this is what I was referring to in my earlier post. another board I used to be active on has pretty much turned into a collection of “perpetual” threads which each have a relative handful of people shooting the shit. their own gun control thread has gone in circles so many times it’s reversed the rotation of the earth and allowed Superman to save Lois Lane.
Facebook and Twitter have replaced message boards.
Unaboard has a vastly lower membership and a corresponding increase in omnibus threads (which are of manageable size). The way they handle sub-topics is with titles like this:
Worth its own thread: I pit the cop who arrested Sarah Bland
I actually like the Omnibus cop thread, but I agree that it verges into chat because of its length.
I like Twitter too, but not for discussion. I use it as a hyped up RSS feed / announcement board.
I suspect the key to increasing traffic would be to hire a few programmers, offer blog space, etc. Whether that would be a money spinner is another matter.
On the other hand, it places the same four or five people who want to keep having the same argument over and over into a convenient, easy-to-ignore box.
There were a couple of boards that I participated in, until they started wanting EVERYTHING in one or two threads. If you wanted to start something that was new people would search and see if there was something in another thread, say we’ve talked about it here and ask for the new one closed. I’ll be damned if I’m searching through threads that are 1000s of posts long and 10 years old.
I do remember when I fist came here that if one made a post it was a good possibility that it was off the first page within a few hours. I guess making new forums helped with that a bit, but I have noticed a large drop in participation here.
Was posting on the rise up until 2010 and, if so, please ignore my join date as it is mere coincidence. The drop from 2012 to 2013 is most severe, I do wonder if it correlates with some event.
I was just thinking the other day about some of the old contributors on the forums that I haven’t seen in a long time.
Yes the rise of social media probably has meant the decline of message boards. But let’s also look at the rise in social media seems to coincide with a decline in civility, thoughtful discourse and general intelligence.
Here we run the gamut. I can real well structured opinions, sitting-around-the-fire chit chat, or even careful analysis and science issues. Yeah, we have our differences and finger-pointing, but the [del]referees here[/del] mods do a decent job yanking the choke chains when necessary. Social media is free-for-all, full of choppy dipshit half-thoughts, innuendo, excessive fighting words, and an expansion of foul language and blood-thirsty attacks, we don’t have here (or at least monitored and controlled in the pit).
The trend may be social media and message boards may go the way of manual gear shifting. But as long as LPs exist (making a comeback), books remain, and a few other things, it’s up to us to retain what may be left of internet civility, discourse, and just enjoying the debate for the sake of the debate.
At least we will have nice, well-kept lawns. The problem children prefer concrete, thumb chats and silicon converations.
Traffic is down at this board, clearly. I don’t know that traffic is down at all boards. Several single-topic boards where I lurk are apparently going strong. Maybe it is that whatever attracted people to this board in the first place has changed.
The learning curve is really high on this board, and new users have to prove themselves somewhat to be taken seriously. If they are too far outside of the norms of the board and aren’t established posters who are already accepted despite being quirky they generally don’t find this a very fertile environment for them. At the same time, a lot of 'dopers are getting a bit long in the tooth at this point…I know I’m not the only old gray beard here. From past polls I figure that there are a lot of 'dopers in the 40-60 years range. And through attrition and just loss of interest for various reasons we’ve lost a lot of long time posters…lost or they have scaled back at least a lot.
I suspect something of this sort. I posted a lament about Netflix move away from the PC friendly lists and several of the early replies suggested they did not understand.
And, naturally — although unsought for in that there’s no conspiracy — there’s a bonus for governments and the bigger computing corporations in that people, their views, and circles can be more adequately checked or followed on the larger entities such as Facebook or even the comments sections of newspapers, if most are all in, rather than on millions of little private meeting places.
This is unintentional, but as much a part of the streamlining zeitgeist as the dumbing.