For those of us who sometimes forget, the Sun-Times publishing empire includes the SDMB, so the Board will be changing hands once again. The early front-runner in the buying game is Tronc, aka, the Chicago Tribune, the Sun-Times’ rival.
I’m sure TPTB will assure us that SDMB will continue to be autonomous, with no change in its basic operation except that now we’ll have the resources of an even bigger, better parent, etc.
What I actually believe is that there will be no change because the new owners will practice the same level of benign neglect than the previous owners (and the ones before that), with no upgrade to software or hardware. There will be a few half-assed attempts to “enhance brand value” which will ignore the viable ideas members have suggested for many years, and end up hurting more than they help.
Oh well, we’ve been through this several times before, and I’m paid up for two years, so I’m just going to pull up a chair, grab some popcorn and see what happens.
Good luck to Ed, the admins, the mods, and to all of us who sees this place as something more than a commodity.
Best wishes from here as well to TPTB from Ed to all the Mods. As for the sale in general I’m a little more meh; after all, like kunilou said, we’ve been here before.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens. It’s entirely possible the costs for running the board are filed somewhere boring like “IT, miscellaneous” and are low enough that no-one is really paying that much attention so nothing will chance.
I’d be very surprised if we started seeing “Straight Dope Messageboard member [Username] said this about a current event…”, for example.
The board seems to pay for itself so it will probably be fine. But as message boards are now largely relics of the past, I doubt a new owner will much care about it. They might have some “marketing genius” that decides it should be moved to Facebook instead, that seems like the worst case scenario.
Actually, in my experience, that has a pretty bad track record. Ages ago I was with a Protestant version of this that was funded by a couple of our national denominations. After the original reason for starting it all went away, so did the funding and several of the more active members “bought it out”. They asked everyone for donations and got some funds here and there but it quickly changed flavor. From there it became a short but intense series of honk-offs which resulted in the majority being moved to Yahoo and eventually pretty much kicking the bucket. A couple meetings (in SDMB terms a thread like a GD or the MMP) survive here and there from Facebook to where-ever but basically the employees killed it off.
An interview with big wigs from the Sun Times and Chicago Tribune discussing the possibility that the Trib’s parent company might be the buyer. Neither guy mentions the SDMB. What are we, chopped liver?
ETA: The link goes to the video page, scroll down for the “Editor” video.
This is an interesting development, given the complaints about intrusive advertising on the SDMB.
The Chicago Tribune website is, AFAIK, impervious to adblockers. Go to chicagotribune.com right now with your adblocker turned on—you’ll see ads. Lots and lots of ads. If you start browsing and reading news stories, sooner or later your browser tab will freeze from all the junky ads the site is loading.
Of course, if that happens here, we’ll have yet another lively debate on paid SDMB memberships.
