Look on the bright side: getting rid of the funny, popular posters just makes more room for those who stay.
Wow - the atheists engaged religious people in debate, so the religious people stopped debating. What should the atheists have done differently? Not debated? Taken up the other side? Used a lot of reflection and “I” statements?
Whose fault is it if one side can’t hold their own in a debate?
If only there were a place you could go to do nothing but complain about the SDMB and use any and all variations of “retarded” that other people can think of for you. Then you wouldn’t have to waste your time repeatedly predicting the demise of the SDMB here.
Part of the reason I’d suggest that there hasn’t been tons of responses to this is that it’s been done several times lately.
I’ve been hanging around for about a year now and have seen numerous “The SDMB sucks now” “All the cool people have left the SDMB” “Is the SDMB in the toilet bowl?” threads. At the very least, it’s a sentiment that gets expressed a bunch. Matter of fact, it was part of the reason I delayed in signing up. If the people who knew what was what and would have a better idea of if the board was going to close up shop though things were getting bad, why should I pay money only to have it close?
Now that I’ve been around long enough I think that most of it is “why, back in my day…” stuff that may or may not be true. I think that it is an interesting enough place, with a much better quality of discussion than any other board I’ve nosed around.
(Yes, I am a guest. No, I haven’t paid yet. Yes, I will be paying.)
I’m here because it can still be interesting, but no. It isn’t what it once was.
But most of the sites I frequent also aren’t what they once were.
Either the common denominator is meeee or it’s simply a life cycle of internet boards. The internet is changing all the time, so we shouldn’t expect everything to stay the same in our little corner of it.
Pay to post is a foolish idea when it comes to maintaining a board. Businesses can be extraordinarily blind at times.
<Foghorn Leghorn>That was a joke, son.</FL>
Like a used up old hooker, the SDMB will be providing cheap pleasure for years to come. Maybe not with the excitement and thrill of her yesteryears, but with verve and skill of past experience. Lots of past experience. The SMDB is one dirty old gal.
The fact that you can write something so fucking stupid demonstrates the problem.
Right, that’s all I do. What a dumbass you are.
I’m sure it’s quieter for lots of reasons, including the rise of blogs, Facebook, etc. Even sites like Flickr have spawned their own little communities of interests… I check out several other blogs, boards, etc. before I log on here.
And on the Dope itself, the amalgamation of what might once have been dozens (?) of possibly interesting separate threads into the MMP thread every week certainly saves me a lot of reading!
And I’ll take this opportunity to say that I also wish that GQ was more trustworthy and that humorous answers were either saved until after the question had been properly answered, or clearly marked somehow as unreliable.
I misread this as:
I think this place is fatalistic
It is, a bit.
Altho I do think the rate of new thread creation has slowed considerably.
I think the issue here is largely a question of tone.
Start a thread about religion, and believers will inevitably start getting described in insulting and uncomplimentary ways - akin to how atheists are treated on other boards.
That sure doesn’t foster a climate of an honest exchange of ideas, does it? Such a thing would have to be conducted across forums, if it continues this way.
I’m not saying people shouldn’t vent, or even that this shouldn’t be the place where atheists feel free to do so - but you shouldn’t be surprised if the things that make atheists comfortable here make others uncomfortable. Not all of us want confrontation, like you and I do. Message board posters generally seek affirmation.
However it came about, this is an atheist friendly board - and atheists won’t be challenged to defend their beliefs quite as much as believers will. And if a person is debating five-on-one, or ten-on-two, he’ll lots of times just give it up as a futile and frustrating exercise that changes no minds.
I thought the problem was that it was boring, anemic and uninteresting around here. I guess that’s only a problem when your own tard-iness is being called out.
I don’t think it has anything to do with critical mass (although I do agree there were more action here awhile back), but more of the ‘been there done that’ feeling from most of the posters. I do think the the SDMB is dying.
Excuse me, but skeptic and atheist are not synonyms. I am a skeptic, but I am not an atheist. Also, it’s the hard atheists, and not their more reasonable philosophical kin, who destroy the God debates with misinformation and dogma to rival that of any religion. I don’t debate in them anymore because there are so few mature debaters.
Heh.
Dude, we’re all dying. Comes with the territory. You just have to enjoy the time you spend here, rather than bitching and moaning about how little of it you get.
Not “part of this is subjective,” it’s completely subjective.
Personally, the two things I find most done-to-death about the Board are (1) the continuall bitching and moaning about any moderating decision, no matter how small; and (2) threads like this that sigh disingenuously over how much better things used to be on the Boards, and how terrible they are now.
It’s like being caught at the Thanksgiving table between an eight-year-old with an acute awareness of any perceived personal injustice (“that’s not fair!”) and an 80-year-old who entertains himself (and only himself) by extolling the way things were in The Good Old Days as opposed to how crappy everything is These Days. Six kinds of tiresome, IOW.
So yeah, the OP might have a grain of truth to it, but it is itself such a great example of why things have gone downhill that it’s hard to give it much credence.
That’s your perogative, of course, but I don’t see it as a choice you had to make. Why on earth anyone gives meanspirited assholes an iota of their time continues to elude me. “Two-faced shit stirrers” are dismissed as such. “Friends” who purport to be “helping” you by telling you when others are being mean to or about you, are told once that you don’t appreciate the notification and then, if they persist, are moved to the column of “two-faced shit stirrers” and ignored.
I don’t have the slightest idea what is or is not being said about me in other fora, or even in other rooms. Without any basis to respect the opinions offered or the people offering them, why would I care? But even if I could not claim blissful ignorance – even if I knew or thought that somewhere, someone was talking smack about me – I sure as hell wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of living my life differently because of it.
The “other board”…? What other board? Fight my ignorance here.
Maybe when we get a change of administrations next year, we’ll get some newer debates. I know I’ve gotten a bit tired of having the same stupid arguments with the same people. I’ve been a lot busier these days and don’t come here as often as I used to, but I find myself spending more of what time I do have in GQ/CS than in GD. Take that for what it’s worth.
Still, there are some really wonderful people who post here, so it’s not like I’m thinking about letting my subscription laps next year.
I would also note that the Alexa graph is relative–that is, it’s not counting our total pageviews but our percentage of pageviews relative to the total globally. Since I can’t find any information on how the latter number is changing, the Alexa graph really doesn’t indicate anything about our total membership or pageviews, only that we’re a smaller portion of the total internet. You’d have to correlate total pageviews with our percentage to get a meaningful number.
And given how shallow the drop rate is compared to what I guesstimate the rate of increase of total global pageviews to be, I imagine we’re gaining absolute pageviews and losing relative ones.
:dubious: Is there anything on this wide earth that doesn’t have an anti website somewhere down the pipes? Will I stop driving, caring for my kids, cooking, listening to music or watching reality TV just because there are websites out there that scorn what I like?
I am not sure what “dealing with the bullshit over there” entails, but I don’t think they were under any form of compulsion to go over there and read whatever it is that the guys at the shorter bus have to say. Not only that, but the taboo about even mentioning that place over here would make it easy enough to ignore.
As for you no longer posting personal details here because of them, well, I guess you can go there and thank them for it anytime. The fact is that some people just have poor habits of privacy safekeeping and it takes them hard knocks with reality to learn the ways. I don’t hide my emergency key inside a cute wooden box in the shape of a key right next to my door. The online world is not that different.
I have my thoughts about the OP in general, but on the interest of unTLDRness, I will save them for later.
It’s the brand name they use; the dictionary definition doesn’t mean much any more.
I sure haven’t met the reasonable type here.
You got that right, pard.
Probably has something to do with Alex Jones. 