He’d be about thirty now. He changed his handle to @Qin_Shi_Huangdi. I never met him, but I picked up from contextual bits and pieces that he lived within miles of my family (I think his junior high school was our voting site).
Other way around, actually. And while I had the sense that he began as a thirteen-year old RWNJ, I also had the sense that as he grew up, he began to think critically.
Oh, we all have bad, bad, bad thoughts from time to time…
So many questions… How many are we? What’s the mean age? Who’s closest to the mean? Who’s the meanest?
I nominate this guy. Just look at that menacing countenance:
More seriously …
Over all history there are 133,417 users. Many of which are (were) spammers or long gone one-time wonders. Plus the folks who’ve wandered away or died. After ~27 years of this, we’ve had a lot of attrition.
There’s a thousandish who’ve posted in the last month. You can learn a lot about our user base by fiddling with this page which is the third item in the left column of the hamburger menu: Users - Straight Dope Message Board.
I’m pretty sure that Guinistasia was about 15 when she first started posting here. She ended up being one of the more prolific posters in the history of SDMB (17K+ posts). Rest in peace, Guin.
She’s been gone a number of years. But there’s well over a hundred posters topping 17K now. The current record holder has 135,000 some posts. And is still active.
But yes, she started young and should be remembered as a great member and contributor.
I figured as much. I should have said, “While she was around, she was on of the more prolific posters”
Happy Birthday to you!
I was just shy of 19 when I created my account in 2010, don’t remember how long I had lurked before that. Not that anyone cares or that it matters much since I almost never post anyway.
Band name?
[Cough] I’m 78
The word, “teen” in this line made my brain retroactively read this as glandular buckets proving I should have gone to sleep four hours ago and/or I’ve spontaneously hit old-man-waving-stick-at-clouds age!
I found the columns at age 22, never knew the forums existed until age 26 or so.
Even then I lurked for a long time; even now I am not a very prolific poster, and much content I have produced is either sarcastic or weird, or both.
I’m 50 years old, so just over half my life being informed by Cecil and the teeming millions.
I can say, this site has vastly expanded my general knowledge, and taught me many niche facts I would otherwise not have thought to research.
I found the Straight Dope columns in around 1999 and was hooked. Started visiting the forum soon after, and never left…no, wait: I did leave when the pay-to-post era commenced. I’m 49, and have also been here over one half of my life.
I have been on here a very long time but I was also on several other boards like Savage Love that went behind a paywall. Did this happen here?
TPTB made a brief and unhappy experiment with pay to post. There was never pay to read.
Lotta folks left over pay to post and never returned even though the policy was reversed pretty quickly. (Couple months IIRC?)
Teen glandular buckets sound fun. Wish I still had 'em.
Was it really that quickly? I tried searching but I can’t find exactly when it disappeared and I absolutely don’t trust my memory. It’s hard to tease out from the paid subscriptions that of course stuck around for decades until we migrated boards.
I’m not sure either; hence my “IIRC”.
Less than a year, more than a month is all I can say with anything approaching real confidence. I expect we could dig around in ATMB and eventually find the start & finish announcements. Not interested enough to bother now.
I got interested.
April 2004
June/July 2008
To stay with the thread, I’m in my mid-50s. I have the impression this means I am younger than the average, as it seems a lot of people are already retired. But it might just be where I hang out here. I know there are quite a few people that are in their 50s, but they keep turning 60, so they no longer count.
And I just realized I forgot I had a birthday and had to change my vote. To the next higher group. Less than a decade before retirement.
Yowza! 4-1/4 years of pay to post. I really need to quit trusting my memory for anything. Sheesh! Thank you @Die_Capacitrix for setting the record straight here.
I suppose that once I’d gotten used to paying, whether I was paying for posting rights or Charter Member bragging rights, it felt about the same. I’d still happily pay if there was a way for Discourse to do that.