I was never a prolific poster (most come around FF season), but i would read a ton. Now I only check in a couple of times a month.
The ad redirects (on my phone) are a major part why I initially stopped, but than once I quit coming everyday I just never got back into it. I’d start again and another round of ads would start up.
A minor reason is I’ve never understood why an anonymous message board needs to have so many vague, subjective rules. I’ve never been in danger from my posting habits, but sometimes I see something and I just shrug and say, who cares. I get the pictures, avatars, etc., but the other stuff…
This board is different than other boards because it is operated as a profit-making venture for the Chicago Reader. The owners have a vested interest in maintaining order and avoiding bad publicity. I’ve never found the rules particularly onerous, but I respect that they are different than your standard message board. I guess the best reason I can think of for this is that the Straight Dope Message Board is a corporate product. If you think of bigger corporations like Facebook, they have some weird and arbitrary rules, too, but we just sort of take it for granted because we know corporations act in their own self-interest all the time. It’s no different here, just on a much smaller scale.
Mostly I’m weary of people constantly disagreeing with things I say. That’s not to say I’m always right (because of course I’m not) but it’d be nice if more people took the time to say “I agree with this” or “I hadn’t thought of it like that but you might have a point” or something along those lines more often.
This place has become increasingly partisan and left-leaning, and while I enjoy the higher quality of discussion here, it’s disappointing to feel like I’m talking to myself or waiting for people to jump out of the woodwork to disagree with anything I say.
The board is partisan and left-leaning. I think conservatives complaining about it have a legitimate gripe. I wish we had more of you. There’s only so much I can learn from different shades of the left. I’ve actively reached out to at least a couple new conservative posters on the board to try to encourage them, but it’s spitting into the wind, I think. People espousing conservative viewpoints are quicker to be labeled trolls, to be accused of being disingenuous, and the least charitable interpretations are taken with what they say. I’ve gotten heat just for pointing this out and I’m not a conservative.
It’s not just here, of course. It’s way worse on Facebook. I once made a FB post inviting any of my Trump voting friends to lunch because I was just trying to understand. You know, not in an attacking or proselytizing kind of way, I just wanted to understand. My liberal friends collectively lost their shit that I would try to understand a viewpoint that wasn’t aligned with their own.
You know, whatever. I am the way I am, and that way is trying to understand why people think differently than I do. When you close yourself off to alternative perspectives, you stagnate intellectually. And I don’t want that.
I think we’re on the same wavelength. I don’t agree with a lot of leftist viewpoints but I at least want to understand what they are and why they think that way.
People often label me as “conservative” but much like Rebecca Bunch’s feelings about Josh in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the situation is much more nuanced than that.
For example: Among other things, I’m very much pro same-sex marriage and drug legalisation and universal health care (all extremely lefty things) and also not religious, but also very pro-gun, anti political correctness, I think Imperialism and Colonialism were/are good things with more benefits than downsides, and of the view small minorities shouldn’t get to dictate to the majority about major issues.
What I’m trying to work out is if there’s many small-c conservative posters on the boards who keep quiet because they can’t be bothered dealing with the inevitable pile-on from their opponents, or if there’s just not many left here anymore.
And i understand that, which is a reason I’ve never really complained about rulings before. As a medium MB’s aren’t really the future, so to me at least, it makes sense to allow the rules to be more liberal than in the past, instead of regressing to a sanitized version. However, there is a reason I’m not an internet billionaire.
It’s not the big stuff (hate speach, sock accounts, etc) more of the little stuff usually escalating from people being jerks. Almost to a point where if it was said in real life most people wouldn’t bat an eye, but since its in writing it carries more weight.
I know that the conventional wisdom is that this board is left wing, but I just don’t see it. It skews left of center, but is not this hotbed of leftist thought. Look at any thread about women being harassed and there are plenty of posts defending the harassment.
I was gonna say exactly this. The composition seems about the same, it’s always tilted slightly to the left, but it’s consistently tracking around the broader polarization around the Trump faction. Liberals react extremely to an extreme situation (justly, I think, but certainly it’s overwrought at times). Conservatives rally to double down on the opposite pole of expression. The poles haven’t moved, they’ve just become the most popular hangout.
Just look at the way members treat the right and the left. Trump is deplorable but the way Dopers treat him is despicable. And the Mods condone it. And Dopers will defend Democrats beyond reason.
Oh my god. I hadn’t heard any of this. Are Dopers sending him dead animals in the mail? Are they following his grandchildren at school and threatening them? Are Dopers slashing his tires?
Did you not read what you wrote? If you are conservative you are pro-harassment? Thanks for the example. Just like those famous righties Louis CK, Kevin Spacey and Harvey Weinstein.
I guess the thing I don’t like is the reactions to certain things. For example, there is an extensive outcry against anything remotely racist or misogynistic, but when someone says something like “scratch a man and find a rapist” there is some pushback, but it is not nearly as fierce. It gives me the impression that the board in general is more focused on certain large groups of people being treated differently and not as focused on the ideal of fair and empathetic treatment of all people, regardless of race or gender etc. This is one of those things that’ s hard to quantify, but the overall tone can give one a certain impression. But I still post, so I guess it’s not really that big a deal to me; I just kind of wish the board had the level and diversity that it did when I started visiting a few years ago. Posters like Hellestal were amazing to read - such succinct and efficient arguments, truly beautiful in my opinion. I see less of that now.
Which post has “defended harassment”? The only things I can see are i) People saying there is insufficient evidence ii) claimed action did not rise to the level of harassment/assuage/rape or iii) that there are degrees of misconduct.
It probably shows just how left this board skews that those are controversial opinions.
It sounds like you are largely libertarian, which may be what you mean by “small-c conservative”. Or perhaps you are just someone who doesn’t like to be pigeon-holed by a label. I agree with all of the issue positions you posted - government marriage licenses should be open to any couple (churches can make their own rules); the war on drugs should end and at least marijuana should be legal; I’m strongly in favor of gun rights; political correctness is a liberal shortcut to shut down conversation; even universal health care - which I have changed my mind on over the past five years. The last one certainly is a black mark on my libertarian credentials, but we are much too far removed from a free market regarding health care, and I see no way to go down that path. I can’t stand how the religious right and rah-rah-military factions control the GOP, either.
In any even, yes, this message board is hugely liberal and stridently so. I thought so well before Trump was elected, but it’s gotten far worse in that regard. And I’m not even a Trump supporter (didn’t and couldn’t vote for either he or Hillary). I’ve looked for message boards online that weren’t so tilted to the far left or far right, but am not having much luck finding any. Echo chambers are the norm, including here (for the left).
I would consider myself a small-c conservative or possibly a small-l libertarian, depends on the day.
This is why I pick and choose the threads I post in carefully. I like this place, but at the end of the day I’m just not that attached to it emotionally.
A while back I came up with a private “rule” for the SDMB that I think of as the “Page 2 Rule”. By page 2 of any thread about women being sexually assaulted, harassed on the street, etc., there will be posters defending the harassment/harassers. This often winds up derailing the thread. There may be exceptions to this rule, but to the best of my recollection it happens every single time, even in threads started for the explicit purpose of inviting women to discuss their experiences.
I wouldn’t call myself a lurker, but this sort of thing is a major reason why I don’t post here as much as I used to.
If you need a specific example, here’s a thread from the summer (I was sexually abused…but was it clearly criminal/illegal?) where the OP describes being sexually assaulted by a yoga instructor and the defense of her assailant begins on the first page, in post #15. Looking at the thread now I see that (to your credit) you argued against a poster who was doing this and encouraged the OP to go to the police, so I’m surprised that you seem to be questioning whether defense of harassment really happens here.
Funny, I just logged in for the first time in months and saw this.
I walked away when I realized that the main thing that I was doing here was avoiding logging off and going out my front door. Some of what I posted here was probably helpful, but a lot of the posts (and plenty of lurking) wasn’t. Also, I tended to get stuck on unimportant points mentioned in threads, and I really doubt that arguing these points helped me make friends and influence people around here.
To be fair he was speaking of a particular thread not overall.
I mentioned it not because people may defend it. I mentioned it because it was used as an offhand way to describe conservatives despite the fact that the current spate of abuse reports in the news is almost exclusiveky well known Hollywood liberals.
The accused are liberals, but who are the people in the threads claiming that the accusers are untruthful, or forgetful, or vengeful, or initiated the contact, or are bypassing Due Process, or are demonizing normal manly behavior? Do you think it’s liberals in these threads showing up to undermine the accusers?
I don’t agree with a lot of leftist viewpoints but I at least want to understand what they are and why they think that way.