Welcome to the SDMB! The post you’re responding to is 19 years old and the poster last posted 11 years ago, so they probably won’t be seeing your feedback any time soon.
I know this thread will be closed any minute now, but people should take a quick read through it. That should kill any argument about how the discourse on the Dope used to be better 20 years ago.
Huh, I skimmed through it and thought “I wasn’t even here back then, and I miss those days.” Everyone’s opinions are so mild today. No one is willing to argue or defend hot takes like that rap isn’t music. It’s not healthy to have such a narrow and homogeneous range of opinions as we see now.
I know it was just funny so I posted that comment
I’ll still defend the premise that rap isn’t music (but is nonetheless a legitimate art form).
Or at least some rap. I’m not precisely sure of the defined boundaries of “rap”.
Music can be identifiably reproduced on a piano, or trombone, or other suitable instrument (OK, some music is based on narrower intervals than a piano can play, but there are still instruments that can produce it). Much of rap, however, cannot be identifiably performed with any instrument other than the human voice.
And who takes the blame/credit for that?
Sometimes things change without anyone being explicitly responsible. Certainly there’s some of that here; the social media landscape has changed dramatically in the past 19 years, and that alters the kind of people that show up here. The members are also older than they were back then, and let’s not pretend that people don’t get milder as they age.
But if I had to blame someone, it would be those that drew the boundaries around bannings/suspensions/etc. The goal of course is to keep out those that are a negative to the community. But even if that was completely successful, there are side effects–everyone else either manages to go right up to the line without crossing it, or they are unable to do so reliably and so eventually rack up warnings and get banned, or they decide to bite their tongue on anything remotely controversial and so never come close to crossing the line.
The first one is hard to maintain, while the second kind eventually go away. So that leaves most in the third category: stay far away from the line so as not to even take a chance at a warning.
It’s not even about the content, exactly (although the rules put limits on that, too). It’s just that some opinions carry “heat”, and those are exactly the ones that some people can’t help but to take personally and thus cross our various lines. But it’s also exactly those that are the most interesting.
I found it interesting that even 20 years ago the discussion was dominated by very angry old men yelling at clouds.