They’re not always the worst - some are FAAABULOUS!
Regards,
Shodan
Hey, welcome back** Esprix**! Don’t make yourself so scarce.
That’s something else we didn’t say in 1999.
Nice to see you again.
You were one of the reasons I got to like it around here.
I miss the jokes and banter.
There’s so much negativity and anger in a lot of threads.
I think there’s still plenty of jokes and banter here, you idiot. 
Regardless of the veracity, Charles H. Duell’s alleged comment that “everything that can be invented has been” is pretty analogous to today’s SDMB topics. A once a month perusal will usually suffice nowadays.
Well, the front page states 21,475,053 posts. You have to expect that some of the newness has worn off.
At, say, 100 words each (balancing the character-limit batshit screeds with the “this” posts), that’s over two billion words. Almost as long as A Song of Ice and Fire will be. Nobody has come close to reading it all, so we’re each making assumptions about the tiny fragments we have read. And those may well not be representative of the whole or of other people’s experiences.
reported
There used to be a lot more fun(ish) threads about weekly TV episodes, now it’s just a few with far too draconian rules about “spoilers” just for comparing a show to whatever source material it came from so they’re often not even worth clicking on.
Actually, back in 2000, we did say things like “don’t make yourself so scarce”, or “it’s been a long time”. It’s just that, back then, that meant someone had been gone for a month, instead of a decade.
EDIT: TBG, the Game of Thrones threads were a LOT less fun before those draconian rules.
I used to enjoy following along with the religious debates in GD. I miss reading some of the old members’ thoughts- Liberal, SentientMeat, Polycarp, Diogenes the Cynic…
+1, since I know everyone is clamoring for the function.
But seriously, that is spot on. It was a straight line for me from “Hey, what’s this Straight Dope online column, that Cecil guy knows some cool trivia” to “What is this message board all about?” to “Wait, that’s a damn good question.”
The SDMB is (almost) singlehandedly responsible for me leaving behind fundamentalism. I miss the debates. I don’t know if they were better back in the day or if it’s just rose-colored memory, but I miss them.
Mars Horizon, were you around for the Fundie vs. Board wars? They’d sweep in with multiple posts about God and a dozen supporters for each one. We, and I mean ALL of us, would fire back: from Espirix on the liberal end of the theological scale, me somewhere in the middle and** Czarcasm** on the other end, and everyone else not backing down. It was the most unified the SDMB has ever been, except for the times we all wanted to know, “What does the sale of the Chicago Reader mean to us THIS time?”
I remember those, yes, but I couldn’t tell you when they were. I started reading the boards in mid ‘99 before registering to post in June 2000. I’ll bet a little searching could dig up those old threads. Fun times!
We do seem to have less “pile-ons” across the board and not just in GD. I didn’t realize I miss them until I stopped to think about it. Mine were more the 20-page MMPs but I remember a few smoking threads that went nuts from the very beginning post.
If you ever consider changing your custom title, you could go with “Poster Child for Gaudere’s Law”…
I think the board changed when technology changed. Before Wikipedia and Snopes, this used to be a treasure trove of factoids, trivia, and little-known things that would be discussed in detail. Cecil’s columns were our sermons and etched tablets, but now there’s plenty of debunking sites, and he’s been rendered obsolete.
There used to be more blog-level posts, as insightful as newspaper editorials and as funny as stand-up comedy, like the posts by Master Wang-Ka, Scylla and a few others. I remember one story Opal had about showing her Muslim neighbor what porn was and how she reacted to it. Another (can’t remember poster’s name) found out she had a sister in China, and told a heartwarming tale of finally meeting her. This was before the advent of Facebook, so that’s probably why there’s so few of those magnificent stories these days.
Duuuuude!!!
The biggest change of all was a societal one: “TLDR.”
Most everything today is Short Attention Span Theater and anything longer than a Tweet is too much for a lot of people to handle. So is holding two divergent opinions in one brainpan.
Are we dumber today? Yeah. Not so much the Doper reading this; y’all are the last holdouts, though. Most other folks can’t be bothered.
Just my jaundiced worldview. But you know I’m right. Dammit.
Jenny
your humble TubaDiva
So, not only is it taking longer, we’re losing ground. Well that’s good news???