A metaphor for one of great power and potential justifiable anger, I assure you.
Appreciated–I certainly feel like I could do better at it, too often finding myself getting caught up in snarkoffs with–ooh, I almost started again–let’s say with posters who approach conversation in ways that I neither admire nor want to emulate. I do appreciate your own measured approach, though.
He who would pun would pick a pocket.
What does this mean?
From my perspective, the board has certainly changed, but not in the way you suggest. I think the board has actually gotten a lot less snarkier, overall.
The major difference is that the volume of posts/members is down, and for any given topic, it is now less likely that you will find a knowledgeable and polite person who is interested in having an extended and thoughtful discussion (in GQ) or debate (in GD). The snark and uninformed morons have always been there, and remain so, but the pool of valuable participants is smaller and so the snark is more prominent by comparison.
I blame the ill-fated pay-to-post experiment, I don’t think the board really recovered after that. There used to be a huge pool of lurkers who would read the threads in GQ and GD and only rarely post, when they had something constructive to add. You’d post an esoteric question in GQ and within an hour get a response from an expert in the field who had been a member for 6 years and had 20 posts. When the board went pay-to-post, it seems a huge number of those people left and never bothered to return since.
That means that you Flirt With Death by poking a bear with a stick, or pointing out to Guin that she might have kind of sort of made some silly little insignificant mistake.
That is a better explanation than mine and reflects my experience. What I notice as a difference is that with contentious subjects there used to be different people debating with you on different threads. Now it almost seems like you are being stalked by the same group of people who are aware of your other posts and often refer to them in ad hominem attacks.
I had not realised the number of users had declined enough to make a difference; it sounds like a good explanation for what I am finding!
Also, people are going to get tired of debating the same damn thing over and over. A significant number of threads in GD just cover the same ground that has already been covered a dozen times, with the same people posting the same arguments. It’s bound to get a bit snarky in that case, although I’m still not clear that things really are all that more snarky. I think it’s that you post mainly in those threads that have been beaten to death.
Perhaps we need to introduce the death penalty for certain subjects in GD. 
Actually we have more traffic than before pay to post.
There’s fewer that become members or that hang out for a long time and even less that renew existing subscriptions. We do have more people who come here with one question, get it answered, and then check out. There’s huge numbers of lurkers, too, ratio of involved people to observers used to be much higher. these days there’s lots more opportunities for other time sinks, both online and off. Facebook was not such a big deal in 2004, to name just one.
Is this because of pay to post? I don’t think so. The SDMB has been on its own website since 1999. Pay to post was in operation for four years, roughly June 2004-June 2008. We have not required subscription fees for participation on this board in quite a while now. The Straight Dope is in competition for your time with many other opportunities, including movies and TV shows, items that were not so much on the scene in earlier times. These days people are more likely to Google up and go to sites like Wikipedia (although the SDMB pops up surprisingly high in lists on Google, even now.) When we started Wikipedia didn’t even exist; blogs were rare. The range of information available to people was much more limited.
Things change, people change too. Nothing stays the same. We can hope that we’re still relevant in these times but that’s really up to our users, isn’t it?
Maybe, but the number of posts has been steadily declining for years now:
2010, average posts per day: 3,730
2011, average posts per day: 3,582
2012, average posts per day: 3,339
2013, average posts per day: 3,058
2014, average posts per day: ~2,900 so far
That’s still a decent number, but it’s a disturbing trend. Even if your ad traffic is up, that won’t last forever if new posts dry up.
I just got back from a three-day road trip through the American heartland (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin). As the sights and sounds of real America unfolded around me, I couldn’t help but think of the foreign Dope posters whose exhaustive knowledge of the U.S. apparently comes from reading the Guardian in American airport terminals.
Among the vehicles passed on the highway: a pest control truck festooned with graphics and logos proclaiming the company’s apparent willingness to kill anything you deemed a pest, plus supportive Bible verses.
Then there was the Chicken-of-the-Sea Gratitude Tour van. I could only speculate what was going on here, but it turns out that “at 39 Chicken of the Sea Great American Gratitude Tour stops coast to coast, visitors can meet and take photos with the Chicken of the Sea Mermaid, and receive free recipes, giveaways and commemorative coins.”
Is this a great country or what? I knew I should’ve followed the damn van.
Later, American hospitality was further exemplified by skull and crossbones stickers on the car parked near mine at a lunch stop, one of which was accompanied by this thoughtful advice: “Nothing in this car is worth your life”. (since it was a Toyota Celica, that probably was true).
Finally, I-57 in Illinois greeted us with cheerful signposts advertising a pro-firearms website, spread out in Burma-Shave fashion along the roadway:
Shooting sports
are safe and fun
There’s no need
to fear a gun
Poor Pjen’s head would have exploded. :smack:
Grrrr!
swipes at Cinnamon Imp threw the bars of her cage
Imp!
Quickly, bring incense and chocolate!
You called?
Not really. Just helping someone read a situation correctly. You sound a little … odd. Is it the air here? Maybe it’s the smiley.
Hope I don’t offend. If I do, just ascribe it to my being out of the loop. 
(These smilies do rather suck.)
I stand corrected. It looks like someone else read that better than I did. I’ll read your questions differently in the future.
Thank you. That’s a very kind measure for you to take.
I am genuinely impressed with your ability to turn literally anything into an anti-Obama rant. Give yourself a pat on the back from me.
Personally I feel that a few bad ideas (pay to post, new pit rules …) and genuinely terrible (and frankly inconsistent) moderating has made the more interesting posters leave (or receive ridiculous bans).
Ridiculous bans?
offers a lollipop onna stick back through the bars
Your “threw” was deliberate, I know, I won’t be whooshed again… 