SDMB shout-out in NYT op-ed?

About This Message Board
1

Ross Douthat, Instagram Is Adult Entertainment (New York Times, 9/28/21):

A key problem with social media, from this perspective, isn’t just its online-ness but its scale. As Chris Hayes puts it in a recent essay for The New Yorker, the contemporary internet universalizes “the psychological experience of fame” and takes “all of the mechanisms for human relations and puts them to work” seeking more of it. But that happens in a much more profound way on a network like Instagram, with all its teeming millions of users, than it would in a message board or chat room for some specific niche identity or interest.

Granted, it’s a common enough phrase, but you never know…

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I very much doubt it,. It’s a very common phrase.

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Eh. Wake me when they mention 1920s-style death rays, masturbating like a motherfuck, or the number of K’s of G that come in a F P D.

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According to [Google ngrams], going back to 1900, looks like Ed’s use of teeming millions sent the use of the term off a cliff. Not many chances of shout-outs there.

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Once again, nothing from this message board or the Cecil columns has gained traction outside of here.

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“Teeming Millions” goes back in literature at least as far back as the 19th century, with the publication of

The Teeming Millions of the East: Being a Popular Account of the Inhabitants of Asia : the History of Existing and Extinct Nations, Their Ethnology, Manners, and Customs

in 1889 by George Thomas Bettany.

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For a true SDMB shout-out, check out this CBS News article. We are mentioned in it at one point.

It’s the line “there are whole message boards devoted to them” - even though we, uh, aren’t that.

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Hayes Brown, MSNBC contributor, was a Doper back in the early 2000s. Refused to tell me his screen name, lol.

I link to my SDMB stuff all the time on Twitter and will get the occasional ‘oh, is the sdmb still around?’ or ‘I used to visit there!’ There have been a couple of other ‘blue check marks’* on Twitter who have also been Dopers, but the one I definitely remember is Hayes.

*Verified accounts

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Did “Gaudere’s Law” originate here? I could swear I have seen it mentioned a few times outside of these boards.

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At least one citation to that effect:

From this thread:

Although the internal thread ref (Threadception!) seems to go noplace.

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For those who don’t want to click through, the link goes to this thread:

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Yeah, that one citation is from the blog of a long time Doper.

The concept of Gaudere’s Law is also known as Muphrey’s Law and the latter goes back to at least 1992 on the Usenet.

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Anyone else remembers that for a while people thought “asshat” originated here and would start threads like this when they saw it elsewhere? I think it was “asshat”, but it might have been something else.

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  • Dracula, Bram Stoker (1897)
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Sweeeeet… Stoker was a Doper!

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This thread seems especially odd to me, given that the article is quite specifically clear about what online platform they’re referring to with “teeming millions”: “…Instagram, with all its teeming millions of users”. I hardly think that Douthat was referring just to those members of Instagram who happen to be Dopers.

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And the Dracula character sounds a lot like Cecil Adams.

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My “Alternate Ending to Big” thread has been cited elsewhere, but I forget where now. I have one of the older discussions findable on that particular Mandela Effect.

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Who in turn sounds a lot like The Count on Sesame Street.