What an idiot I am:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=118749&highlight=Anthology
There used to be a more even balance between liberals and conservatives. As the Bush administration wore on, the conservatives seemed to drop away as they found it harder and harder to sustain logical arguments for their positions.
There also used to be more in-jokes – “Hi Opal” and crap like that. As the board has matured, a lot of the “I’ll repeat this phrase so everyone knows I’m in the club” has gone away.
Yeah, fewer in-jokes and less wacky/mundane/pointless threads overall. Although you still get some of that. Also a lot fewer Cecil references. A lot of the people who showed up here in the early years of the boards did so because they found it via Cecil’s columns. These days I think we get a lot more people coming in from Google searches or whatever. The Pit has also been somewhat neutered these days.
I am continually surprised at how the overall quality of this board remains relatively high, though. A lot of other places I’ve hung out on the Internet over the years have eventually imploded or died via attrition.
I’m another who’s been around since AOL even though I didn’t join until much later.
The main difference I notice is that there is much less tolerance for trolls, and for silliness in general. I mean, how long would Manny Peoples last nowadays? Maybe a few hours at most?
It’s a double-edged sword. Now we put up with a lot less BS, but there’s also not as much fun! I’m also not a fan of the way the BBQ Pit has been tamed. It’s a little bit more boring these days.
More snark, but I doubt that is exclusive to this board.
Same topics get discussed over and over.
At the end of the day there are still a lot of entertaining and well informed folks here.
It’s still the best board. I don’t know if it’s deliberate, but it seems as if the Mods work to keep it that way. Except, as has been said, silliness isn’t tolerated as much as it used to be, and the day of the meme seems to have passed.
I wonder if there is a common personality trait that people who enjoy message boards share?
My husband has participated a very little bit in a board dedicated to fishing, but he gets bored with it and hardly ever visits it anymore.
I don’t know anyone else in real life that enjoys a message board and people I mention my addiction to the dope to, look at me funny.
It would be interesting if someone could update this.
And thinking about that thread, are major Dope events (good or bad) celebrated any more? They don’t seem to be. Or we don’t have events. Or I’m missing them.
General Questions has become WAG.
There are less silly games, like word association and such.
Conservatives vs. Liberals: the fact that people here still limit the groups to these two is one thing that is consistent, despite the fact that political stances are more dynamic than that.
My opinion of the SDMB increased immeasurably after I first discovered it on the net. IMHO, this board has greatly improved since I joined. YMMV.
There was definitely a golden age for me – I’d say 2000 through 2002 – but that’s for me. I was on the left coast, I’d just joined up, I met virtually every friend I made in California via this message board, there was practically a standing weekly meeting of the B.A.D.'s, etc.
It’s the theory of message board relativity. For example, there was a stretch in about 2004 or so where I couldn’t access the board while at work; it really sucked then.
I agree that GQ has gotten worse over time, but it’s still a good place to bring questions that Google can’t handle. There are more guesses and opinions than there used to be, but there are still solid answers in the mix thanks to the quality of people we have around here. I feel like the mods used to smack people around more for putting WAGs in GQ threads, but I might be misremembering.
I miss the silly games. We need more of those. Even though I’m not very good at them.
I’ve been around since 2003 and it seems to me that stuff comes in waves. There are some weeks or months when it seems like there’s nothing at all happening here worth responding to, but then there will be a flurry of great posts. I do feel like I used to laugh more while reading the boards, but maybe this is just a slump and greatness will return soon.
Of course, opinions on what constitutes a great post will vary wildly. So, I guess the moral of my story is: if you don’t like the weather here lately, stick around a while and it’s bound to change.
Oh yeah, other people have touched on this but I’ll also say that the technical quality of the boards has vastly increased in the past year or two. There was a time for a while when I wouldn’t even recommend the SDMB to friends because I knew they’d get here and be unable to load any threads or get endless timeouts while waiting for things to load and whatnot. And that’s not even mentioning things like the Winter of Our Missed Content, when the board was down completely for about three straight months in early 2002. So that’s been a major improvement.
Only minor changes – you can’t post a joke answer in GQ unless the question has been given a serious answer, for instance. And you can’t put a link to your personal web page in your sig.
The discussion isn’t much different, though.
I don’t laugh out loud as much as I used to.
You guy’s used to crack my shit up.
There used to be some fantastic OPs, real works of art, you don’t see that as much anymore.
It could be me though. When I first joined I reveled in every new thread like I was exploring a new lover. Now she’s grown familiar and while I may not have the red-hot passion I once did, we have a familiarity and closeness that’s comforting.
Man I really need to get out more
:rolleyes:
This is probably the biggest change I’ve noticed; although I found the boards off a link on the main Straight Dope site, I stayed because the content was frequently hysterical, and because it made me think.
I mean, where else do you find a thread titled “Ever crapped your pants?” with page after page of people’s tail-end misadventures and accidents? Or a thread about sex injuries?
You don’t see that kind of thing anymore; it seems to have been replaced with a particularly shrill variety of leftist ranting and/or atheistic ranting.
And like others have said, 10 years ago or so, it was much more accepting of conservatives and Christians than it is now; there was respect for people who did what they believed, even if it wasn’t what you agreed with.
Now we have people calling Tim Tebow evil because he’s very religious, and a member of a very conservative denomination. That’s a big change from back in the day for sure…
I’ve been lurking since the AOL boards, although I didn’t sign up until much later. I think it did used to be more fun and dynamic - certainly it used to be funnier. And GQ used to be more awesome. Don’t even mention the downfall of the Pit. I still like the place, but it’s not what it used to be IMHO.
One thing I noticed is that somewhere around 2005, a lot more “kids” found the Board. In fact, the number of new users during Winter and Summer breaks seemed to increase dramatically.
At the same time, the Board also seemed to experience a large increase in in threads like “My gurlfrend wantz to try anil sex” and a large decrease in members’ tolerance for threads like that.
I have a lot of difficulty determining whether what I’m about to say is “get off my lawn”-ness on my part or real.
However, my perception is that this place used to centre around GQ and GD. It had an almost fanatically empirical and objective bent. It still does, but I feel that as the number of forums, and the social interconnectedness between long term posters, have increased over time, it has come to revolve far more around the opinion/social world of TGR, CS, IMHO and MPSIMS.
You regularly see straight questions asked in MPSIMS (not GQ) or interesting debate topics raised in IMHO (instead of GD) and the reason why isn’t usually given, but when it is, it seems often to be along the lines that people don’t want rigidly correct answers, or don’t want to have to justify their positions rationally. I don’t feel this was as common (or as acceptable) an attitude as it used to be.
I’m really not sure if what I’m saying is right or just a matter of perception.
I lurked on and off from about 2000 to 2005 when I actually joined, and remember “Hi Opal” and schtick about goats and some sort of pie handed out to new members.
But that’s gone by the wayside, I think.