Most boards have faded away. This one seems about the same place it was say 5-8 years ago. It may be less active in terms of the number of posts but the quality of many replies seems better to me. A whole lot less of the one-line snarks and constant “cite?” we used to have even in IMHO and MPSIMS. I’m guessing we’re pretty stable where we are ------- until the robot overlords decide to shut everything down. 
I kind of disagree, though. I’m also mostly on reddit these days, but only because of my special interests - fighting games and computer game news/discussion. Reddit has absolutely killed message boards of these websites, and that’s mainly a mass of users issue.
For general discussion, though, the threaded mode that reddit uses is absolutely not conducive to discussion. Unless you’re one of the top level comments, everything else gets buried. The same points get made repeatedly in different threads. This encourages poor comments, nothing in depth, focusing on speed and emotional reaction, rather than well researched and written posts. I think it’s no surprise that most reddit comments tend to be no more than 400 characters long Reddit - Dive into anything
The problem is, reddit is so big that a flat mode like what the SDMB uses wouldn’t work.
For what its worth, I miss the heyday of the SDMB, where I had new replies every time I refreshed - I’m in a different timezone from everyone else, so activity has dropped waaaaay off for me. I still drop in, though.
Oh, I don’t doubt that reddit it popular. But as I mentioned, it skews HEAVILY young white male.
The numbers I looked up a few weeks back were:
80% male
70% white
80% below age 35
So there’s a real issue there with diversity. I looked it up because my younger brother - he’s just been awakened to politics and socialism - is constantly sending me links from there to prove that ‘everyone’ is talking about something and he agrees with it. But he is, obviously, a white male age 32 (he’s 20 years younger than me and a good guy) and therefore there’s a strong chance that he’s seeing things being linked to by people just like him so that of course he agrees with them.
Now, there’s an argument that the majority of people wasting time on the Internet as a whole are young white males but I think areas like Jezebel and Buzzfeed might undercut that.
Yeah but this place clearly lacks just as much diversity, if not more so (SDMB only tends older really).
I don’t like the format of Reddit, it’s way less intimate. Posting here is like talking with your compatriots in the whiskey/cigar smoking room of your ol’ gentleman’s club even if you disagree most of the time. Reddit it like paying some hooker to listen to you drone on and on, and then you’ve misplaced that last gram of coke, and snatched the money back and run out the door waving a gun.
The thing is, Reddit is not a singular community, but a collection of communities. Each subreddit is essentially its own forum. Where Reddit beats out classic forums is just how easy it is to create your own, combined with the easy discoverability and crossover appeal (the latter being a problem with proboards).
Maybe Reddit as a whole still leans heavily white male, but individual subs vary a lot. I actually encounter more diversity there than I do here. In particular, I encounter many more trans people. Maybe it’s due to my taste in media, which is nearly always LGBT friendly. Or just that I specifically avoid subs where any bigotry is common, unsubbing if I notice such, after reporting and blocking the people who participate in it.
I actually wouldn’t be surprised if those figures are out of date. But, even if they aren’t, they don’t match my individual experience of using Reddit.
I decided to do the simplest examination I could, and just typed “Reddit demographics 2018” into Google. The top article, dated in March 2019, is this one by techjunkie. A brief summary:
[ul]
[li] 67-69% male, vs. 49% male for the entire US[/li][li] 64% between ages 18 and 29, 29% between 30 and 50, 8% older (vs. 22%, 34%, 44%, respectively)[/li][li] 58.4% from the US, UK 7.4%, Canada 6.3%, Australia 3.1%, and Germany 2.1%.[/li][/ul]
While not the same numbers, these fit the same skew. However, it specifically says that the ethnic split is pretty similar to the US population:
Once again using the Pew Research poll from 2016, we can determine that, unlike age and gender, Reddit’s audience actually follows the trends of the US population fairly closely. In the United States, white non-Hispanic adults made up 65 percent of the population, with black non-Hispanic making up 12 percent, Hispanic making up 15 percent, and other non-Hispanic making up 8 percent. From the Pew Research poll, we can see Reddit’s user base is primarily white non-Hispanic, coming in at 70 percent of Reddit’s users in the United States. Black non-Hispanic users are at 7 percent of Reddit’s base in the US, Hispanic users at 12 percent, and other non-Hispanic at 11 percent total.
So, while it may skew US younger male, it basically matches the diversity of the US population. For such a large website, I think that’s pretty good. And, a ratio of around 2 in 3 male is much better than 4 in 5.
As for skewing younger: that’s exactly what gives it so much growth potential. Younger people are more likely to become new users of the Internet, and to venture out to find new places online.
I wonder how Reddit’s demographics compare to demographics of the WWW as a whole?
Do we have demographic data for the 'dope? I’m fairly sure we skew more older posters, but I really don’t have any idea.
Eh… there are remedies for that, such as sorting by new, or sorting by controversial, etc.
On Reddit, if you say stupid or offensive things, it gets ratio’d to hell and everyone sees the disapproval level. Here, there’s nothing to differentiate between a thoroughly considered post and a fart in the wind, without scrolling through the entire thread for replies that say “this”. The absence of reputational penalty is why this board is getting overrun by shitposters who tell themselves they’re standing up for an invisible majority, and is one reason I spend less time here.
At our local newspaper’s community forums they have a bunch of statistics at the bottom of the pages. One of them is how many users are on right now (347 - mostly cruising the hockey forum because there’s a game on). Another is all-time high. That was recorded on March 30, 2011 at 9:50 a.m. (2,246 users.)
I can’t find any transcendent breaking news that happened at that moment, so I have to guess there were just more people in general back then who cruised general-interest forum websites.
The most ever users online thing is meaningless in the world of search engine spiders getting content. For the low volume Giraffe Boards, the most ever users was over 15,000 last November. There hasn’t been that many users total over the last ten years.
The SDMB has more forum topics than it did in the past, so posts are also spread out in more forums; the game room and thread games are fairly new additions.
The OP and the replies have generally dealt with the SDMB’s decline in traffic “over the years”. That’s certainly true, for all the reasons cited and perhaps others. But the question I’ve had, and have been checking ATMB for the past couple weeks to look for threads about, is whether it has had a noticeable falloff just in the past couple months, a steeper drop than what had been the ongoing attrition. It sure seems like it to me.
Interesting to learn from BigT that Reddit is actually not dominated by young white dudes. I was totally willing to believe it was, given how much my nineteen year old son loves it. He has repeatedly asked me why I don’t bail out on this board and stick to Reddit (where I do post some).
I’ve lurked on Reddit but don’t post there.
Here’s another issue that I just realized in the past few days. I recently cancelled my AdBlocker for reasons I won’t go into here, and the ads, particularly the “Saambaa” one at the top, make this site slower than watching You Tube on dial-up, which I have done so I know whereof I speak. Yes, I’ve posted here, like right now, but they were on threads to which I REEEEEALLY wanted to reply.
after 11pm my time in ca the boards pretty dead ……I don’t think us grandpas stay up late these days
Anecdotally, I’ve had a couple of PMs from posters saying they were keeping away because they feel that misogyny and trolling are not sufficiently regulated.
Funny, I checked in to blame you, too. 
Over the near two decades I’ve been here we’ve lost some remarkable posters. They haven’t been replaced by posters of equal caliber and as a consequence the board has suffered a decline in quality. I visit now out of habit rather than with great expectations.
well when we were asked fir ideas by tuba a while back … some one mentioned the whole pay to post fiasco (which im glad to say I missed ) and said lot of people left and never came back
I don’t know how’d you do it but I mentioned maybe sending a “we miss you e-mail” and explaining the current optional subscription/free w ads board might help ……