I thought about a poll, but i think I’ll leave it at open response.
There’s a couple of reasons this board could close. The first one obvious, someone at whoever owns the Reader discovers we exist and pulls the plug. To be honest, I haven’t even looked for physical copies of the Reader in a long time. Even 5 years ago, you’d still see people reading it on the El in Chicago. It’s got to be on its deathbed.
2 The SDMB just withers away. This has been the fate of many message boards I used to be a member of. Our demographics skew pretty old. And, for various reasons, people stop posting: long time posters get banned or else they move to Reddit or just lose interest. Plus, more sophisticated work software is increasingly blocking the SDMB and so much of the best posts came from work. Sure, you can use your phone, but the SDMB isn’t Twitter, you often need a substantial post to make your point.
So, what say you? My guess is the SDMB lasts until about 2025 or so in the wither away scenario.
Good question. I wish I had a good answer, but I don’t, not even a speculative one. On the one hand, message boards all over have been suffering and dying like the dinosaurs, superseded by more modern platforms and left behind to the dustbin of history. But on the other hand, it doesn’t take much to leave them alone in their suffering; there isn’t much overhead to let the software chug alone on its own. Server memory and bandwidth are close to free these days. Message boards are more likely to die of boredom than from corporate cost-cutting.
But I will point out that the Chicago Reader no longer owns the Straight Dope. The Sun Times Media Corp (or whatever they are called these days) sold off the Reader property, but they did not sell The Dope. They still own it and control its fate. The Reader is now a privately held property, and is soliciting donations from the community. I actually sent a few bucks their way as I would like to see them survive. Chicago and the rest of the nation still need a counterculture, however moribund it may be. And I still see the (alarmingly slim) paper copies in doorways around my Lincoln Park neighborhood.
I stand corrected. At my old office, there were always copies of Red Eye and the Reader in the break room . And, before the blue and red lines got data service in the subway sections, having one of those in my backpack was my default reading.
I don’t think you or anyone else could be blamed for not realizing that The Dope and The Reader are now separated. It certainly wasn’t publicized. I only knew about it because I was on a particular mailing list. But in a way, it could be seen as good news: when the Sun Times sold off The Reader, they went to the extra effort of separating and keeping The Dope. That would seem to imply that they have plans for it. Let’s hope those plans pan out.
Hmmm I think it will be a long downward spiral of lost interest possibly before it comes to an end.
Eventually membership will dwindle down into a small number of the same 100 people who are the only remaining active posters.
I already have a sense of this, more and more it seems likes it’s the same small group of posters that start threads and then reply to them, anyone else also get a sense where there are long periods where it seems like very few interesting threads are started and it’s only the same boring threads and omnibus threads that are updated for months and months?
As the older posters drop off the perch (myself included) and there’s not enough new blood to take over, I’d give it maybe 10 years…with a dwindling response rate between now and then.
How much money does it take to keep a message board like SDMB up and running? Any chance it could be acquired or somehow made independent so that it can exist on its own indefinitely?
That’s funny, while Cecil and I were together this past weekend for the Alabama / A&M game he was surprised to hear that the board was still running. He had thought it would have been killed off with the demise of the print copy of the Dope. I assured him that it was still thriving, although the moderation had taken a weird turn. He wasn’t surprised in the least about that.
We got drunk at the game and took an Uber back to Houston before he had to catch a red-eye out of IAH.
