I’ll start by saying that I know the question is pointless in any empirically verifiable sense. For every example that the board is like X someone will find an example that conclusively proves that it is like Y.
Even so, I don’t think the exercise is pointless. Anyone who has ever worked for more than one employer knows that there is such a thing as a corporate culture. Sometimes that amounts to the complete lack of any type of culture whatsoever, but even the absence of something can be a defining characteristic. In a similar way, I think that all message boards have something similar. It’s a bit more attenuated since you don’t have the direct physical proximity and contact that you do in a workplace but I think that only serves to make the cultural undercurrents more visible. There is less need to be scrupulously diplomatic in dealing with others and therefore the general tone of the place can be easier to see.
I have only been here for a month or so but I’ve been on other forums for several years and so I hope I have encapsulated the most common characterizations in my poll questions. However I always end up overlooking something and then there are more that never even occur to me. That’s why I’ve made the poll multiple choice. Hopefully there will be at least a few statements you will agree with and then can elaborate as to those I did not cover.
The trouble with this is that almost every statement is correct. This is a very large community, and there is a representative of almost all aspects of the outside world.
It’s easier to say who is likely to be excluded and not tolerated. You’ve got to be able to spell, punctuate and use grammar correctly. You can’t have extreme views that you rant about and try to inject in to every thread. If you deliberately and constantly try to wind people up, your time here is likely to be brief. We’re fairly conservative in that suggestions of flashing avatars and embedded photographs tend to be met with howls of pain.
Apart from that, we’re very nice, inclusive people.
The SDMB isn’t a single community. It’s a set of loosely coupled communities. While everybody has a membership that lets them participate in both GQ & GD, darn few people spend much time in both places.
So I suggest you’d get a very different pattern of answers to your poll if you ran it twice, once for GQ fans and once for GD fans. Running both polls at once as you are here will totally blur the overall picture.
I just voted for the ones that I’d actually though of before, and did so with the basic version, not the explicit connotations.
The first one is a given.
We have a lot of self-proclaimed perverts and degenerates. How often do people joke they are going to Hell?
We have more than one community, and it can be hard for noobs to get in.
Nearly everyone here is older than I am, although that’s been changing lately. And many self proclaim to be “get offa my lawn” age.
Mostly liberals: duh.
And you can make of it what you want.
It mostly is a community of people searhcing for the truth. And yet, if you want it to be something, including an intelectual cock jockying community, it can be that to.
But for a community of this size and acitvety, their is pleasantly little of that.