody but himself. He’s said that this is the kind of business he wants to run.
So man up and tell us. In two and a half decades of working with clients, the one thing I’ve learnt is that when there is a problem to be utterly honest with the reason. Customers can deal with problems; what pisses them off is bullshit and obfuscation.
If Ed had given us a rationale for these changes - “Look guys, I know this place has been pretty rambunctious in the past and I don’t want to cut into that too much, but I’m getting leant on a bit from upstairs - do you think you could see your way clear to toning some of the language down a bit, and lay off the cussing out of staff? I really hate to spoil your fun, but this is the way the wind is blowing from above and I really don’t want to have to start implementing rules like we’re all back in school.” C’mon, most people here would have been completely on board with that.
But telling us out of the blue that the tone of the place is now too filthy for his liking, there are suddenly dirty words that we are Not To Use, that here is a list of them and we are to comply Or Else: well, as customer service goes it leaves no fist unhammed and no finger unbuttered. Or is that no ham unfisted and no butter unfingered? It’s bloody clumsy {and yes, it did flicker across my mind “is it OK to say bloody?”; that’s the atmosphere that’s being engendered in here at present}, in any event, and it is no way to treat the people who have typed their fingers to the bone over the last ten years to keep this place going.
Ed read the op, then read it again. This is exactly how I feel about your recent activity. I’ve been here coming up on nine years, hell, I’ve been here longer than most people stay at a freaking job. Yeah, I lurk a lot more than I post, but I check the boards almost every day. You really need to step back and think about what you are doing here, this is not going to work out the way you hope it will. You’re going to fracture the boards, lose a lot of good long-time posters, and wind up with a lesser place.
Look at what’s happened so far: You lost your best mod, posters (myself included) that had supported the mods/admin in the past are turning against you, lots of confusion, your remaining mods are getting frustrated and irritable, and refugee boards are popping up all over (lord help you if one takes off).
You might not take this well, but you did much better as a “behind the scenes” guy, this hands-on approach is not working out. Someone said in another thread “Your half-assed under parenting was better than your half-assed over parenting”. As much as a Simpsons reference can be true, this one hit the nail on the head. Stop. Take a good look at what is going on. You are “fixing” something that wasn’t broken.
What Exit? - you’ve summed it all up superbly.
What’s interesting is that the tone of this thread is different to what I think it would have been a week ago. A lot of the anger has gone; it’s been replaced with resignation and disappointment about something that is being viewed in the past tense. It’s as if people have - or are prepared to - accept that the Dope is no more. Surrogate boards have been created - one of which seems to be becoming quite popular, so the disenfranchised are finding a new home. Although Ed is losing customers, there seems to be doubt as to whether he minds or not. Could it be that Ed is prepared to take a huge gamble by getting rid of all the old-Pit proponents on the assumption that they will be replaced by an influx of new customers who prefer the toned down version of the Dope?
I’d like to know what proportion of viewers and posters are affected by all of this. I know many never really visit the Pit or ATMB and I wonder if they have noticed any change, which may be something else Ed is gambling on.
People need to stop saying this. It simply doesn’t appear to be even remotely true. Ed has emphasized again and again and AGAIN that this isn’t a financial decision and he hasn’t been getting any pressure. He’s stated that this is all because he’s found himself uncomfortable with a few very rare instances of tasteless abuse. The fact that the censorship rules only apply to language directed at other Dopers emphasizes that it’s not about cleaning up the language for the advertisers, we can still swear, just not at people. It’s my perception that it all centers around one instance where Lynn got slapped with a C-bomb and this seems like his way of eliminating that type of stuff from ever happening again. Instead of just limiting it to Mods and Admins he wants it applied to everyone.
He’s done an awful job of it. He’s lastly overreacted to what he’s repeatedly said is a “very rare” issue and something “you’ll hardly ever notice”…if it’s so rare and such a minor change why is he making a huge case out of it. The mind boggles.
I can already feel the board stagnating. The overall page views might be steady but the number of new posts and new posts that don’t relate to the board changes and anger are dwindling to nothing. It’s depressing in the extreme.
It makes me sad. Very very sad really. I almost never ventured into The Pit. I almost never used any profanity and I probably never said anything against another poster, even when I thought they deserved it. That wasn’t why I wanted to be here. However, I see exactly why the people who did go there are angry. I can see how pointless and inconsistent the new rules are. I don’t intend to go to the splinter boards, they wouldn’t replace what I adored about this place for a full decade. I’ve been here from the start and I’ve seen the various dramas, this one is the worst and the one which creates the least theoretical benefit. In the past I had confidence that the people who stormed off weren’t taking much with them and they’d be replaced with good people, not so much any more.
Looking at the Alexa stats you can see that the MB creates 51% of the traffic to this site, while Cecil’s columns provide 49%. This place has become a user-generated content venture and the antagonistic tone he’s taking with those of us who’ve been here from the beginning and created that content is depressing. I have to wonder if the misery and anger in the newspaper industry is spilling over into our world. At one time Ed probably had tons of things to work on and lots of opportunity and he basically ignored us because we were “just the internet” which wasn’t where his bread was buttered. Nowadays it’s apparent that the Net is where the media world is going and Ed’s had to start spending more time here and it’s not to his liking. That might be reasonable, but he’s cutting off his nose to spite his face.
I really hope it’s much ado about nothing, I really do. I want this place to succeed and prosper and I want it to remain in my life. I’m not optimistic about this happening anymore and it’s making me miserable.
Honestly, I think this is all much ado about nothing. I really don’t care about the changes, other then I hope it reduces a good chunk of the unnecessary snark. I’m sure some posters will leave and I’ll miss them, but it’s not going to change how I post or whether I’ll renew.
I suspect there are a lot of us posters to whom this is kind of like cyclone in Bangladesh - we can appreciate that it’s a major deal for those deeply involved, and is causing genuine anguish for a some, but it really doesn’t affect me in any meaningful way. I’m not dismissing your complaints, but they don’t really interest me and by now I’m just ignoring the vast majority of posts that are complaining. I opened this thread on a whim but I’ll go back to ignoring the obvious complaints because I’m really not that interested in the conversation.
Largely I agree, but we don’t live in a bubble. I love the sports threads here, but it’s of no use talking football with myself. If 5, 10 or 20 of the Dopers who tend to arrive in sports threads are among those aggrieved and they leave or cut back on participating then it’s my loss. Bad rules, even if they don’t affect you directly, affect us all indirectly in the loss of content and viewers.
Two problems with this:
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If Ed is not being made to do this, as has been suggested more than a few times here, this is what he wants with the place.
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Of late (the last three years or so), Ed has not been much of a sympathetic figure. He’s running the place as he feels like it, and that’s his right, but to then expect sympathy from the people who helped make this place (“Go easy on Ed”), in return for his doing whatever he wants … doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Putting a business face on “P2P didn’t work well enough, so now we’re going with ads, and you don’t have to pay anymore because that way we get more traffic and thus make more money, so please come back” didn’t sit right with me, and I’m fairly sure I’m not alone in that.
If you mess up, you say so. In a business, in a relationship, whatever. It’s the adult thing to do. You made a mistake, you admit it, you try to learn from it.
The face that was put on abandoning P2P in favor of ads was disingenuous, to be kind. The board, and Ed, needed us back, needed more people, needed more server hits to generate more money from ads.
This requires a sell to get customers back. And quite apart from a sell, what we got was “This is what we’re going to do, and that’s all there is to it.”
There was, if memory serves, no frank and simple admission of less than perfection. There was no “This didn’t work out,” only an attempt to sell this as a continuation of some master plan. (Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.)
And that’s what it’s been from Ed for the last several years. It was with P2P, from what I remember, and it was with introducing ads even to paying customers, and it was with abandoning P2P, and it is with the Pit changes, which Ed’s asserted (one hopes, for his sake, with perfect knowledge) won’t change anything major.
(For anyone who cares: I left the first time because of how the place was being run, and I left the second time because the place was being run by the same people in the same way, just with no money attached. And now this. If you’re not going to learn from past failures trying to make everyone think you’re some perfect master, you’re not worth my time, including this post.)
Another person who is seeing a SDMB-less, not because of the pit rules per se, but because of the heavy-handed style of Ed and Lynn in general (and frankly, it’s my feeling that Lynn is driving a lot of this).
I’m almost inclined to start a thread for long-timers to compare this to all the other previous kerfuffles, of which there have been many. This feels qualitatively different.
But the OP nailed it pretty good (for a newbie).
Just adding my voice in support of What Exit? and the rest.
I think you are missing the point of my Op. I am well aware that Ed runs the place. He is free to do what he wants and all I can do is live with it, make mild protests like I did with this Op or leave. However I do love the Dope and I don’t want to leave and I don’t want to see it damaged.
They tried allowing spidering and then decided it was crashing the board. If these new rules were the first step to allowing spidering again, Ed probably would have mentioned it and he should have before making the changes if he wanted to keep the user community in the loop and if not happy, at least not angry and unsure what was going on.
Did I? He is failing however to communicate before making changes.
An old adage and I think a wise adage. It is of course not 100% true, some customers are not worth it, but the gist of it is correct.
I’m posting this because the OP encapsulates much of my own feelings about the changes being made to the SDMB.
I’ve been a regular member on this board for over eight years. While I only have a few thousand posts, I rarely sit down at a keyboard without checking out the SDMB. The SDMB is by far my most visited site. It is the only site on the web that I have ever paid for, and I do so willingly. I love this place.
That said, I agree that the board ran better when Ed/Cecil remained an Olympian figure that rarely interfered with us mortals.
Of late, we seem to be constantly bombarded with all of these administrative changes (pay/don’t pay, ads/no ads, new forums, “side conversations,” etc.), followed by the latest round of rule changes. And all of these changes have been handled in a very heavy-handed manner. None of these rule changes have really affected me personally, but I see that others are affected, and that they are upset about it.
It is distressing is to see the number of well-established posters who are either leaving voluntarily or are getting banned.
All in all, the SDMB is becoming a much less pleasant place to hang out, and that is a shame. 
There’s only been one banning that was even tangentially related to any of the changes you refer to (Otto) and even he’d still be here if he hadn’t broken a very old rule about sock accounts.
I think he was also thinking of Baldwin, who was only suspended but for a month and possibly a few I might have missed.
Baldwin’s suspension wasn’t related to any rule change either, though. The site he kept linking to is new, I know, but “don’t spam” is an old rule, and that was Baldwin before he received any warnings.
It’s related. He basically got himself suspended because of the new rules and being upset by it. “or are getting banned” does not mean specifically being banned (or suspended in this case) directly from the new rules.
Marley23, I like and respect you as a poster, I think you are still on the learning curve as a mod much like when **Frank **and **Rico **first got started. Do you have any comments on the points in my Op? Are you at all uneasy with the current problems? I’m not talking about any one specific thing, but the general trend of the board. Do you understand what I mean when I speak about the community of the Dope?
I also have to wonder as to why exactly anyone would want to try and make the board more “friendly”?
I would think that anyone who had spent any real time on the internet would soon realise that the Straight Dope is at the apex of both proper grammar and friendliness between the members, compared to every single other message board of any size. I would venture to guess that much of this is due to the BBQ Pit. I could only see that messing with that is almost guaranteed to make us less well spoken and friendly.
Probably. If he chooses to flout the rules and gets suspended for it, though, that’s on him.
I can’t think of a way to read “or are getting banned” does not imply people are being banned. Which they aren’t.
Despite some of what’s been said lately, I, and the mods and admins as a group if I can presume to speak for them, do understand what people are reacting to here and what they’re seeing and are concerned about. I’d dispute a bunch of your specific points but the overall concern is there and we’re trying to deal reasonably with that. You can appreciate the difficulty, I hope, because we have lots of posters with different ideas of what the board is and how it should work, taking a variety of tones in expressing their concerns, and a lot of them are weighing in at once. 
On the first two parts of your reply, of course it is on Baldwin but he was reacting in frustration to the changes. But Robby will have to clarify the banned part.
On the third part, I do understand how much dealing with dopers is like herding cats or managing IT people. Many are strongly opinionated and some will always be offended. I think communication is the key to this and that means a change in management style to communicating before changes are made and maybe even trying to get a feel for what would work best in the community.
Spam here, to me, was generally of the: New poster, simply posting "hey, check out this grovey new place"which I happen to have a personal interest in
Some times a poster would link to stuff they personally found interesting, funny, exciting etc. and it wasn’t a problem.
For example - how did ya’ll treat Opal linking to her mention on some artist web site? hmm doesn’t seem to have been any moderation at all, even though she mentions that she was hoping folks would buy prints because of that site
Could you please, then explain what the difference is? I know you don’t moderate every single mention folks make of other sites they find interesting. Why now, why this one? and, more importantly, how was anyone supposed to know that it’d be found objectionable?