I’m commenting with two different hats.
- Hat 1 is that of a long-time member, occasional poster.
- Hat 2 is that of an admin for another message board. Our demographic is about the same as SDMB. We are not shrinking but we are not growing either. I’ve thought long and hard about how to change that.
Hat 1:
I discovered the Straight Dope column when I moved to New York in 1994. It was in the free arts newspaper (the one that wasn’t the Village Voice). It was brilliant! I discovered the SDMB on AOL a little while later. I’ve never been a particularly active poster (~1000 posts in 25 years) but I have long periods of lurking interspersed. My heyday (and the SDMB’s?) was in the early Bush years. I was always most interested in GD and GC but I dabbled in some of the other forums too.
Here’s why I don’t visit very often anymore:
I always enjoyed the cut and thrust of Great Debates and it’s always the forum I check first. These days, when I go scan the open threads they are all the same threads as 20 years ago. “Why religion is stupid”. “Why guns are bad.”; “Why taxation is the same as slavery”. “Why cops shouldn’t shoot black people”.
Maybe it was always like that and my memory is rose-tinted but, either way, I’m not interested in having the same discussions every day for the rest of my life. It’s no one’s fault, but it’s true all the same.
On the rare occasion when someone does start a new and interesting GD thread, it gets hijacked off to one of the standard topic destinations before it even leaves the runway. It’s like some posters are playing a game of “I can hijack that thread to ‘why it’s ok for police to shoot black people’ in 5!”. This one is someone’s fault. I often wonder if they know who they are.
And this. Oh my God, this:
No names, but any discussion about free-will will, in no time at all, be dominated by someone explaining why all the other opinions are moronic. He has had made that same argument for 20 years, never seems to tire of repeating it and never seems to hear what anyone else has to say. Why does he do this? Perhaps it is fully determined.
For any particular topic (Guns, Gods, Gays, Property Rights, Immigration, etc, etc, etc), there are 3 or 4 people who seemingly don’t feel at home unless they repeat the same arguments they have been repeating for 20 years. Your arguments were interesting the first 12 or 13 times I heard them but now, maybe you could let someone else have their say before shutting them down? Maybe you could just say “I refer you to my Argument No 7” and shut up for a little while and see what the new folks have to say.
General Questions is harder. I used to love it — and it’s still good — but there are better places for that now like Stack Exchange.
The BBQ pit is vile and awful. It should be called the Cess Pit. I never visit but just the smell puts me off. Someone upthread said it contaminates the reputation of the other forums the way that some of the seedier subreddits put people off Reddit even if they never visit those subreddits. It pollutes everything.
The general attitude to newbies who don’t yet know all the many unspoken conventions is appalling. Snark between people who have been snarking at each other for 20 years is one thing. Snarking at a newbie is a totally different thing.
Hat 2:
My forum (we call it an online community) is for patients and their families. Most are cancer patients who are typically older than the general population.
Marketing things that we have done that help include:
- Posting snippets (along the lines of Threadspotting) to other venues like Twitter and Facebook. It doesn’t actually help much directly but it helps a lot with SEO. We are not much bigger than SDMB but many of our communities are the #1 hit on Google if you search for an online forum about X.
- Even better than this is to get members to post about Smart Patients occasionally in other venues like blogs and Twitter. Again, this is more of a boon to SEO than to direct conversations.
- We provide some tools for this kind of sharing like a gallery of quotes (anyone can quote something and add it to the gallery) that are easy to share with a nice photo background on social media. Also, badges that you can put on a blog or whatever.
Lastly moderation:
I belong to lots of online forums and this place has the most Byzantine and authoritarian moderation policy that I have encountered. There’s a kind of vicious circle of legalistic moderation policy → creates resentment and demands for more legalistic rules → more legalism → more resentment. At my place, we prefer a softer touch. We have the occasional bad actor on our forum but, usually, a quiet word will fix it and if it doesn’t, we say goodbye. We don’t even publish any rules.
I think it all stems from John Adams and his “This is a country of laws, not men.” Some people still think that was a good idea but I prefer moderation by sensible people with good taste over lots of rules any day. I understand why Facebook needs a Byzantine moderation policy. I don’t understand why SDBMB needs one.