Hey, ‘five years ago’ is the new ‘10 years ago’, grandpa.
I basically agree with your first bit but, even if the percentages of good:cliquey are about the same or better, it sure seems to me that the total volume and pace is quite down. Maybe my expectations just went up, lol. It’s hard to say when they refuse to implement any level of the “who’s online” feature.
My interest raises and falls with the tides. I agree that when things are new you tend to look bad with nostalgia no matter which direction the quality has gone. If SDMB was my sole destination on the internet I can easily imagine how quickly I’d bore, but I spread my interest between a couple other boards and that helps. Some related to this one some not.
I’ll agree with What Exit? Take some time off if you’re not enjoying it here. Please don’t take this as a “show yourself the door”. I like yah well enough. But it’s normal to take some time to learn how to be enthusiastic about something again.
I’ll also agree with CarnalK, in it that I sometimes get frustrated by a lot of other features available to me on other boards that are not available here. Although the administration staff always answers queries about that such and such. They have their reasons I guess.
Now I’m off to go brainstorm some orginal topics.
Something has changed about the way this place feels, IMO, but I can’t really put my finger on it or point to any obvious examples.
I’m in a phase where I’ve gone off messageboards in general. Some pretty pointless experiences with others has made the messageboard experience in general less fun than it was. With the SDMB, though, it’s still like coming back to an old friend. I can see it’s changed, yes, but I’ll still visit from time to time. No question about my resubscription as yet.
I think that things are not what they once were, but maybe it is cyclical?
I know this is going to upset people, but I find the “kitty talk” thread titles as a bad sign. Perhaps counter intuitively, it seems that since they started charging, it seems less selective. I also agree that there seems to be much more groupthink than I remember in the past. In general, the place seems more typical of other corners of the web.
I agree, Ogre. The level of wit and intelligence has dropped. However, I also feel the level of intelligence has dropped about 25% for all Americans during that same time period. The SDMB is still a haven for more intelligent discourse, but it’s all relative.
I disagree, I think you (we) are just used to the wit and intelligence, therefore making it seem like it’s dropped off. That goes for Mangetout as well. 
As to the OP; I think it has slowed down a little, the cliquishness has faded away, and people have kind of settled in. I would agree about the rehashed subject matter, but I’d like to add that it seems to me that it’s inevitable on an MB that remembers all, but has a transitory membership. New posters are going to think it’s new, as has already been said.
Lastly, there are two other things that I think bear mentioning:
1.) There seems to me to be a decline in the… you know what? I don’t know how to phrase that without sounding like a snob. Lord knows if we only talked about what I want, it’d all be boring discussions about readily-accessible anime, manga, the “mainstream” videogames, City of Heroes, anything Warcraft, and fanfiction. 
Even so, I feel like the focus on the SDMB used to be about rigourous debate of issues, intimate (personal, not romantic), friendly chat, and research into answering fun questions. Now it’s dull MMP’s, talk about the latest episodes of mainstream television, and rehashing the same highly-charged, polarizing political debates. GQ seems to involve links to wikipedia, snopes, or other on-line resources as often (if not more so) than it does the kind of fun and interesting answers from knowledgeable people in the field that it used to.
2.) One voice among thousands. Which gets more responses, the latest post by a veteran (or highly active) member about their dog being sick, or some poster with <500 posts talking about trying to decide what direction in their life to take? How about CS: Discussion of a specific tv series, book, etc, or another generic thread where everybody lists their favorite/moveing/dramatic whatever without reading the other posters’ responses?
I know that most of my threads only go to 15 or 20 posts at best. I once linked to a short story (about 15 pages when copied into Word) that I really liked, and not one person even posted to say “I don’t read fanfiction.” Granted, the lack of response to my threads could be because I’m a nerd and have no life, but it often feels like people are in too much of a hurry to throw in with groupthink threads that appeal to the SDMB’s demographic, political threads and/or RO threads where everyone asserts their view and gives no quarter to the opposing side, and/or generic “what’s your drive-by?” threads to actually sit-down and discuss things of interest.
Basically, what I’m saying is that I feel like in the old days, before I felt like I was mature enough and sufficiently well-informed to really get involved (basically the last few years or so), people seemed to really make an effort to get to know eachother, and get involved in discussion. Nowadays its sometimes feels like no one has the energy, and the forum has become a wall of noise where people blast out their thing, and that’s it. Just like every other forum, except with better moderation, better writing, and less junk (ascii-image responses, one-word responses, images, giant sig-lines, images in sig-lines, animated images in sig-lines, etc).
I still like the SDMB a lot, and I certainly am not going anywhere, but I readily agree that it doesn’t seem to be as interesting a place as it used to be. I think it has more to do with the age of the board, than anything else though (including pay-to-post).
I agree with the first statement, only I’d characterize it more strongly. In an internet community, 5 years is an eternity.
As to the latter statement, is that a woosh? Haven’t you noticed the dots next to posters names, and how they are sometimes green, and sometimes grey? It tells you if the poster is logged in. Are you talking about something else? I know there’s a lot of MB features that they don’t include for one reason or another (generally perfectly reasonable ones at that), but if I’m reading your post right, this ain’t one of them.
I’m not sure - it isn’t really a decline in wit and intelligence that I’m noticing, it’s… something else, but as I said, I can’t think how best to describe it.
So go do the ones you can do, then.
Sorry. I should know better than to express an opinion in IMHO.
I first registered in 1999 (under my own name, no less!), and it seems to me that right from about 2000 I started seeing threads claiming that the board wasn’t what it used to be. And you know what? Those threads were a lot better back then.
Ogre, I couldn’t agree with you more. I started a very similar thread about a month ago.
Basically, I was convinced that there was more good than bad on this site. And if you want the board to be interesting, you gotta make it that way. If nothing else, take some time off. If you’re already going wks without checking the dope, try going months. Like others have said, take a break.
On another forum I frequent, once the air got really stale as it turned into a club of regulars. Everything was an in-joke. Half the threads were flirting or emo cries. There was hardly any debate on the topics that were the subject of the forum (it was a sports forum).
A couple of members left, a couple came in and all the sudden the place was all fresh and rockin’. Newbs were no longer pushed around, all threads were on topic, the MPSIMS sections withered and it was all about the sport.
This renewal took no action from the administration at all. I am not sure how it happened, but it did. Have faith. It can happen.
What applies to this from that example, I think, is the clubbiness part. There are several personalities here that are too ingrained for newbs to feel confident to jump in. There is also some level of obsession with form that I think is not helping newer ideas come in.
Ok, maybe I didn’t have a lot to offer to this thread. Carry on.
That’s “whoosh” yah little brat! (yes, obviously kidding 
)
CK was referring to the option at some message boards which shows the number and names of everybody logged on at that moment, including unregisted/unlogged “Guests”.
For example, at a glance I can see that that these guys…
…are logged on over at Fathom. And that currently there are “Currently Active Users: 84 (6 members and 78 guests)” The six members being the ones I listed above as well as an extra 78 pair of eyes browsing the forum. If I wanted to I believe I could even break it down into the stats of looking at what each of those people are currently looking at, or which forum they’re surfing.
SDMB administration has chosen to limit what we can observe about who’s looking at what. While I disagree, they’ll happily answer any questions regarding this turned off feature and usually cite privacy as the reason.
Feel free to correct me if got any of this wrong.
Last time they turned on some of those features, the board stopped working quite catastrophically.
Not the “Who is on line” feature. They just choose to leave that off for other reasons dealing with privacy or some such. Same with the member list. It was on briefly when we first went live on this new server and was there on the test board. It is a nice feature, but nothing spectacular. I would like to see the Calendar feature turned on for DopeFests and such, but again, no big deal.
The RSS feed did disabled the board. The search function also hits this version of VBulletin very hard. There are some solutions, but it involved getting us up to a newer version, which I don’t think is being planned for the near future.
Despite cries of doom the 5 minute edit window has worked out well.
The PM system also works well and has caused no problems.
Jim
You can add me to the list of people who think it’s gone somewhat downhill. Not as sharply as I had thought, but definitely in a downward slant.
Still, lots of fun people here - but some of the fun itself is gone.
All right, since I brought it up I went through the effort of digging it up.
Can we both be right? 
I think you’ve put your finger on it, but I’m not sure.
Hey, the election is coming, a new golden age will dawn and true productive political and social discourse will flourish.