Don’t just lurk, but definately post less than I used to for a number of reasons:
General Questions has become nearly useless. It used to be actually a place you could actually get cited content from real experts. Now most posters are “I don’t know the answer, but here’s my guess, and I’ll throw in a political/religious potshot.”
A lot of the best posters like Eve (answered lots of old Hollywood questions) or Zev Steinhardt (knew Orthodox Judaism inside and out) are either gone or barely post themselves.
Way too many people outright proud of being hopeless with technology or disliking being with other people. It’s fine to be that way, but it’s silly to claim that as a sign of pride.
Too much of a hive mind on too many subjects. Religion subjects are the worst; a lot of the militant atheists on the board treat any Christian as the enemy. As a politically moderate Catholic, it’s just not worth the trouble fighting back on even the most innocuous of questions.
And when someone does step outside the lines they do so in the most obvious to provoke ways. For example, why was that awful “all women over 40 are ugly” thread not closed right away?
I lurk a lot…
I post when one of you amuses me…
And most of the time lurk and secretly snickle…
tsfr
I’ve seen that happen on multiple message boards, actually. “Cite” for many people has become a weapon to shut down opposition by simply shouting *“Cite!” Cite! “Cite!” *at them over and over for every little thing, until the opposition stops talking because they can’t have an actual conversation. And even if they try, the thread tends to degenerate into a few people arguing over minutia instead of the original subject; exactly as the cite-screamer wanted. And if people try to just ignore the tactic the cite-screamer calls in the mods for “not providing cites” and has them silence his/her opponents.
What’s worse is it discounts people’s direct experiences with things. There’s another thread here where I’ve said “I’ve previously worked in [industry] for many years and seen or experienced X” while someone else has come in with (effectively) “I also worked in that industry and never had the experiences you mention, ergo you’re full of shit”.
It’s tiring.
I’m not seeing that as a bad thing. I’m seeing it as a good thing.
I follow a few other boards, and so often, I see a ridiculous assertion like, “The moon is made of green cheese.”
Poster A: “Cite?”
OP: “A guy told me. I think he got it from XYZ blog.”
Poster A: “Good enough for me, thanks.”
Yeah, I think we can disregard that as fact, and I can hear all of us Dopers now: “Cite? Cite? Cite?” It really is taking longer than we thought.
I like how we here require solid cites. Yes, sometimes we overdo it, but perhaps the end justifies the means.
I haven’t been posting as much as I used to. Yeah, the board has changed over the years, but I don’t think that explains everything. I’m simply older. My peak posting years were when I was working at academic institutions and I could get away with non-work internet activity. I can’t “play” in my current job. Yeah, sometimes I sneak in a post before I go to work (like now) or during a coffee break when I feel like typing away on my phone. But I no longer have huge swaths of time that I can devote to just the SDMB like I used to have back in the day.
Also, there was no Reddit 15 years ago. I spend about 90% of my internet time there now. I am a news junkie. We don’t have that kind of content here.
I mean, yeah. The threads aren’t as riveting as they used to be. It’s been ages since I’ve gone toe-to-toe against a poster like I used to do back in the Good Ole Days. We used to have a nice contingent of black Dopers (Hippy Hollow, Nzinga, and auntie em come to mind). We don’t have that now and it shows. It also seems like the derpy-to-cool poster ratio has steadily increased through the years. I know we can all have our derp moments–myself included–but some folks have become like walking caricatures of themselves. When you can predict whatever so-and-so is gonna say down to the word, it’s just not fun anymore. But I can’t pin my “meh” entirely on how the board has changed.
This is pretty much why I don’t participate anywhere near as much as I used to. That and the comments from others about how toxic the discourse has become, over the last few years or so. Particularly the quote about how, and I’m paraphrasing, “they used to think I was wrong; now they think I’m evil.”
Funny enough, Sam Stone was one of the posters I was thinking of when I read this. A few years ago (and after checking my mailbox, I see it was actually 2011: how the time flies) I’d privately asked him, after a particularly erudite post on economics by him, why he went to the effort for people who weren’t likely to be swayed. That there might be some lurking tenuous group of people in the middle, who might be swayed, never struck me as worth the effort.
While I don’t think my posts aren’t as clever or as well sourced as many, or as Sam’s were, they do take some effort. I don’t see the point of putting that effort towards trying to convince people who won’t be convinced, and may see me as evil no matter what I say.
I’ve heard similar on other sites which are now nearly ghosts of their former robust selves. Many, but not all of the posters were SAHMs at the time. The sites for them were the equivalent of the neighborhood kaffeklatch where you sit around, talk about your kids, your marriage, your kids, maybe current events, you kids…
Then one of two things happened: Either they suddenly realized the implications of ranting online or their kids became old enough to realize that THEY were the main subject of whatever their mother was posting, especially if photos were involved.
I’ve never been a parent so I never directly participated in any of this. My “mommy friends” who did, though, are not proud of their participation in the Mommy Internet Wars where strangers criticized parenting styles at the drop of a hat. If you had PPD you best stay away. Some didn’t, and unfortunately they paid the price.
I know a lot of people who came to similar conclusions. They’d flourished during the anonymous days of the internet. When Facebook came around they quickly curtailed their online activity. Many of them still do. They’re all in different places in their life, too, so constantly being online is either impossible or no longer the noveltyit was.
The bottom line is that this message board is getting pretty stagnant. Threads play out in predictable ways: in GQ, someone will post some version of “let me Google that for you”; in GD, the High Post Count Freaks (HPCFs) will ignore any non HPCF poster and rehash an argument that they’ve been having one way or another since the Clinton administration and then another HPCF will engage in parsing of every line of a post and if he can find one misplaced comma he will declare that he has won the debate; and in Cafe Society, adults will argue that it was unrealistic for Wonder Woman to have a sword in the back of her dress, but seem fine with men in tights fighting crime. There doesn’t seem to be much new blood coming in, maybe that’s a function of a message board being a pretty old school form of media, but it’s the same people having the same conversation over and over.
We’ve been facing this exact issue on another old school site where there have been mass exoduses for various reasons over the last couple of years. One of the same conversations there is the possibility of duplicating the glory days of the site elsewhere for the people who don’t have a Facebook and/or don’t use other social media. The conversation always ends up in the same rut because nobody has an answer.
People have scattered far and wide since those glory days, whether it’s here or elsewhere. Times have changed.
I do believe, though, that the advent of the smartphone ultimately killed the internet as we knew it. I don’t know how many people use Tapatalk to get Dope access. I don’t, so the only time I’m here is in the early morning on my laptop. The general vB message board setup is more friendly to that or to a desktop.
I didn’t stop checking SD … I just slowed down posting in Great Debates due to they are a lot smarter than I am lol
Now that’s funny 
New young posters with new young ideas get labelled as trolls in the moronic Omnibus Trolls thread in The Pit and driven away. This board has a contingent of aging folks who use this board as a social club and drive away those who don’t conform to their norms.
Nothing is really stopping you from being the change you seek; except yourself of course.
You mean like posting my observations on the subject in the appropriate thread? Thanks for the permission.
I still post, but I have become very selective about where and what the subject is. Mostly in the irrelevant fluff stuff, never attempting any kind of real discussion. I am convinced that very few posters here even want to discuss anything. They just want reinforcement of their views.
The actual Straight Dope column was an irreverent, often funny way of answering an interesting topic. And the board used to reflect that somewhat. Oh, we still get an occasional quip from an artificial root vegetable, but other than that this has become a very humorless version of Miss Grundy’s home owner’s association meeting. There appear to still be 4 or maybe 5 posters offering up a more conservative or moderate view to the hive, I believe that Ed is just paying them just to help keep the lights on. And they have to remain ever vigilant or the mods will hover over every post and take them out if they step too far outside their role as token “house” moderates.
The delusional, rabid, foaming at the mouth Trump hate would be amusing if I did not realize that these same posters must go outside and deal with different people on occasion. A trip to the grocery store, a PTA meeting, even Miss Grundy’s home owner’s association must expose them to other people, maybe not.
The SDMB will do what it wants, and it seems to just want to fade away. When Ed decides to no longer give a shit about maintaining this place it will be gone.
I have more than that on my ignore list and those are only the borderline trolls ones who are not interested in civil discourse. Although to be fair it would be difficult to name 4 to 5 civil conservatives or conservative-leaning people who are also fairly prolific posters, but that’s two additional conditions that weren’t in your post. There are also plenty of conservatives who post less frequently but I cannot recall their names for obvious reasons (since they are not abrasive nor prolific enough to be memorable).
Thanks for demonstrating many points so well.
The OT’r’U thread is like a car wreck. I shouldn’t be looking at it, but I can’t take my eyes away. I don’t like the tattle-tale culture it evokes, and it seems to me the main participants are on a continual witch hunt to identify potential trolls to the point where they consider any personality lapse something to scream about to the public. It brings to mind Joseph McCarthy’s list of communists.
It’s a toxic gossip chamber. I’ve commented a couple times about it, but was met with fierce resistance. I’m sure they have me in their sights, just waiting for me to type something marginally objectionable…
+1