I think this is the best board around too. Doesn’t mean there is no room for improvement though. To me, the easy fix towards satisfying the pro and anti crowd is simple: Leave it up to the thread starter if they want to allow pictures in their thread. Just like the poll function.
And just like the poll function, there could be an indicator in the thread title letting readers know, this thread has pictures. So those who don’t like pictures can scroll on pass the thread with out having their eyes offended.
And even before that, I never really saw a lot of those words anyways – at least not the dreaded c-word, which for some reason, seemed to spark the whole thing.
I do like this place. I like the people here. I do not, however, like some of the snobbery here. It’s one thing to say, “hey, I like this board better than anywhere else” without saying, “WE’RE better than anywhere else. WE’RE special”. The comments about “attracting the wrong crowd”, as we’ve had in the past. I can disagree with the way some of the things are done here and still like to post here.
And yes, I think it would be kinda cool to have avatars. So? Doesn’t mean I’m going to stomp off if they don’t have them. I think the reasons for not doing so are stupid, but hey, whatever. (And anyways, this isn’t about avatars, it’s about posting pictures – completely different subjects)
Really, this is another bullshit argument. Avatars and pics are part of almost every other board out there. It’s the standard. Adding them here isn’t going to bring in an influx of stupids.
Really, if you prefer a board without pictures, OK. I’m not going to tell you what your preferences are. But pictures and even avatars are in aid in communication. The knee jerk reaction against them is almost fetishistic.
I have Tapatalk, so have no dog in this fight if I cared in the first place, but it’s the attitude behind statements like this that will eventually leave us with nothing but an echo chamber. Not that we have to have pictures (or avatars), but that if people want some improvements that they could easily have and are denied them for no real reason, our growth here will continue to decline. And I don’t have numbers to point to where we are versus five years ago, but as a daily user, I know that when I log back in each time, there’s so much less new posts than there used to be.
So to me, the issue appears to be progress. Our VBulletin already runs considerably behind others. We offer no tangible rewards for paying members, as you can get ad blockers for free and I’ve never seen anyone express any excitement over the increase of the amount of PMs you can send or receive. Utilizing Tapatalk, they opt out of a lot of the features. You can’t customize your experience here much… no changing colors that only you can see, no avatars, inline images, titles without extra payment and lately, the boards have been wonky to boot. If I recall correctly, even for members there are limitations as they no longer offer gift memberships or, in some cases, easy ways to pay. Hasn’t there been long standing problems surrounding some non-Americans being able to use their credit cards / PayPal?
Anyway, message boards in general are on the decline in favor of more social media that provides lots of options or news aggregators that allow comments, like the enormous Reddit. Many are corporately owned, plenty still have unpaid moderators and lots have a high level of discourse depending on where you’re at. I’ve just begun hanging out at Reddit some, and although the Dope will always be my home, there’s some really intelligent and witty folks there. Sure, learning your way around will take a bit of getting used to, but it’s not the great unwashed wasteland that some try to present it as during threads like this.
I say all this as a paying member, who absolutely loves this place, the people here and typically the good moderation. However, there’s nothing wrong with occasionally changing with the times because you’ve listened to new or potential customers you’d like to retain. Sadly, we are see the effects of ignoring that when, a lot of times, there’s the same handful of people arguing the same topics repeatedly in GD or Elections. We need new blood for the board to even hold the long-term interests of us old timers.
And as a perk, not treating the Internet like it’s still shiny and new and everyone acts like we’ve just been let loose with the folks out of town, would be a plus. As the Internet ages, so does the behaviors associated with it.
Agreed. And, though no one asked, I don’t want to see anyone’s stupid avatar, either. Nor do i want to see the avatar that you think is oh, so clever. Because it’s not.
I realize that I can probably turn off avatars in my prefs, but I felt like being snarky this evening.
I don’t want to come off as one of those “oh, back in the day!” types, but this place has gone down in hill some ways. Many posters left after the pay-to-post. Or over the sketchy ads. I don’t even feel right reccomending this place to people anymore, because I don’t know if they have adblockers or not.
That was actually the suggestion – turning off avatars and pictures by default, and if you wanted to see them, you had to turn on that feature.
As for trolls, there have always been trolls around. Their methods may change (I haven’t see people spamming place with goatsec type stuff in ages), but they’ll still be around. Whatever. Arguing that we’re going to be flooded with it because of something that happened 15 years ago is absurd.
I trimmed your post, but am responding to more or less the whole thing.
I think you’re conflating a few things that are worth separating out. The risk of becoming an echo chamber is real, but is a separate issue from allowing pictures/avatars/animated gifs/whatever. We should certainly strive to make sure that a variety of viewpoints are welcome here, and that vigorous debate thrives. But that debate can exist within the context of our culture: text-based, logic-and-fact focused.
Is that furthered by enabling pictures? Only if you think either that 1) pictures/etc attract a different demographic whose views are materially different from those represented here or 2) a) enabling pictures/etc simply allow us to attract a higher volume of uses, 2) b) a higher volume of users will reflected greater variety of viewpoints, and 2) c) it won’t have other negative repercussions on the board culture. I flat out don’t believe argument 1, and I think for argument 2, (c) is where it falls apart. Again, I value the text basis of conversation here, and have no interest in seeing that diluted.
I don’t use tapatalk, because I think it is a POS, so I’m not really familiar with the general experience you describe there. But I do agree that the lack of value for becoming a member is odd. I obviously don’t see much value in it, and it’s what? $15 / year or something? But I don’t really see what this has to do with enabling avatars or pictures. Sure we could add value to membership without those things, right?
Reddit is okay. It’s not great, but it’s not a cesspool either (at least not taken as a whole.) But the thing is, we already have a Reddit. There’s no need for SDMB to try to be more like Reddit. We already have one of those. The marginal value of having another is low. I want SDMB to be its own thing. It’s okay to not be like other message boards, because having a unique value proposition, even if it only appeals to a niche set of users, is valuable in and of itself.
You’re right that the heyday of message boards is past, and some of the decline we’ve seen in message rates is because of that. So the question is do we accept that, and find our niche, and keep the community we have accepting that it will probably always be smaller than it once was (and maybe stop reflexively banning so many members)? Or should we chase some other message board’s identity? Maybe that’ll buy us a few more members and a few more posts, but I don’t think it’d be worth it.
I think my point must have wandered too much. I really see this issue not so much necessarily of all the new members we can attract (although that would be a bonus), but of all the ones we’re continually losing. There’s been many a bright, articulate poster who no longer comes here and, unless they announce their departure, we really have only guesses as to why.
Now, I understand that correlation does not always mean causation, but the increase in popularity of other forms of discourse means something. Out of some of the people that I’ve talked to who have left, it’s been over various things… board moderation, life offline, lack of time and the preponderance of other social medium avenues that allow you to express yourself in a multitude of ways. And no, I don’t want us to become Reddit, but I don’t think we’d ever be in danger of that regardless. I just feel it’s doing everyone a disservice to see our numbers and participation keep dwindling, and yet still discount new folks and the possible amenities that they may see as beneficial. We can still keep our own unique identity without becoming a slave to things that happened fifteen years ago or a relic of a bygone age where we lament our readership and grouse about kids these days.
But, perhaps that’s just a small handful of us. I never expect any discussion of things like this to move beyond anything but idle chit chat.
Here’s a point I don’t think anyone’s brought up yet in this thread: the SDMB has a fairly strict policy against copyright violation. If people were allowed to post pictures here, chances are pretty high that some people would post copyrighted images, probably without really thinking about it. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that, if we took copyright violations as seriously for images as we do for things like song lyrics, the mods would have their hands full moderating, not just for spam and NSFW, but for copyrighted images.
This is a common if understandable misconception. If big boards don’t have a problem, it’s because they have 100,000+ anti-troll moderators on their payroll. The work is grueling. Image policing is the worst part of the job.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think it would be as bad here. But it would not be a non-problem.
A decent chunk of them are probably banned. But there’s always going to be attrition; I have no reason to believe our attrition rate is any worse than what other online communities would see. Though I’d be willing to hear any data if it exists.
I use a Chrome extension called Imagus. It’s better than having threads filled with all sorts of pics, imo. I don’t want to see every pic everyone posts, necessarily. Too much clutter. With Imagus and extensions like it, you just mouse over the pic link and the pic appears. No clicking or leaving the page. It’s become a "must have’ extension for me.
I must be turning psychic, because I’m having a vision – much heart-felt debate between both pro- and anti-(such as myself) picture posters will go on for several pages, with the end result being a retention of the status quo.
