I used to come to this site all the time. I used to post all day. Now I come about once a day and stay for five minutes or so.
Part of this is subjective, I’m sure. All the debates to be debated have been debated ad nauseum in Great Debates, for example. A newbie, however, might jump into the umpteenth iteration of the James Randi Challenge debate. Etc.
GQ is about as interesting as ever–i.e., not very–but now when I post a question I seem to get much fewer responses, sometimes none. Here is an example of evidence that there are fewer posters before; it really seems undeniable.
The Pit is really dead. Controversy about members seems to have greatly diminished over the past year or so, except for a select few retards who really ought to be put out of their misery here. I hated the old ban-baitings, but now it seems that there aren’t even any good pittings at all. Plus, there just seem to be fewer threads.
Boring, boring, anemic, boring. I’m not just saying this to stir the shit, the board just really seems boring and depopulated. How far off am I on this one?
People have been periodically complaining that the Dope is boring/dying ever since I’ve been here. The biggest crisis was when we went pay-to-post. Every few months, it seems, someone would be lamenting the imminent death of the SDMB. “Have we lost our creativity? Our spontaneity? Is this the end?”
Not yet, apparently.
You say this like it’s a bad thing.
I’ve noticed this, too, but I thought it was a Good Thing; I thought it showed that overall, we were maturing as a group, learning what was important and worth Pitting, and what wasn’t. I’ve been actually pleased to see a dropoff in the number of “you annoyed me in GD so I’m gonna Pit you fer that, you bastidge” threads, taking it as a sign of maturity–folks are learning that you don’t have to go racing over to the Pit and whine about how someone was mean to you in GD.
Or that you don’t have to go racing to the Pit the minute you spot an annoyance. Really, five years ago VC03 would have had multiple, non-stop Pit threads in his honor. I’ve been assuming that the reason he doesn’t is that we’ve all collectively learned that there’s no point in mass Pittings like that, and have learned to say “meh” and move on to better uses of our time and pixels.
It definitely has. I’ve been here seven years (longer than that, actually - it took me a while to register). Threads just don’t draw the same response as they used to. General Questions mostly died when we went to subscription - we lost a lot of the lurkers with knowledge in specialized areas who would only post occasionally. The other forums, while active, are still more quiet than they used to be.
I was amazed the other day when I scrolled down the thread listing in the Pit and noticed that there was no page 2 - hell, there was practically no page 1.
It used to be you could post a thread on here, and be guaranteed at least twenty replies regardless of what you were talking about. Not so anymore. I used to post something in MPSIMS or the Pit, or wherever, and get reply notifications in my Inbox immediately. Leave for an hour and you could miss twenty posts. Now they sort of trickle in over the course of the day.
The SDMB is far from dead, but the trend is clear, I think. It’s too bad, because I really haven’t found a good alternative to this place.
I don’t think the SDMB is as good as it used to be. But fortunately the conversion to subscriptions didn’t have as dire an effect as I predicted. Overall, I’d say we’re around 70% of what we were at our peak. And we seem to have reached a plateau of stability/stagnation in members - we lose relatively few old people and gain relatively few new people.
Again, the subjective element is there, but I find it hard to find stuff worth reading here these days.
I kind of agree. I think a big part is the group maturity you mention; another part is just a kind of fatigue, as though it really doesn’t matter one way or another what someone thinks or does here (within reason). Blandness and apathy are also at work.
I noticed no page two for the first time today. But for a good six months or so now the Pit just hasn’t had very good metabolism. I look at the threads and, it seems, a week later many of them are the same thing I had no interest in in the first place.
Yeah, I find this really hurts Cafe. You need a lot of users in order to guarantee minimal, viable interest in an obscure topic.
I think the hardcore skeptics/atheists got what they were going after: a board of mostly atheists and those who have learned not to engage them in debate. Great debates is really, really stale and passionless now. Just try to find something worth posting in there.