Sure it was…Dopers planned a meet-up and got together. It just had very low attendance. 
Of course they do. It’s what this place could have been if the management had half a clue way back when.
What’s confusing you is the default format. They have a mode that will make it look just like here (and vB can be made to look like the Reddit default). Reddit is actually more old school than new. It’s more like the Usenet of the mid90s than anything else.
Thanks.
That would explain it.
I always wondered where the judgemental immature cowardly assholes of the Dope went to hone their craft. Now I know I suppose.
MaxTheVool met on the SDMB back in the early 2000s. We dated long distance for a while, until it became clear that we wanted very different things out of life.
A while later, he met Araminty here on the SDMB. IIRC, the two of them ended up getting married.
The last year there was a Gettysdope was also the first Gettysdope we ever attended.
There was one in the works for the following year, but several people said they wouldn’t attend because of something posted elsewhere after the previous one. I did some googling and found it - and someone who had attended was posting very nasty personal insults about attendees. We never knew who it was, but the thought that someone would come to a social gathering and then be so nasty to the people he (I assume it was male) had been hanging out with, was pretty damn offputting.
This reminds me that we haven’t had a Central Floridope in like a decade. Time to rectify that (though many of the people that used to attend are no longer posting).
No, Reddit is quite different from here. It is still as it was originally designed–primarily a link aggregation service. Here, posting just a link is horrible–there it’s what is expected. This provides a foundation that is always present.
The forum aspect of the site was added a bit later, but it still revolves around the links. There are some plain posts, but even those are treated like content more often than not–although occasionally they are treated like questions. The diversity helps.
The threaded conversations that are sorted through gamification are a core part of how the platform works. Having to read entire threads doesn’t scale, so sorting through what is worth reading works better. And rewarding people with fake points gives feedback on the quality of contributions.
Seeing either a list of all posts or having to check each forum individually doesn’t scale, either. So they have another reward system that allows them to sort submissions. And the ability to customize which subforums are visible allow for a customized experience, much better than subscribing to individual threads.
With this model, user-created subforums can compete with each other, thus pushing the best ones to the top. The same model pushes up the best posts and the best comments, allowing the bad stuff to fall to the bottom. And all of this without any direct involvement of anyone actually working for Reddit.
The thing is, old forums never scaled. Neither did Usenet. And Reddit removed pretty much all the barriers to entry (you don’t even need an email address), so people flocked there. Since it could scale, it did, and it basically took over the forum space, despite not actually being a forum system itself.
So, no. The SDMB could not have become Reddit, any more than all the other forums which also did not become Reddit. It maybe could have become the Something Awful Forums (the highest ranking general topic forum, excluding 4chan since it works differently).
(Surprisingly, straightdope.com is not much less popular than somethingawful.com, according to Alexa. Heck, it’s doing better globally.)
That’s because the trend with the young’uns is to share everything in real time using real names. The Dope is a dinosaur in that respect, Reddit notwithstanding.
There was also a fairly large anonymous SDMB snark community on LiveJournal where anybody could anonymously post anything about another Doper. A lot of the veteran-at-the-time Dopers were slammed in that community, so much so that they not only left here en masse but also left LJ. The community folded soon after.
There was, for a time, a smaller anonymous snark community on Dead Journal, I believe, which concentrated more on pointing/laughing at threads posted here.
(holding mine)
I’ve been thinking about this off and on since I read it, and have discussed it with a few friends. Overwhelmingly, my circle of friends would assume the behavior to be from a female, especially if it had to do with dress or looks.
I suppose we should be flattered that anybody cared enough to bother. Still, that sounds like pretty jerkish stuff.
People! Sheesh, whaddaya gonna do wid 'em?
A longtime online friend of mine who I initially met here was raked over the coals. Years later it still comes up in conversation. Heck, I was the subject of another thread which quickly died because I was fairly new to both here and LJ; ergo, nobody knew me, so to speak.
In hindsight, it was the anonymity factor which fostered such communities. There were a ton of them on LJ, the subjects of whom were either purposely looking for attention and therefore “asking for it” (according to the populace) or they had no idea how to self-edit themselves.
Think of it as bullies on a playground: The more you inadvertently gave ammunition to people, the more they could use it against you. Online behavior wasn’t/isn’t much different. Consequently it’s made message boards a much different place nowadays.
For sure anonymity brings out psychopathic behavior. And the more anonymous the situation, the worse the behavior gets.
Very few jerkish drivers behave that way when standing in a line, much less amongst their coworkers.
Well, yeah, but he’s old enough to post under his own power, should he choose to. He’s a smart kid who has some interesting things to say. He just chooses not to post them here.
Maybe, but as I recall, the group heavily skewed male and the female attendees did NOT seem like the sort to post something like this.
I don’t think anything was said about attire, the comments were more about body type. Pretty much all the females there would have fit into the despised category anyway. Sigh.