Have you changed your mouse recently?
In my opinion, bad moderation is part of what is crushing this board. From my viewpoint, the General Questions board was the centerpiece of this whole thing, a bright shining gem of not-stupid. There, questions could get asked, brilliant answers would often be provided, and dumb off-topic statements would be quickly warned and squashed. Effective moderation, in other words. In my opinion, GQ is totally jacked up now due to crap moderation involving the following factors:
1: When a factual question is asked, umpteen chuckleheads make jokes out of it before anyone ever attempts to pose a factual answer, and rarely is there any intervention
2: People swarming in to label someone a benighted “tinfoil hatter” without really even considering the question. If it’s just a dumb question, just ignore it, mkay?
3: “IANAD, in fact I’m a COBOL programmer, but I think you’ve irradiated your pituitary gland. I’m sure an endocrinologist will be along shortly to improve my already semi-brilliant wild-ass guess.”
4: “OH NOES IT’S A POST CONTAINING THE WORD POT, QUICK CLOSE IT BEFORE THE BURNING ORGANIC PLANT MATTER KILLS US ALL… oh wait… he actually meant a coffee pot… well, we can’t get too close to teh drugz anyway, I might as well add a pithy comment…”
5: Slow response and outright down-ed-ness
Improve the GQ moderation and I think everything gets better. Yes, I know the “report this post button”, but at this point I have little faith that the mods even care about what the subscribers think. For 15 bucks a month… oh yes I’m going to mention the money word, because I’m paying it… I can get an internet connection that stays up 99.9% of the time, I can get a hundred channels of cable TV that stay up 99.9% of the time, but I can’t get a properly moderated message board that stays available?
:smack:
But you’re only paying $15 a year here - best you can expect, pro-rata is 8.325% uptime.
I don’t think so, at least not for everyone. Your list of what’s wrong helped to crystallise my own thoughts a bit, except that my gripes are somewhat the opposite of yours. It’s the tendency towards junior modding and to quench discussion and speculation, in GQ, that irks me.
Speculation and discussion itself isn’t necessarily a good final answer to the question at hand, but it’s often a good starting point, and it’s also often a good way for people to work their way to absorbing the definitive answer when it does arrive.
There are other ways to get to the factual answer to a GQ than sitting silently waiting for someone to arrive and hand us the complete and definitive answer supported by abundant citation.
I can’t speak to whether or not the board has gone downhill, but if it has, maybe it’s because us n00bs are stoooopid.
If I use my TV standard it is going downhill in the last 12 months.
I find with TV shows that, as soon as I miss an episode or two without caring what I missed, I will soon stop watching entirely.
Lately on the SDMB it is a rare event to look forward to seeing what is happening in a juicy thread.
Welll…I got here [Join Date] and it seems to me that even in the almost 3 years since, there has been a decline in the rate of interesting new threads posted. Since 2006 in fact, a rather precipitous one.
This could just be the hammer/nail effect of always going to New Posts first and seeing the same old friggn threads up near the top for days to a week at a time, but hey, I figure it’s worth a thought, at least.
This is one area where the boards definitely have gotten worse. Up until about July 2003, GD was actually interesting to read even if you didn’t particularly care about the hot political issues of the day. But pretty much as soon as the presidential election started taking off, every other kind of thread just disappeared. Now, GD may as well be restricted to current events.
Curious, are we looking for more GD threads debating the Merits of historical figures like Adams vs. Jefferson? If so, than I agree, this would make GD more interesting. The current event & religious ones all do end up sounding the same with the same general cast of characters parsing each post to tedious death.
I would enjoying more debates on other subjects. Instead we get current events, religion is bad, atheism is bad and drugs are good most of the time.
Jim
History, philosophy, science (at least the evolution/creation debates weren’t politics), and all sorts of other things.
That’s not to say that there weren’t a lot of threads about current events–in fact, the majority probably always have been–but the exceptions weren’t so exceptional back then.
Yes, and he’ll be gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you.
Maybe. But as long as people occasionally post stuff like this OP that makes me smile, tear up a little and just generally feel good, I’m happy to stick around. It’s like *good *glurge.
But even I’m sick of the anti-anti-drug threads, and it looks like we’ve just started another wave of those.
I’ve thought about doing an occasional series on the American presidents, devoting one thread to each president, and kicking each off with a short summary of their career, accomplishments in office, and pros and cons, and then letting people offer and debate their evaluation. I don’t know whether people would find this interesting. There might be limited interest in debating the presidencies of John Tyler or William Howard Taft, but on the other hand it would be an opportunity to learn about some of the more obscure presidents.
An alternative would be to tee up past elections–McKinley versus Bryan, Jackson versus Clay, et cetera–with a short summary of the issues and candidates, and then let people vote.
I think either of these concepts would work better if the Board allowed polling, but they seem unwilling to do so.
While I recognize the snark, to be honest, I think this is a substantial factor in any perceived downslide of the board. Which is kind of ironic, because I absolutely despise that meme as a “critical thinking short-circuiter”. No, 9/11 didn’t change everything – people will still go about their lives, businesses will still succeed or fail, technology will continue to develop, government (mis)management is still with us, etc., etc.
At the same time, one has to acknowledge that 9/11 is a seminal historic event. And, clearly, it has had wide ranging effects – the most prominent being the subsequent actions of the U.S. government (including politics). For the SDMB, that provided so much fodder for GD and the Pit as to overwhelm other topics. Moreover, it’s generally very polarizing (up there with abortion and atheism). The effect is evident, albeit to a lesser degree, in other forums (I can’t speak to CS, as it doesn’t have a great pull for me).
This too shall pass. Even so, there’s nothing else that gives me more bang for the $15 bucks than a subscription to the SDMB.
So, are you saying that Post #15 is worthy of reporting? I’d be glad to start reporting that type of stuff. Not in any vengeful or punitive kind of way, but as a step towards upping our standards a bit.
If you think a post is inappropriate for any reason, report it. I might agree with you.
Whenever I get tired of the Dope I check out the comments on YouTube. then I come scurrying back. I can’t even remember when I originally signed up…
I do find it overwhelming, on any board, to wade through six pages of writing before adding my two cents. Also, this ‘edit post’ option is reeeally making me lazy!
I am new, and might be contributing to the perceived downfall of the SDMB, but something to consider is the evolution of the internet boards, social sites and the like. There are many places to go and be creative, intelligent, funny. Some users of this board are also on facebook, myspace, livejournal and so on. Could it be that the slower pace is due to those sites sapping the time that the regulars spend here as well as some of the other factors mentioned above?
Adding my $0.02 – I’m a new subscriber here, but I’ve popped in on the SDMB occasionally as a lurker over the years whenever there’s been a topic I’ve been interested in. I used to spend a lot of time years ago on Slashdot, Fark, Digg, various computer oriented BBSes, and the like. I’ve pretty much fallen out of regular reading of these sites mainly bcause of the gradual Youtube-ization I’ve seen.
I decided to sign up here because I’ve been really needing good brain food and I haven’t been able to find a place where, as an amateur, I could start a topic about convergent evolution, or is infinity a transcendental number, or the economic merits of creative commons/copyleft based creative works in a capitalistic society, and not get flamed for being a n00b or being told to “go look it up on Wikipedia,” AND get cogent and informative replies from knowledgeable individuals to boot.
There is a much higher S/N ratio on this board than any other generalist “smart people” BBS I’ve been on, and IMHO the SDMB has not jumped-the-shark. I think that there’s just a greater number of people overall on BBSes, mainly because of the penetration of broadband and the “always on” connection, and the subsequent increase in “joe sixpack” types posting their thoughts tends to bring the average down.