Taking into consideration things like, trends in web technology and culture, and user engagement patterns/trends, and other factors, can you guess how this web site - assuming it continues to exist - will look like in 5 and 10 years? Maybe in 10 years websites in general will be things of the past.
Still running v3.7.3
If anything, the pace of evolution of the web part of the internet has slowed.
5 years ago we all looked and behaved just like today. But with a bit more action. 10 years ago we all looked and behaved just like today. But with a lot more action.
I suggest this place will recruit fewer newbies over time going forward. How long it lasts is then a race between the last of us dying off, which is 40+ years in the future, and the website’s owners deciding they’ve lost enough revenue to not bother.
Right now there is quite a fad for things like twitface, instagra, etc. that cater to the mostly young set with mostly 3-second attention spans. As they get older they too will become less that way, just as we did before them. The SDMB is a tiny, tiny minority interest. We thrived in the early 2000s with ballpark 0.00001% of the English speaking world participating. As internet penetration increases we can still get by just fine on a mere 0.0001%.
Goodness, I really hope this place lasts longer than I do.
I would hate to…
Instagram has been around for 6 years, Twitter 11, Facebook 13. I don’t know if you can really call them “fads” anymore.
thanks for your reply
In another thread someone posted that the site owners get most of their income from advertising clicks on the massive archive of past posts–so site income should continue even though current participation substantially declines.
I seem to think the SD is dyeing off, but may subsist in some form for some time to come. I also see it as a atheistic religion for some, but that would require a new format, such as a church, to succeed.
To be fair, Reddit’s format I think is overall superior. Instead of pushing threads to the top by last date posted, do it by upvotes. Decay positive votes all the time to keep it fresh. This keeps the things that are both recent and interesting to the crowd at the top.
Similarly, comment replies get sorted by quality in a similar way.
Reddit is also an enormously larger site, orders of magnitude more popular. I spend most of my forum browsing time there, but I hang here sometimes because of more personal discussion, deeper thought put into posts, and certain stand out posters like LSLGuy.
Reddit has eaten most other message boards. It will probably eat this one too.
On the downside, Reddit is a segregated echo chamber. The precise upvote mechanism you laud guarantees that minority voices in any particular context get pounded into non-existence. Hence, a wide range of distinct subreddits of every flavor, but almost no cross-pollination. It’s like Facebook’s ugly love baby with Usenet.
Reddit is great just for reading posts ( and is a million times better on mobile), but it definitely sucks for discussion. Outside of small subreddits, by the time you actually see anything interesting it’s already 3 hours old with a thousand comments. No one will ever see what you write.
In 5-10 years, assuming the Dope is still with us, it’ll be pretty much like now.
The average age of active posters will continue to rise, and we won’t get all that many newbies since message boards will continue to be passé. (Too bad - I like the way message board discussions work. I think they have real advantages over blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
There will probably be another forum or two added, but damned if I know what. (I certainly wouldn’t have predicted Thread Games.)
The ‘In Memoriam’ sticky will continue to grow, and as we get older, that growth will probably speed up a bit.
Cecil Adams will always be Cecil Adams, forever and ever.
Agree. And like gnoitall points out, each subreddit becomes an echo chamber. Defend Intel on the AMD subreddit? Downvotes. Vice versa. Point out that Trump may have made a few minor mistakes on any of the few conservative subreddits? Downvoted to oblivion. Point it out when Trump did something right (even by accident) on r/politics? Here come the downvotes.
I’ve noticed I get downvoted just from the first sentence of a post. Nobody even reads one before deciding if it disagrees with their beliefs, so I can sometimes in the middle of the post say something that changes the tone totally, and still get downvoted.
For example if I point out that I agree with <some action of Trump> and call him an utter moron in sentence 4, I’ll eat lots of downvotes on r/politics.
I really hate the nested reply structure at Reddit and Hacker News. The sequential posts here really facilitate discussion in my opinion.
Until you get to the 100+ page threads, which is I suppose what the nested replies were created to resolve. But we have very few of those.
Unless someone already stated the obvious and I somehow missed it:
the motto will have changed to
STILL FIGHTING IGNORANCE SINCE 1973
(IT’S TAKING EVEN LONGER THAT WE THOUGHT)
I’ve been here and similar message boards for more than ten years, and they haven’t changed a bit. Most even still have the same mods, exercising the same judgment according to the same criteria. A ten-year-old zombie isn’t even conspicuous, until the salf-appointed zombie watchers point it out.
Killed by Grammar Nazis. 
Also, the average age of a Facebook user in the USA is something like 40.