Sorry lobstermobster, that was a little meaner than I intended. Your misconstruing of the discussion just grated my nerves. My point stands though. Some people like to use this place as a social club and $15/yr may seem like a deal for your tiny slice of online vanity publishing. Others just want to occasionally show off their expertise or opinion if they happen to come across an interesting thread. We all lose out if those guys don’t bother reaching for their wallet. Like Dead Badger, if I didn’t have a little nostalgic tug for this place I definitely would have rolled my eyes over paying to post here.
That’s probably RitzyRae. She doesn’t use bookmarks or the address bar, she just does a Google search for every site she needs. 
I hadn’t thought of that… that’s definitely very true for me personally.
I still stand by my contention that by “raising the tone of the board” that the mods managed to make it far too serious and in many ways wreck the community feel of the board.
To me, it started going downhill about then, and P2P was kind of like another punch to a reeling fighter. I still come here and read daily, just because I like the catch-all knowledge and topics, but honestly, the threads I remember the most fondly were the silly poop and sex threads and/or the gross-out threads about zits and the like.
I even forwarded those to friends, which isn’t likely to happen with one more thread about atheism vs. Christianity, or how Bush is the antichrist, or another thread about some godawful sad thing that happened to someone.
I don’t think I misconstrued anything so you got your panties in a twist for nothing. Obviously I know it’s not about having to give up 15 precious dollars. I just have a hard time relating to this barrier it poses for people to sign up because I personally spend money like it’s a body function. I fired off that fifteen dollars without even thinking twice about it being a reason to not sign up. I mean I can only speak for myself but I can’t see how this really is that big of an impediment to join a message board.
And online vanity! For that I’d pay double! What a deal! My ego sure is stroked by being called a gadfly here and a stupid whore there. Quick someone insult me before my head swells.
On most successful message boards, there is a constant churn of members; old members leave for various reasons, but their departure is made up for by new members that take an active role. Ideally, the number of new active members should be higher than the loss of old active members, so the message board experiences net gain of active users even as old-timers leave.
I don’t have hard numbers, but it seems like on the SDMB, there aren’t enough new active members to make up for the older members that leave. Looking at post counts on most message boards, you’ll see a wide range of post counts; new members with double-digit post counts to old-timers with thousands or tens of thousands of posts. On the SDMB, when I see the posters in a thread, the vast majority seem to have post counts in the hundreds or thousands, with join dates at least a few years old. This tells me there’s relatively few new active users rising through the ranks; that the people participating are usually those who have been around for a long, long time.
Where am I going with this? The SDMB no longer has a monopoly on a “fun intellectual” vibe, and many people who would have joined the SDMB in the past are now participating in the same types of discussion in other venues. There is also an increasing number of specialty message boards where a similar vibe can be found. I run a message dealing with a very specialized profession. The most popular part of the message board is an off-topic area, where about 60% of all posts are placed. The quality of the posts are far from the usual one-liners seen on gaming, vanity and and upstart general interest boards; threads are quite similar to what is generally seen on the SDMB. There’s user gatherings, inside jokes, and, as of a couple of weeks ago, two marriages between members who met on the site.
In the past, a science geek might have joined the SDMB to answer questions in GQ, and maybe venture to MPSIMS or Cafe Society for a break. Now, if there is an offtopic subforum on the science forum they normally visit, with a high level of discussion, what compelling reason is there to spend $15 to join the SDMB? A more diverse crowd, maybe, but is that enough? Sure, some will pay for the SDMB, but the majority probably won’t.
Maybe you can’t see it, but that doesn’t change its being a fact. It’s pretty clear that the moment this place became pay-to-play, the number of new members dropped precipitously.
Fine, you are a light weight piece of fluff that takes nothing serious.
I keed.
Well, I partially agree in that I think (or rather, thought) it’s worth paying for, but I really don’t believe people here are smarter than anywhere else. I believe the decent debates arose from having many interested contributors, a good set of rules and a willingness to enforce them. There’s no significant selecting factor I can see that would mean the average doper is anything other than that - average.
Rather, the rules and high level of activity and contributor turnover acted as a filter that meant the high-quality stuff tended to float to the top, instead of idiocy drowning out sane voices as happens on a lot of MBs. I think it just about managed to overcome the perennial internet problems of anonymous debate, and raised the level of discussion here to about what you’d expect between reasonably intelligent people IRL (which was quite a coup, really). But that’s a matter of engineering a certain type of interaction, not ensuring that only clever people come here. And now, in a period of undeniable decline in numbers, new posters and content, what does that leave us with? Not a great deal, in my view.
I mean - all of the people at the Other Place must either be, or at one time have been, Dopers, right? And let’s not kid ourselves that cattiness and gossip are pastimes solely of the dim. So what does this tell us about our supposedly rarefied breed when it’s let off the hook?
Part of the perceived problem is precedent. Is participation here worth $15/yr? Sure, if you have the time and the inclination.
But what if most great sites were pay to play? Suppose imdb, snopes, the onion, wikipedia and slate were all $15/yr?
Ideally, I think salon.com and others got it right with a mixture of ad-free subscriptions and guests-must-see-ads formatting.
And who in the heck would join a board like this without being able to search during a trial period? That wasn’t terribly clever.
I think it has to do with bandwidth and hardware. There are hundreds of compromises a site must make in order to succeed and I think this one’s OK. I can’t imagine how insufferable I’d be in real life if I could readily look up and play back any conversation my neighbors ever had.
Nice to meet you, BTW.
While I’m no historian, I believe the snark appeared right about when PTP arrived and thousands of socks were culled. It was a massacre. Argyles, kneesocks. Oh God, those poor, poor footies.
Pragmatically, when well-known meatworld people are willing to outright steal someone else’s shit, what method (other than casha-casha) can protect the academic props of the SD? Furthermore, how seriously should a message board be taken if every other member is talking to himself?
I still contend GQ, Staff Reports and Cecil’s Comments should be free. And I think we should behave in GQ. Also, I would like a pony.
Hey, the one time I had a thread dedicated to me over there, I loved it, mainly because for every mild jape thrown my way, Aeschines (or was it Snakespirit - I forget) was being drenched in scorn and I thought it was hilarious.
And I sign my occasional post there with my real name, too. 
Eekers?
I have to confess to having very little idea what you’re saying here. If you’re trying to say that PTP has excluded socks, thus raising the tone and preserving the standards of the place, I can only disagree completely. We still have a veritable stream of socks (which is why some people are now so hostile to newcomers in general), because they only last a month now. And cash is no guarantee of “academic props” - it’s just cash, not a degree. All it means is that anyone wanting to get a bit of trolling in has to do it within a month. The idea that we’re great, so only great people will want to pay to join us just doesn’t hold any water. All sorts of schmucks with little intelligence and still less self-awareness nonetheless have $15. Just look at that brazil nut currently infesting the boards.
Even if PTP did do what you claim, it still puts new people off joining, and that, for me, is the main problem.
I haven’t seen this kind of hostility here.
If this place is to survive as a salable academic brand it must if nothing have a foundation of brick and mortar. In this case the mortar is plastic.
I’ve always been a big proponent of this myself. Though maybe not out loud, now that I think about it 
.
IMHO it would go a long way towards solving the turnover issues. Not a complete panacea - but a big help. It’s probably the biggest single disagreement I have with the management of this board and I’ve had a few ( mostly quite minor ).
Maybe the new owners will revisit that idea at some point.
And maybe you’ll get that pony - you never know :D.
Well Cid, It’s not as bad as some places, but the hostility towards newcomers has definitely increased in my view. But this is a minor point.
Either way, I still have no idea what you think $15 guarantees. Nor, really, do I have much of an idea what you mean by a “salable academic brand” (at least in reference to these boards). Speaking as an academic, I think good debate arises out of open participation, critical appraisal and a set of agreed standards. It doesn’t come from ring-fencing a group of nominated intellects and keeping out the riff-raff, sitting back and declaring job done.
I didn’t join a “salable academic brand”, I joined a discussion forum that was populated by a large number of people, many of them interesting, and where the good discussions weren’t derailed by morons. I would like to perpetuate the latter, and have no interest whatsover in being part of some weird brand-building exercise for the benefit of god knows whom. The only problem PTP solved was the Reader’s. Anything else is just post-hoc rationalisation.
Christ, this is hard to say without sounding pompous:
It’s much less likely I’m a bot. That makes me worth a shitload. There are ads across the top of this place because people like what I say.
If I can enjoy talking to you (I always do) and my content makes me content, it’s a steal. In me you’re talking to one man, pimples and typos and all, guaranteed. If I fuck up in my research I’ll be accountable to you and the rest of the board.
Again, I’m a little lost. Do you mean bot as in the things that spider the web for various search engines, or bot as in something that actually posts to messageboards pretending to be human? Because if it’s the former, they get completely ignored by contextual advertising services (hell, Google would be charging itself if it weren’t capable of ignoring bots). And if it’s the latter, then this again seems like an entirely illusory problem. When did we ever have trouble deducing whether posters were human or not? And furthermore, when did said deduction ever guarantee accountability? I refer you again to our lamentable friend brazil84, who seems entirely incapable of any sort of joined-up thinking, let alone a minimum of intellectual rigour. I’d rather talk to Dr Sbaitso, frankly.
Even if we were unduly bothered by wannabe-HAL 9000s, surely a simple CAPTCHA on registration would deal with the problem. It might even genuinely help to weed out our stupider contributors. 
I know this gets shot down every time, but I think the board’s software is showing its age. Simply, the place looks like crap. Yeah, I know many think this is a good thing, that content is what matters and this keeps the l33t out. Meh.
I can deal with free ugly and with paid pretty. Paid ugly is a bit of a turn off. I am sure many potential new members think “Do I want to give my credit card number to someone who can’t keep search working?” (let’s not even talk about the emailing CC info when payment wasn’t working). Where is the money going if the servers are powered by rodents?
All little things that just add up to the appearance of a place not run professionally.