If someone were to somehow audit the posts here and classify them into the types of posts they are and how much response they get would this give us at least somewhat of an accurate reflection of how much attention people pay to various things. Or, would the demographic here give us more of an isolated overview.
My gut feeling would be that the SDMB is a strongly self-selecting group that is unlikely to be representative of the US as a whole. Just based on our Political Compass results, we can state for certain that the board is far more left-leaning than average (not only aren’t there many Republicans, there’s not all that many centrists either and that takes some effort).
There are probably topics where the polled result wouldn’t be that far off. But even for something mundane like, “What brand of toothpaste do you use?”, you would probably find that the SDMB users are more likely to follow medical wisdom in their selection and less likely to just go based on color, flavor, or price point.
The Dope’s relatively strict moderation and ancient age probably select for older and better educated users as well.
I have noticed often that some topics I am not really qualified to comment on but I find very interesting have an almost zero response, even topics that could be of great social significance. I have to wonder if the light response is due to lack of interest or lack of individuals who feel qualified to comment. The amount of views typicaly suggests that a lack of interest is usually the case.
It’s self-selecting as well in that people are more apt to respond to threads they can answer positively to. For instance, a thread titled “Can you run a six minute mile?” is more likely to attract the attention of people who CAN (since they get to say “yes!”), whereas the actual results of polling the entire board would likely tilt strongly away from that.