Why is the SDMB membership declining, and what's the best way to add younger members?

[codinghorror]

@Tired_and_Cranky

One of the worst recent examples was to turn a thread about James Holzhauer, a recent Jeopardy contestant, into an omnibus Jeopardy thread. Now, if Holzhauer becomes relevant again or someone Googles to learn more about him, the thread is mostly useless to that new reader. If someone comes to discuss Jeopardy, there is no good point to jump into a ten-thousand post thread.

Excellent example. I originally thought of discussions as potentially endless, but soon realized… those long, long discussions aren’t tenable:

The MEGATOPIC: public good, or public menace?

We’re going to add a limited form of real-time chat to take some pressure off certain “topics” that degenerate into chatrooms.

@kevlaw

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.

Yeah, devolving into the standard “things people commonly argue about” template is a problem with general discussion topics. Maybe take it as a challenge – can you start an interesting, unique discussion that avoids repeating all the standard arguments about hot button issues?

On another site similar to this one, the site owners do regularly post topics for discussion every day. There is a vast divide between the “difficult” (race, gender, guns. etc) topics and the “easy” ones. But you need new topics … and some discipline around keeping the discussion on those specific topics, plus or minus 20%.

Pick the weird, obscure, strange stuff to discuss!

@kevlaw

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.

This one is difficult from a tooling perspective. On our oldest Discourse community, one of the few remaining sore points is when a long time user suddenly goes “on tilt”, per the poker term… we sandbox new users so they can’t post too much, for everyone’s safety, but established users can reply as much as they want.

@kevlaw

shut up for a little while and see what the new folks have to say.

We do have Slow Mode, which allows you to limit a discussion to one reply per person per (x) minutes. That at least prevents the “I now shall reply to every single person in this topic and explain, in detail, why they are wrong” phenomenon.

@kevlaw

the most Byzantine and authoritarian moderation policy that I have encountered.

Hmm. Can you provide a few examples? With names removed to protect the innocent.