Urgh, the pedantry on this board is unbelievable sometimes.
I am not sure about that- warnings? :dubious: But just a simple "this thread has run it’s course’ and locking would be fine.
That’s a horrible idea. Someone might come across the thread a day or a year later and have something to add that isn’t pedantic bickering and puts the conversation back on track.
Closing a thread should really be one of the last things a mod does in almost any situation. Back to the subject of this thread, most of the people reading threads here are finding them by doing google searches. If they open a thread that interests them and it has been closed there’s almost zero chance they will go on to open a new thread on the same topic and discuss it. They will just move on.
Open threads that google searchers can bump and participate in is pretty much the only way the board will continue to get new posters.
Maybe, like shifty property developers who don’t want a run-down old people’s home they are lumbered with and could use the resources otherwise, the owners may prefer for it to be sadly administered and unwelcoming to intruders.
Do you know what would be even better? If posters didn’t attempt to “cite” opinions, editorials, bloggers, and pundits, as if they were facts.
Ok, find me three where that happened. A full page of pedantic bickering by two posters back & forth that turned into productive debate?
It would be far better to restart the debate.
OK, how about a mod note to stop the pedantic bickering, then?
There’s a key difference here.
The property developer has eternal land with a semi-temporary building on top and a temporary useage and tenants inside.
Absent legal restrictions they can change the tenants easily and still derive value from the existing building & land. Or take it a step farther & renovate or scrape the building and reuse the land.
Mistreating tenants is a tactic that’s only useful when the “absent legal restrictions” part is untrue and the developer needs the tenants to “voluntarily” vacate so the developer can extract the value inherent in the assets’ reusability.
OTOH …
SDMB consists of a couple of cloud-hosted virtual machines. Those could be switched off with a mouse-click. No legal restrictions at all. There might be some residual duration on supplier contracts that’d have to be paid off, but that’s it.
And once switched off, there’s nothing of reusable value left behind. Poof; all gone.
So whatever Ed & the ownership are thinking, it ain’t what you suggested.
My theory:
The crappy advertising vendor(s) are chosen by a simple metric: who claims to offer the highest payout per fewest clicks. The mods & IT staff are chosen by another simple metric: who’s willing to work for free.
The whole shebang has the feeling of a business that grew at first, got big for a one-man show though never big absolutely, and is now shrinking towards being a hobby-for-slight-profit (albeit now a corporate-owned hobby-for-slight-profit).
IOW, nobody would bother to create something with this revenue stream & business model today. Waay too much work for waay too little reward.
But since it already exists, the marginal effort to keep it running as-is is comparatively negligible. Just leave it running in slow decline until/unless something abruptly changes to kill it off. In that vein we’re glad they’ve migrated from owned hardware to the cloud. A random physical server dying would be exactly that sort of coup de grace.
How will it die? The ad revenue doesn’t cover the cost of operation for a quarter or two. Or a sellout to an outfit run by MBAs who value owning 3 big winners over a dozen small mom-and-pops.
How will we know when this happens? Click your usual bookmark & get back a 404 or DNS not found error.
The vocabulary word of the day is “fisking.”
Actually cloud-based machines are I have to reveal still run on old-fashioned metal in physical servers.
And I really doubt if they’ve sprung for VPS with the attendant joys of tweaking Apache and nGinx when it really is cheaper just to let the hosts do their thing.
But I’m not suggesting they would gain anything from deletion of the site; quite the contrary. they would lose virtual respect by pulling the plug, as seen when Digg and MySpace did that by losing their minds : far simpler just to spend no more, let the place run down until few are around to attend the obsequies, and those few be pantalooned ancients nattering about their dinner and the Trumpololypse of so long ago.
And in the mean time, rake in what one can from dodgy malware-soaked advertisers met in a dank garbage-infested alley.
This board continues to provide a valuable service for people like me. I am hardly computer illiterate, and I am reasonably internet savvy, but my “Google-fu” is terrible: I am particularly bad at coming up with the correct search terms for the question that I actually want answered. So message boards like this continue to serve a public good because, unlike an internet search site, real people are actually reading what I write, many of whom are smart enough to understand the question I actually want answered, instead of the question I foolishly asked. And, if they don’t understand my question, can often lead me towards being able to articulate my question correctly, instead of just showing me the results for the most frequently-asked question that includes any of the words in the string I typed into the search bar.
Well, yeah. I actually prefer the Internet of around ten years ago. Board forums provide civilised layouts for threads for people to discuss stuff. Social media is obviously valuable to many, but not to all of us.
I don’t begrudge nor sneer at those who like Facebook et al; just that it’s not for all of us, nor the be-all and end-all of the Internet or communication. The Internet is softer now, more corporate, less wild, and with the Fat Slab styles of Flat Style, Material Design and such worthless contrivances ugly enough to make many tune out and leave. And I mistrust views dependent on whether those who read something before me voted it upper or downer…
And in the end, bosses and corporations need viewers ( workers ) more than viewers ( workers ) need them.
My Latin dictionary, admittedly only a paperback, defines humor as “we bury”. Perhaps that’s what you meant.
Well, that doesn’t actually work as well as it might. The board is set up to mark stuff as read after a certain amount of time (a couple hours or so, although it’s not quite that simple). I once asked if it could be changed (I’ve seen other VB-based boards where it works better) and the answer was “no, it never will be”.
I learned something in the last couple days that might be relevant.
Usually I take my Surface along on trips. So in the mornings or evenings or on mid-day breaks I can pull it out, read everything as if I was on a laptop or desktop PC, and comment at will using the full-up keyboard.
This trip I forgot my Surface at home. So I was stuck accessing SDMB using Tapatalk on my phone. When accessing SDMB that way I have zero interest in posting and almost no interest in trawling through the forums for interesting new threads. Instead I read the “subscribed” roster of threads I’ve already posted to and that’s about it. Anything else is too laborious and/or too much trying to drive looking through a soda straw. It’s just unpleasant.
As more and more of everyone uses ever more limited devices to access the internet in general and social media in particualr, I think this is a significant factor in SDMB’s predicament. It’s designed for a large format screen and for full-bore touch-typable keyboards. As and when people can read using something akin to what Google Glass promised to be, and can post via reliable accurate voice recognition we *may *make a comeback.
But when most people are using devices that are 99% consume-only, we’re not going to have the volume of contributors that keep the discussions lively. And when most newbies find us when they’re in a consume-only mode, it’s not likely they’ll come back (or bring pie) when at some later date they’re sitting in front of a real screen and real keyboard.
Comments?
Why not: “Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc.”?
Not just pretty words.
You may be right. I’m not sure that there is anything that can be done about it. The SDMB may just be a victim of changing times and technology.
Something else may be relevant. Many, if not most, posters here have watched the birth and growth of the internet. It used to be a little difficult to find things. Things like answers to concrete questions. That is no longer true. At all.
For example, someone asks the Dope a question about a legal matter. The answer is almost always already available. The person is just not good at looking for the answer. We are no longer necessary.
We do still several things going for us. We are a generally polite, moderated board, that doesn’t accept wrong or lazy answers. All hail the “cite?” post. We also have the thing that brought many to the board in the first place. The witty snarkiness that the original Straight Dope column pioneered.
I have to say I think there’s definitely fewer regulars than there used to be, and everyone’s pretty fixed in their positions to the point where I think the discourse on the boards has gotten a lot less pleasant than it used to be.
As an example, I’ve been on the board 11 years and I’ve been called a Bigot/Nazi/Racist/Privilieged/etc more times in the past three months than the previous 10 years combined, by my count.
If anything, my views have actually become more progressive over the past decade - but clearly not enough so for many of the posters still on the boards.
I’ve backed out of posting to several discussions lately because I’ve thought “As soon as I post, Poster A will be in to call me an intolerant bigot for not having an opinion they like, Poster B will deliberately make pedantic attacks on a secondary aspect of my post whilst ignoring my main point and Poster C will say I’m a neo-Imperialist Colonialst apologist who’s not allowed an opinion on anything” (Posters A, B and C being stand-ins for actual posters who shall remain nameless).
Messageboards are on the way out, which is a shame because I like the medium - not just because it’s what I’ve grown up with, but because the non-immediacy of it leads to good and often well-researched discussions.
As has also been mentioned, the internet is a bigger place now and the answer to pretty much literally any question you want the answer to is a few keystrokes away, often in incredibly specific detail.
I’ve said before I’m not really sure what relevance Cecil has these days (I’d never heard of him before finding the boards all those years ago, and even then it was pretty obvious Wikipedia was rendering the concept a quaint novelty.
4063 active users is an eyebrow raiser, though - especially if the Chicago Reader gets sold. I can see someone in the Ministry Of Bean Counting at the new owners saying “4000 members? My 15 year old niece has more followers than that on her Instagram account and it’s nothing but cat memes, sunsets and the odd picture of Chris Pratt. Why are we supporting this again?”
I guess I’m one of those. I came here a lot when I joined as a young student but I just sort of stopped as my life moved on and I entered the world of work. That break was a long one - maybe a decade or more. I had found a different sport-related message board (which was private and we talked about a lot of non-sport), and got to know the community of that one very well. I have never really interacted with anyone here so it doesn’t feel like as much part of the community. I used to read and post exclusively in GQ, the rest of the board didn’t interest me. And I was browsing on a desktop computer and at some point I started using my desktop time to write music and edit photos which were both big hobbies of mine.
I came back here after I started dating this French girl. We met in London but she was finishing a year of teaching and went back to Paris to start her teaching career. We decided to try to keep it going and so I would regularly take the Eurostar to spend the weekend with her. At one point every weekend she would need to spend a few hours marking homework and preparing lessons and French TV didn’t interest me, so I would get out the iPad and quietly come onto these boards. That’s when I started reading the other non-GQ boards. When we split I went off the boards for a short while but I’m back now having decided that I missed the Paris days of coming here. Having an iPad and using Tapatalk made a big difference. If I didn’t have those my browsing would be on my iMac and sorry, but I don’t want to browse a message board like that.