On a broader note, we’ve had repeated polls done in IMHO and elsewhere that show that this board is 70-90% liberal. Yet, every now and then, we have posters claiming that “This message board’s culture is misogynistic and isn’t sufficiently accommodating to women/LGBT/insert category, therefore I want to leave, or that’s why others are leaving.”
If a place that’s 70-90% liberal isn’t good enough to cut it, what is? Democratic Underground?
(Not that everyone who is a woman or LGBT is automatically liberal, but you get my point; it’s already almost as good as a message board could get for such causes, without becoming an echo chamber.)
JohnT, I’m surprised at how tone-deaf your OP and follow-up posts seem to be. They’re completely at odds with the whole culture of the SDMB as a place that exists to “fight ignorance” and allow the free exchange of ideas. “Ban this man! (because he’s costing some parent company some minuscule amount of revenue)” was never going to go over well with the mods or most of the posters here. Was that not obvious to you from the outset?
“Liberal” is neither necessary nor sufficient to avoid bigotry and misogyny. Hollywood is one of the worst offenders of enabling rape and sexual assault, in terms of societal institutions, and it’s very liberal, politically. Many church organizations are just as bad on this issue, and they are generally politically conservative. It’s about broader culture, not liberal vs conservative.
The people who decide to keep this place open do exactly as I did. They very likely have zero connection to this place. And they are going to run the numbers and make a decision.
This is America. It’s capitalistic. People are reduced to revenue figures. That’s how all this works.
And if you think that analysis is going to include a detailed poster-by-poster NPV calculation of which ones are costing revenue and which ones are generating revenue, I doubt you’ve spent much time talking to accountants. It’s going to be “oh, the SDMB website? Yeah, that made / cost us $X last year” “ok, keep / can it”.
None of the people with the authority to decide the fate of the SDMB have the time to worry about whether JohnT renewed his charter membership or not or whether HurricaneDitka irritated 1 or 3 or 10 posters.
Assuming they do, I don’t have much respect for that either. I mean, I have no objection to recouping costs if possible and if they make a small profit bully for them. But nobody is going to make much, if any net profit off a dying a social media venture like a public message board. If that’s the goal this place is doomed. I mean it’s likely doomed to fall to the toll of gerontology anyway, but even quicker.
About the only minuscule value it might ever generate is from some random, ephemeral notoriety attaching to a brand. And in that case, sad to say controversial posters are probably worth more than plodding, boring ones like myself.
shrug Not in my little pocket universe.
But I’ll grant you that is neither a very big, nor particularly profitable universe.
It’s mildly interesting to note that iiandyiii is in run-away first place there, followed by JohnT in a distant second, but beyond that, nobody that matters, cares. The mods have said that they don’t take Pittings into account when making moderator decisions, I don’t care, it doesn’t matter to the people who will decide whether the lights stay on or not, etc.
According to the cited thread, this should be 8,307 members.
That’s just how things work when providing a public forum, digital or physical. If I go to my local debate club as a non-paying participant, and antagonize those participants who support the club financially (but don’t run the events), then it’s the same thing. If they try to assault me, they go to jail, and I might even get paid compensation. If I’m staying within all the rules, if I’m arguing in good faith, but take incredibly controversial positions on the subjects at hand that tend to rile people up, then the operators of that forum face the same exact predicament.
Now, they can enact rules to make the forum into a safe space - they can ban me specifically on general grounds, and they can ban controversial viewpoints. That’s within their prerogative, but it may contradict the debate club’s mission statement.
They can come to me and ask me to at least make a contribution if I’m going to use the forum so often. Although I don’t consider myself a troublemaker, this thread reminded me to subscribe.
Past that, there really isn’t a clear path forward. It’s going to come down to specific circumstances that don’t hold across all businesses of this type.
It’s not a business model, nor should there be one in my opinion. Public forums serve a public purpose, not a business interest. This isn’t a tech support forum or a feedback hub for some widget. It’s not even a forum for discussing the Sun-Times Reader. The stated mission of the Straight Dope, including its message board, is to fight ignorance in general.
If we can lessen or offset the cost of serving that purpose then that is great. As it stands the cost is hidden to members of the board such as you or I, and even to moderators apparently. Normally donation-based services are organized so that their finances are transparent, that way donors can see for themselves when a donation is needed and are assured that their funds are not misspent. NPR is like, the golden standard here.
But undermining fair application of rules to serve that purpose is not something I support. I would probably leave if preferential treatment was given to posters who maximized profitability. Whether or not the absence of myself and others that might agree with me undercuts the very purpose of this board, I leave for you to decide.
I copied the names from the link into Excel and found there was 175 posters. (I’m not one). I looked it over quickly and subtracted 25 from the number to give a good estimate.
It would be junior modding and there’s a rule against that.
Personally I didn’t see it. Not all of us spend all our waking time monitoring every thread. Theoretically we have moderators for that.
Yet a mod has already weighed in with the opinion that they don’t really give a shit, so what’s the point of even trying.
Once again thank you for contributing the typical conservative whataboutism response of “who cares about someone inciting terroristic threats in this context, I happened to see less outrage in some other context.” Rest easy knowing your dishonest and intellectually lazy viewpoint is shared and probably endorsed by staff.
I’m not asking the executives to do a poster by poster calculation. That’s not what they do and had you ever been an executive you would know this. I’m asking the moderators to do this.
This is a business. Period. I’m surprised you don’t understand this. You perform actions which are, and have been for years, disruptive to the financial viability of the SDMB. And this thread is meant to make this case.
I cannot imagine any other business which allows non-payer users of resources equal voice to those who pay. But that’s what’s happened here, and the membership levels indicate that even after the 2011-2013 collapse, this decline is still continuing. And part of that… but not wholly… is because the moderators don’t use financial considerations to determine who belongs.
Let’s imagine the case of Starving Artist. Imagine if the mods could simply tell him “hey, guy, 12 people over the last year PM’d us and said they were leaving/not renewing. This represents lost value of $1,045.53. In short, we can no longer afford your presence here.”
What a difference that would’ve made! See how easy the SA decision would’ve been if the mods would’ve monetized the argument and presented the financial case that he was hurting the Board? “You’re losing us money. Bye Felicia.”
Instead we were subject to more than a decade of his hatred, his misogyny, while the mods dithered, as member after member said “I’ve had enough”.
This pattern is no longer unsustainable, imho, given the Active Users metrics and their decade+ decline. Hence this thread.
Oh you guys are victims of extortion now? My god this is hilarious. It’s just jaw-dropping how people who decry the politics of victimhood are the first in line to deploy it when it’s convenient. No wonder you hate people who play the victim, they’re your direct competitors for attention and sympathy.
