I shot an elephant in my pajamas one morning…
Must have been a small elephant to fit in your pajamas. Or very large pajamas.
The real elephant in the room: the size of blondebear’s pajamas.
“Do theses PJs make my ass look fat?”
“Your ass is fine. Your elephant looks chunky.”
But what is Reddit if not a large general purpose message board? And that remains highly popular. Though I don’t believe that fact contains any useful wisdom for revitalizing these boards, since Reddit’s popularity owes a lot to its features, libertarian governance, and critical mass.
Yeah, but look at the size of the trunk he’s swingin’ 
I have averaged about 138 posts per month since I’ve been here. I’m not as prolific as some and I also used to post a lot more but work, other interests and health have conspired against me, as I am sure it does for many others. A lot of popular posters have been banned since I’ve been on here, and then there’s the phenomenon of 1999ers having 1000 or less posts that pop out of nowhere to post a rare comment (which I always thought was weird, and is apparently a source of pride to some of them).
I don’t know what it means either, but I don’t feel like the quality of material has lessened since I’ve been around.
Just my 2 cents…
I have 684 posts and Friday (6/9) will be the 17th anniversary of my join date. Needless to say, I mostly lurk. There are still prolific posters on the board worth reading, though their numbers are fewer. That said, I’m sorry that some of the (IMHO) best and brightest over the years have crossed one line too many and now find themselves banned. Their - and our - loss.
Not to hijack my own thread but…
For those long time posters who have low post counts, it looks like many have taken long hiatuses from posting, frequently 10 years or more.
What are some of the reasons?
In my line of work, when we notice a frequent flyer has disappeared, or suddenly reappeared after years away, it is usually related to a long stretch in jail. 
If I were running a prison system I would encourage my little felons to spend all day on suitable internet forums. Keeps them quiet at little to no cost.
Suitable being whitelisted beforehand.
Facebook. Pfftt! Who the fuck reads books anymore?
I tend to agree. You are in fact the perfect example however of what I’m talking about. The logic that follows is…who joins a message board and never posts? I mean, not never, but so infrequently as to make denizens such as myself wonder why. Why bother?
I highly doubt our lurking longtime members are lurking because of jail. It’s because they choose to. Which is their right and prerogative, but like you, I cannot help but wonder WHY?
Why are there some long-term users that don’t post often? Because life is difficult.
For instance, I know that you have liver problems. I like you. I don’t know what to say to you------
So a totally unrelated topic is posted. And I see you post to it----We haven’t been properly introduced. There’s been no formal “handshake”. We’re neither anonymous nor friends. We are some weird hybrid.
In this particular instance, you are saying, “why don’t you post more?” And I’m thinking I never told you sorry about your health issues----It just seems weird. We are going to have an intimate exchange of ideas, but we aren’t friends or anonymous.
----and I’m thinking, I was just diagnosed with “DISH” (Diffuse, Idiopathic, Skeletal, Hyperostosis)-----it’s really very painful----it’s not deadly----and how does that compare with liver issues?
So I think, “Let’s just stay on topic.”-----How? I can’t un-know the sort of intimate things that you have shared. It’s easier to be quiet.
It’s still interesting to read SDMB, but I agree with the OP that there does reach a critical mass point where if the membership falls below a certain number, I’ll think, “Why bother?”
Occasionally, a post will fit my Venn Diagram so perfectly that I’ll post a response—Does that help you understand why a long-term member might have a low post count?
I tend to think the mods have been too quick to ban long-time members who have made errors. How does one balance a poster’s contributions against their indiscretions? And then I think, “Moderating a message board must be difficult.”
I’m a low-post '99er. I read 5-6 forums here every day. I used to post more earlier on, because I was the only/one of very few with a law enforcement background, or a Muslim, or a quasi-expert in some other areas.
But now there are more of all those, and by the time I get to a thread I find that I rarely have much to add. OR, in some cases, what I do have to add will potentially cause me some emotional turmoil from responses, so I refrain.
One of the benefits to signing up is that it will track which posts you’ve read making navigation a bit easier. I would lurk on boards for that benefit.
It’s more than 100 certainly, but I have no idea how many there are.
Is the decline genuine or did they purge a bunch of inactive accounts and socks? Or both?
I’ve been here and active for 17 years. I’d hate to see it ago.
I figure we would re-gather/rebuild over on Giraffe boards or meet up on Facebook and find a place to go.
I’ve been here for just about 16 years, and i definitely post less than i used to. In my 16 years, my overall post count is just over 24,000, which means an average of about 1500 posts per year, or about 125 per month, or four per day. But a disproportionate amount of that was in my first eight or ten years. The past few years have seen a marked decline, including almost a full year away from the boards. My last 500 posts took 231 days, or about 2 posts per day, and my last 100 posts have come over the last 51 days, at almost exactly two posts per day.
My posting habits have also changed. I now tend to post a higher percentage of my posts in threads on baseball or TV, or in threads where i make relatively short observations about the topic. In my earlier years here, i spent much more time having sustained debates in places like GD and the Pit, but those have lost a lot of their attraction for me. I still find myself occasionally wading hip-deep into a big debate over politics or history or whatever, but it happens far less than it used to.
Part of this is because the big debates have, in considerable measure, become so predictable. I’ve been around long enough that i have a pretty good sense of who is going to argue what, and the sheer variety of contributors seems to be a lot smaller than it was a decade ago. Also, as you note, a lot of people have been banned, or have left, and many of them were people who, in my opinion, made this place considerably more interesting, even if they sometimes broke the rules or acted like jackasses.
I think that the pay-to-post experiment was a big mistake. The board lost quite a lot of good members, and even when free posting returned many of those people didn’t come back, and we never really returned to the participation level that we had before that. Sure, new people have joined, and many have been excellent contributors, but subjectively it just doesn’t feel to me that this place has the critical mass of people that it had when i first joined.
For me, there was also a fairly long period where the moderation of this place was, quite frankly, fucking awful. There were some really crappy moderators, and they were also, at times, tasked with enforcing some really stupid rules. It didn’t help that some of them were so inconsistent and arbitrary in their enforcement of those rules. Perhaps the worst part was that it often seemed that almost every criticism of the moderation was met, essentially, with an accusation of rabble-rousing and pot-stirring, rather than recognizing that people who had invested lots of time and effort in contributing to this place might have a genuine interest in its operation. Moderation problems were also treated differently than posting problems, in terms of consistency. Posters who screwed up or broke the rules had their cumulative history on the boards used as a justification for suspensions or bans, but moderators who fucked up were judged on each case de novo, without any penalty for patterns of crappy decisions or biased moderation.
I understand that my experience is not the same as everyone else’s, and that there are probably plenty of people who would take issue with some of my claims. I’m just offering this as my take, and as an explanation for why i choose to post much less frequently than i did in the early years of my membership.
Having read this is very helpful and as you note…a bit strange. I mean, I knew I put myself out there to a degree with what I’ve shared about myself personally, but reading you post about it here, knowing that you didn’t participate in any of the threads in question yet read them…you’re right on that score.
I guess I tend to fall under the illusion (or just forget about lurkers altogether) that if someone reads it, they will have replied as well. I guess it just comes down to an emotional and time investment, or feeling, as you say, incongruous to the matter at hand.
This pretty much mirrors my experience as well, especially the bolded. And the “elephant in the room” WRT the parts of this exchange about moderation and banning to me is Diogenes The Cynic, whom was in every respect the exact opposite of a lurker. That guy was, I think, the most prolific poster that I’ve ever seen on here, before or since. LOL, I used to wonder if he ever did anything else his post count was so high. I never agreed with his banning, even if he was insufferable on so many things…but he was interesting.
We’ve had several threads over the years asking lurkers to de-cloak and explain their lurkitude.
The consensus doesn’t seem to vary much from my personal motives. I enjoy the humor, wit, knowledge and diversity of the discussions, but by the time I read to the end of a thread to make sure someone hasn’t already posted my thoughts- they usually have.
Why register? So I can track threads and do searches, find other posts by X, etc.
pantheon… 2002, ~.08 posts/day last time I looked.
I have been posting more since I retired; I used to mostly just read what other people said. I’m still only on here for a couple of hours per night, making maybe one or two posts in that time. I used to think that no one would care what I thought, but these days I don’t care whether they care or not.