It seems there are a fair number of people here who joined 7 or 10 or even 12 years ago. That’s a long time for an internet message board.
I’ve only been posting occasionally for a few years. I get the sense things have changed, but I’m not sure how. In what ways would you say it’s changed? Was there a “golden age” for the board?
Happy Birthday?
It was much better in 1999. Things have been going downhill since.
The culture of the board has definitely changed and I’m a relatively new member. I lurked since about 2004 and from then til now the place is different.
More political in some areas, less inane and irreverent in others.
And now I can’t even tell Measure For Measure to fuck off for trying to pass himself off as a '99er.
I haven’t noticed any significant change to the board: We’re still fairly small, fairly tight-knit, and likely going to debate this one way and the other for a good while, just like the old days.
Specific personalities drop in and drop out. That can’t be denied, and that does change the tenor of the board to some extent. However, we’ve never had, to misuse some biological terms, either an extinction event or an explosion. We maintain at a fairly constant long-term average, both in terms of numbers and in terms of culture.
So there either hasn’t been a golden age, this is it, or the golden age is yet to come.
I started here in 1999 (though I didn’t join until 2000). Back then, there were a number of “profound” issues that were discussed, some for the first time. It was exciting to read people’s posts on subjects that hadn’t previously been discussed. Now, that’s rarely the case. And I miss some of the Dopers we’ve lost, even some who’ve been banned.
In GD, religious ecumenicism tended to predominate before the mid 2000s. Atheism has become more militant since then. There’s always been a refreshing skeptical bent to the board.
The Pit consensus tended to be broadly pro-moderator. Not so much in ATMB anymore. ETA: The snack board didn’t always exist.
Conservatives have always been a minority and have always let that be known.
Wikipedia has displaced the SDMB in some ways. I see somewhat fewer media references to the board than I used to. Then again, we have more satellite boards now.
There have been a lot of bannings accumulated over the years, as a review of old threads shows.
Now there are ads and memberships. That wasn’t the case in the early 2000s.
I blame Covered_In_Bees! 
ETA: We’ve lost the some of the major philosophical players in GD (or they’ve wandered off rather). Lib, Spirtus, and Eris.
Anybody want to talk about the AOL era?
The pit has had the biggest change and not in a good way. The subject matter and language has been cleaned up to be more “civil” in the owners prospect, more boring in mine. I used to love the pit and always read it first, but after the changes I find it a waste of time often. The great debates have all been debated before and the sense of smart assed humor seems to be waining. I visited everyday for years but the last few months I’ve found other places to be and only come here a couple times a week, instead of a couple times a day.
Our “core mission”, Fighting Ignorance, is intact.
There is less humor on the Board than there was at one time, although it has not completely vanished.
We evolve.
See for yourself, this thread from 2002 contains a lot of links from early board history:
One of the big differences I’ve noticed, at least within the last year or so, is a seeming obsession with bodily functions, at least by some thread titles. Maybe it’s just that one spawns another, and maybe I wasn’t paying attention in the olden days… Fortunately, I’m not so bored that I feel compelled to open such discussions.
Some of the more obvious changes are the additional forum divisions. I was especially happy with the Game Room, because I don’t enjoy such threads, so I can avoid them all easily. I prefer my MPSIMS unsullied. 
Your link goes back to this thread.
Err,the link is to this thread.
Aol was my first experience with a message board. I was pretty active on the Scott Peterson/AOL board and one other. Mad world…something like that. I think it’s still active.
I’ve been reading here for only a little over a year, so I can’t comment about how much it’s changed from the start. But one of my favorite threads here, which I can’t find because I haven’t a clue what to search for, was when someone came in strictly to correct another persons use of you’re vs your. They did this with a one word post:
Your
That’s it. And the thread took off from there and it was just so funny. Personally, I see less of this sort of thing these days. Or maybe I’m just not hanging out in the right places.
I remember posting in a thread with a single-letter title:
a
I think that was the entire content of the OP as well.
Obviously, someone responded with b, and it went from there, around the alphabet, getting more creative as it went on. And on. And on.
And on.
And on.
You know the rake gag from the Simpson’s, when Sideshow Bob steps on rake after rake after rake? After a while, it stops being funny, but as it keeps going it loops back to being even funnier than it was.
That thread made the full loop a few times over.
It got closed, of course, and I have no idea how to even find it now.
I guess it shows we’ve always been smartasses.
Found it after all: a
OK, I can think of a way the boards have changed: Google searches are so much more convenient than this place’s native search engine. Also, who here remembers when the boards would regularly crash, timeout, and generally become unusable?
And remember When Everyone Was Banned? Oh yeah, that was just last month.
I feel a Ph.D coming on. We’re already talking high tech nostalgia.
Oh my gosh, I just read the first page. I love it, love it, love it. And there are 107!! pages of it.
I now know how I will be spending my free time for awhile. Thanks for taking the time
I expect it wouldn’t be allowed to reach 107 pages now.