When I joined eight years ago the board was a lively place filled with a lot of interesting posters. That has not changed but the way many choose to express themselves now has.
I paid when it went P2P and enjoyed my Charter Member status with pride. But just a few months later the general attitude began changing for the worse. Gone was the comraderie and in its place was excessive snarking, backbiting and all around childish behavior. I unintentionally began to just fade out. When it came time to reup I just couldn’t see the use, the SDMB was dead to me then. The $5.95 subscription fee was not a consideration at all. I am a professional and make a very good salary. I just couldn’t see paying for something I didn’t care about anyway.
I still peeked in from time to time and kept in touch with most of my board friends in my LJ, which has become my preferred outlet. When I read about the upgrade and return of free posting I was hopeful that the board could possibly revert to the way it *used *to be.
So I logged back in the second day and was disappointed to see things were now even worse. Some people that hung in through the entire P2P fiasco now acted like “their” board was being overrun with intruders and interlopers, potential socks, riff raff and a general decline in “quality”. :rolleyes: x10
Not everyone has that attitude however and I recognize dozens of familiar names. I remain hopeful that things will settle down and the general attitude of the board will improve.
Not quite. One poster started a lot of new threads, most of which were frivolous to say the least, if not outright trolling. He was warned several times to knock it of, the suspended for a month. When he returned, he carried on as before, then he was banned.
He was given a lot of chances to abide by the rules, in the end he couldn’t, or wouldn’t. He annoyed a lot of posters. He was banned in the end for ignoring instructions from the mod.
Not sure where you got that impression. I call bullshit when I see it and yes I’ve been in heated arguments here - maybe 2 a year averaged out of 8 and a half years - but I think 95+% of my posts go completely unnoticed through sheer blandness. I’m politically moderate and don’t take online conversations all that seriously. I am absolutely not “snarky” in the sense of being generally familiar with other posters’ opinions, posting history, personalities and calling them out on it, and I couldn’t give two shits about off-board drama. Never read that shit and can’t imagine wasting my time doing so.
Well, now that it’s been brought up allow me to contradict myself by saying I’d like to jump through the internet and choke the next person who makes a pie “joke”. This includes “when come back, bring [whatever].” The flash video wasn’t funny, the first 10,000 references to it weren’t funny, and your reference to it now isn’t funny (not you, Shodan; the general You.)
Hey it’s good to take some things seriously, right?
Speaking as one who only went away a couple times because I asked Tuba to cut me off, I’ve noticed a big IMPROVEMENT now that all you people are back.
Welcome back! Make this the board you want it to be. The power is in YOUR hands. Cuz really, the same old same old was growing mighty tiresome.
As far as some of the negative stuff you folks have seen, remember that the past couple weeks had Palin, the board upgrade, and Ed flying off the handle. Things are already settling down.
I think everybody’s upset that the economy is weird, the government is buying mortgage companies, Russia is getting cranky, and we’ve got nobody good to vote for in November. So, on national or world level, there isn’t that much to look forward to.
Debate, hell. Discussions can’t even remain civil. I pulled up the David Foster Wallace thread to find people taking personal potshots at each other. I start another thread about a movie I just saw, and I get this bit of condescension*. I can’t count how many times someone shared a personal experience of the subject being discussed, only to be slapped down because it was not a perfect analogy, and was therefore utterly irrelevant to the matter at hand. The oneupmanship around here is definitely tainting the boards.
*It’s not the correction itself that offends me. It’s the pompous posting of two dictionary definitions of the word, plus further illustration, as if I had been hanging an entire Great Debates argument on it. And no comment about the movie itself; just a drive-by vocabulary lesson without even the courtesy of [nitpick] tags.
Well excuse me your majesty, how is what I posted a “personal potshot” and how was I being uncivil? Apologies for not engaging with your thread otherwise but I haven’t seen the movie. “Fighting ignorance since 1973” doesn’t include the definition of words? I don’t see anything pompous is using a dictionary definition. If you think what I posted was uncivil then I don’t know what I can do for you.
Funny, I was thinking the opposite - there seemed to be a lot less drama and a lot less bannings (perhaps because of the introduction of suspensions) since pay-to-post started.
No, I said the people in the DFW thread were taking personal potshots; I said you were being condescending. The correction was reasonable; the two detailed dictionary definitions were overkill. You may not have meant to be condescending, but that’s how you came off, and I find it interesting that this is your reaction.
Plus which, you’ve brought up another pleasant activity: hiding behind the “fighting ignorance” banner. If you get crossways with someone, you can take a free shot: call them ignorant and it’s okay because it’s on the banner.
FWIW I always check dictionary definitions before I post about the use of a word, unless talking about a vernacular or personal experience of it. In that particular instance, for all I knew there was a secondary meaning that fit your use of the word. I intended no offence but will be weary of how I come across in future.
Well, I’m back. Zotti, after his half-assed inadequate semi-apology, took half a step in the right direction and changed my cowardly banning to an unwarranted suspension.
I’m willing to ascribe the whole matter to PMS on Ed’s part. But it sure bugged me, the past few days, to think that Lekatt and Carol Stream could post their worthless shit here, and I was locked out. (Not that I’ve ever contributed much to the SDMB, but I do at least try to keep our motto in mind.)
'04 was nothing compared to the post-election firestorm of 2000, with the Florida chaos and whatnot. There was so much spittle flying, this place looked like a car wash…
In the right hands, SDMB could be a place not unlike the WELL, a forum where technical obstacles were worth enduring… IF there is a sense of community, a spirit of respect, and most importantly a critical mass of sharp, knowledgeable posters that can provide content that is worthy of the users putting up with the glitches and capricious administration. Attracting and keeping those people should be is everyone’s goal and responsibility. and it begins anew now that PTP is a thing of the past. It will be very hard given that there are so many more forums then there were back in the early part of the decade, but having SDMB searchable through Google may be a way to generate traffic.
As for “snark” being part of the content, anyone who thinks that a sharp tongue has no place here has never read a Dope column. “Cecil” is a smartass through and through. If there’s no place for wit here, there’s no place for me here either. It is entirely possible to be snarky without being overtly offensive. Allowing this environment to flourish is where the mods come in. They have the near-impossible job of determining intent from simple text, and by-and-large they do a good job. Where it gets out of hand is where people other than the mods stop giving other posters the benefit of the doubt as to intent and immediately start waving the bloody shirt of offense, whether it be to score cheap points in a debate or just due to a lack of respect of their fellow poster. Unfortunately, this is the dominant means of modern political dialogue, and many laypeople of all descriptions fall into this trap of cheap rhetoric and phony outrage. Maybe we can be better than that.
