Rejoice with me, Conrad! We have prevailed in battle again over Eastasia!
I thought I did make it clear that 1)threads were getting shut down very soon after they got off track from their original premise, and 2) a lot of long time posters who contributed much were banned. Further, I also posit that I might not be able to quantify the perceptions I have, but it seems like there are a lot of people who have noticed similar things.
And again, I conceded that those posters may have deserved their bannings. But given the number of people who are under the same impressions that I am, it seems that it’s not all in my head. In fact, there were several pit threads about the premature closing of threads just as they were starting to get interesting for the reasons that I offered earlier.
One person, and criticism of the admin does not equal criticism of the upgrades.
That one person is not the crux of my argument, in fact, I even said that I was only referring to that incident tangentially. You said “The posters banned were criticizing the board upgrades anyway.” This is clearly not the case, so trying to twist your own words to prove it in a roundabout way does not prove that to be the case.
I totally agree with everything you’ve said in this thread, Ladyfoxfyre.
A big source of tension has always been the way all major decisions about the board are made behind a curtain by a nebulous entity that, by all accounts, doesn’t care much about it anyway except as a potential source of revenue.
Ed and Jerry are our only link to this nebulous entity, so they’re going to bear the brunt of the criticism, even when they’re doing everything they can or when it clearly isn’t up to them. It doesn’t excuse being rash or unprofessional, but I can’t say I wouldn’t have snapped by now. The problem is not Ed or Jerry or the Chicago Reader or the Teeming Millions, but the dysfunctional relationship among them all.
I wish there were a way to restructure that relationship. It could be as simple as better communication between TPTB and the Doper hoi polloi, or it could mean spinning the whole board off into a separate self-governed entity and paying the Reader/CL some sort of fee for the archives. Maybe things will settle down eventually, but as long as that relationship doesn’t change the same problems are likely to keep coming up.
I found the dope around Dec 2006/Jan 2007 as a lurker so I haven’t been around here long enough to know the undercurrents. I have no idea what this place was like 5 years ago, 10- whatever years ago. I liked what I saw 2 years ago and I’m hoping that doesn’t go away.
I hope yesterday is already forgotten.
Oh, come on. You’re one of the snarkiest people here.
I personally don’t have a problem with snark (yours or anyone else’s), but seriously, pot, kettle, etc.
To respond to the OP - I think that what you are noticing is a symptom of malaise that commonly affects people that have frequented the SDMB for a period of several years. If I had a dime for every time I read a post that said “The message board isn’t the same as it used to be, the moderation sucks now but back in the day it was much better, and there are no new interesting threads”, then I would have many dimes that would amount to a not insignificant sum, the total of which cannot be determined with great precision but rest assured that it would astound you.
I think we will need to add to the SDMB lexicon for newbie posters:
The Barn House - commonly used at this message board to describe iniquitous harms against humanity, without equal in the recent history of the USA; [also] an emblem of the ruthless dictatorship that squeezes this board in an iron fist.
Maybe it’s malaise, or maybe the boards really have changed. How many people have to make the same comment before we start wondering if it’s not just a bunch of individuals with malaise?
I’m one of those that left out of principle, although I’ve read here on and off over the years. What really strikes me is how little has actually changed. Everyone seems to feel like the recent events here are a turning point, but to me this feels like the exact same type of inept administration we’ve been seeing, well, for at least the 7 years I’ve been around.
I still think this place could be much better, and I’ll bitch about it when I feel like it but I don’t fool myself into thinking that anything will actually change. That’s why I refuse to pay. But, I enjoy the drama and the sheer incompetence displayed here is amusing so I stick around. At least I’m actually getting what I paid for now.
Well, the board is A LOT better than it was back in 2006, when I gave up in disgust – although that’s faint praise, because the SDMB was absolutely terrible in 2006. Too many Big Name Posters, each with their devoted little followers, hissy-fits followed by dramatic announcements of “I’m leaving the SDMB forever!” followed by dozens of pages of people talking them into staying, bitchy behavior, stupid jokes… to watch the SDMB nose-dive into *that *after the previous glory years was suicide-inducing. I mean, whatever happened to “Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out”? I got so sick of posting an actual question and hoping for a factual answer, only to receive a dozen warmed-over jokes. The SDMB used to be renowned for its humor – but repeating the same jokes over and over again doesn’t make you funny, it makes you unoriginal. The political flame wars were ridiculous, and it got to the point that both the Dems and Pubies were so foaming-at-the-mouth insane that you couldn’t tell the difference between them anymore.
I’m not 100% sold on the SDMB at the moment, but I’m willing to give it a fair chance… and that’s after I quit in disgust almost two years ago and didn’t even miss it for months and months.
I’m sure that the boards have changed. But then in 2006, the boards were not the same as they were in 2004. In 2004, the boards were not the same as they were in 2002. etc.
Are they much worse now than they were in 1999? Has the change been continually in a fashion that shows a decrease in quality? I believe not. If you showed a person unacquainted with the SDMB a series of representative threads from June 1999, and a series of representative threads from June 2008, would that person exclaim in astonishment and surprise and say “I can’t believe how different the boards are?” My answer to that last question is No, the person would not notice any great change.
P.S. I also did not mean to use the word malaise in a way that would reflect negatively upon the OP. Would boredom be a better word? ennui? listlessness?
Ed has apologised and criticism is back again.
It’s the Internet. Things change.
I remember when English footballers were paid £500 ($1,000) a year. And there was a **huge **dispute when they asked for more. :eek:
Now the top guys earn well over £1,000,000 ($2,000,000) a year. And the money just keeps pouring in.
My TV used to be black+white, about 18" and have two channels. (Yes, two! :smack: )
Now it is High Definition, 42" 
and has over 100 channels (mostly rubbish though 
)
I agree that it would be great if more resources were put in by the management (mainly so Jerry had more time to update and improve the software).
I thought this place was great when I found it; I was ready to pay my $15 to be part of the commmunity and now I have the choice whether to see ads for free.
It is good that posters express themselves as you’ve done. And that we discuss things. I still think this is the best board around, but let’s keep an eye on it. 
Personally, I find that overuse of mayonnaise gives me a stomachache.
Argent Towers:
Speaking as one of the newly returned, perhaps I can answer your question and provide my own perspective on ladyfoxfyre’s OP.
Like a lot of us, I stumbled across the SDMB after having read Cecil’s book. I was immediately drawn to in-depth debates that I encountered here, as well as the droll camaraderie. The board was free of charge, back then, and the SDMB was a very large community, so there was almost always something interesting to read and discuss. It was also fairly new at the time: I had never participated in an online community before, for example.
Then came the Bush presidency, 9/11, and the invasion of Iraq.
Not to harp on it, but my feelings towards many of my fellow posters began to change as the political debates raged on – and on, and on, and on. With the talk of WMDs and invasions, things started to get serious. Peoples lives were on the line, dependent upon correct leadership in a time of great turmoil. It was no time to fuck around or play gotcha or word games. Here’s what it looked like from my perspective: those who supported the invasion were, for the most part, snide, hateful, and patronizing. On any particular point, a bit of research would invariably prove them to be factually incorrect. But it was like arguing with a hydra: I (and my fellow war opponents) would debunk one accusation only to see a dozen others rise up in its place – each of which required its own 25-page debunking. And so on.
Then a strange thing happened after the Iraq invasion. Conservative voices here on the message board nearly evaporated. Most of the really snide, outspoken proponents of the invasion quit posting after a few weeks. As time dragged on, and it became apparent that there were no WMDs, the majority of war supporters either changed their minds, disappeared entirely, or – in some cases – managed to get themselves banned.
Then came the next election, and the swift-boating of Kerry, a lot of which occurred here on the boards as well – that is, certain posters gleefully participated in the smearing (this doesn’t include you, Scylla, in case you’re reading this). Things got really nasty and I lost a lot of respect for people I had previously held in fairly high regard. I also began to realize that certain posters had motives other than honorable, or were, quite simply, utterly immune to reason.
I paid the first subscription but watched as board membership dropped off and the interesting discussions began to dry up. It was like being stuck in a doldrum – nothing I wrote seemed to get any traction, or generate any interest, and I didn’t have all that much left to say, anyway. Arguing with the few dead-enders still hanging around – Sam Stone, Shodan, and Starving Artist, to name a few – was an exercise in futility. It could go weeks, or months, before I would find an interesting topic in GD or General Questions. I gradually quit posting and even lurking. Every now and then I’d drop by to see if anything interesting was going on. But no. I just let my membership lapse.
My return is purely serendipitous. I was reading blogs and keeping up with the Palin stuff, and felt an urge to get back into the political debate. I surfed over a couple of times and began to seriously considered renewing my membership. Then, purely on a whim, I decided to see if I could log in – and was stunned to discover I could. By complete chance I had returned a day or so after the board had reverted to free membership again. So here I am.
I personally attribute the current animosity here to the fact that most of us on the left have been through this now a few times and are basically sick as shit of it.
Hopefully the free membership will pull more people back in. It seems to me that for a message board to be really interesting, it has to reach a certain “critical mass.” Something about the subscription – more than just the cost – drove people away/turned them off. At some deeper, unexpressed level, it was like we were forming a kind of closed club, which runs directly against my sense that the fight against ignorance should be open to everyone. It wasn’t the cost per se, it was something symbolic. I’d have probably drifted off after the last election anyway, because I was really fed up with the futility of arguing politics on a message board.
Finally, I’ve never really had a problem with the board is run and personally think that the mods do a great job of trying to find a balance in often difficult circumstances. I really appreciate the time they put into the board, especially since they do it voluntarily.
Well, the difficulty in addressing something as vague as the perception of the board’s atmosphere is that all you can go on is generalizations and often incorrect recollections. Unfortunately that is all I, and many of the posters who have agreed with this perception, have to argue at this point. It might be malaise and we might have misconceptions about the way things used to be.
But.
I don’t actually think that the moderation sucks, nor the administration for that matter. What I’m offering is that the approach is different than it used to be, resulting in more closed threads, more strict monitoring of behavior that is relatively harmless. I mean, it’s a message board, not a Lincoln-Douglas debate. (Okay, sometimes it’s an LD debate but most of the time people have thin skin about what constitutes “being a jerk” anyway)
And I typically think that bannings, except in extreme cases, are mostly unwarranted. There are so many circumstances, it’s hard to infer that the bannable offense isn’t entirely unique to each poster. And if the bannable offenses are arbitrary, how is that fair? We don’t have many rules here, but the ones we have are amorphous and unclear, lending them to be applied unevenly whenever the perception from the moderation gets to be that they’ve let it go on too long.
We have Otto who had warnings going back years. Years! But if the number of posts a member contributes over a period of 8 years is 98% substantive and interesting and 2% getting on someone’s nerves on the wrong day, does that mean they deserve to leave? (I know that the decision has been rescinded, by the way, it’s just an example.)
Then we have people who have been banned for posting too many threads but not returning to participate in them. Annoying, sure. But “get the fuck out of here and never return ever again” level annoying?
There are more, I can’t research them now and can’t recount many more offhand.
Things change, people change, places change. I don’t have a problem with that. But when the perception is that things have changed for the worse, and that a valuable part of the draw of posting here is diminished somehow, and it’s a widespread enough perception that many people agree with it even if we can’t put our finger directly on it, it is going to be questioned and people will wonder why it’s happened. That’s what I’m trying to figure out here.
I understand that. But I can tell you from personal experience that I have yet to see a post saying “the board has changed… for the worse!” (going as far back as 2000 or 2001) that was not followed by “many” people agreeing with it. And in my case, I don’t believe that the board has changed for the worse.
I’ve noticed in the time I’ve been here that the board has gotten quieter, but it still seems to be full of good people. I wish all the politics threads would go away, but what are you going to do?
For those of you complaining, what kind of threads do you wish you saw? And why don’t you start them?
Agreed. I’ve been seeing “the board is going to hell” for so long that I really wonder when this supposed Golden Age was. Because I gotta say, I joined in 2003, I think, and things aren’t all that different.
Maybe a few less people in Cafe Society getting exasperated and proclaiming “We’ve done this!” after the latest round of “Name all the movies that feature X” threads.