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

[LSLGuy]

@Melbourne

@Princhester

Not sure I agree. I think we are pretty welcoming of anyone who turns up and says something vaguely intelligent and relevant

… that you agree with. The reason there is a friendly consensus is because anyone you don’t agree with leaves. Disagreement is often expressed in the most unfriendly terms.

Personally, I came here and remain here because of The Straight Dope and QQ. I don’t want GQ to be like other general interest forums, which are mostly full of unfounded opinion.

I think that it is possible that young people might not have the same interest in facts and knowledge that I do: they’ve grown up with Google, and perhaps facts and knowledge just don’t have the same importance as when I was young? If that’s true, then the SDMB is done.
…

This is me too. With a side order of:

@msmith537

I don’t think the SDMB is marketed that well. I don’t know that I would have found this had a coworker not suggested it to relieve work boredom 20 years ago.

I started out as a GQ-only reader on the advice of a friend and only slowly branched out into the other forums. FTR: I’ve been here since 2003 = 17+ years and am now 62 yo (yikes!).


As to the larger topic of the thread:

1. Back in the day GQ was one of the best places on the web for laymen to quickly get well-informed answers from journeymen / experts in whatever field imaginable. It still is. But … today wiki & YouTube are bursting with the same info, though not as compactly delivered and certainly not tailored to answer follow-up questions.
   
   I think younger folks of a curious mindset are as common as they ever were. What’s changed is that our “competition” has grown far larger and more sophisticated.
   
   

2. Access to everything online is mediated by Google/Bing search & popularity on social sites. If we can’t SEO ourselves to higher up the search rankings and we can’t generate “buzz” on social media because most of us have no presence there, we’ll be unable to keep up with the Grim Reaper attacking our current members. We need to have first looks to generate ongoing members. And right now I believe (based solely on guesswork) that we’re utterly flunking first looks. Certainly Discourse has the data to answer this question.
   
   

3. We recently had a poll on whether folks post by desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone. See [u]**How do you post to the SDMB?. Long format message boards work great on big screens and keyboards. They suck on phones. Most young people use their phone for 90+% of their online activities. Maybe once everyone is used to dictating, rather than thumbing, their posts on their phones we’d see some renaissance. But more likely not; short punchy tweets are the mental model that resonates for phone users.
   
   Imagine an SDMB limited to e.g. 200 words per post. Whatever it would be, it wouldn’t be what we have today. That is where phone-based posting is taking us, whether we like it or not.

4. This …

@madsircool

Here at the SDMB a question of who is hotter, you or your wife? gets closed because it makes the aging mods uncomfortable. The appropriate response/moderation to this type of non-graphic thread is to remind people if it makes them uncomfortable dont open it. If we want a diverse membership we have to adapt to diverse tastes/opinions. This site was a lot more fun to read when there were a wider range of opinions/experiences and people posted more colorfully. These days a thread gets closed if it gets ‘heated’, whatever that means. The point of discussing controversial and interesting topics is to be passionate about your beliefs while holding a conversation. Heated is more interesting.

is a lot more true than I wish it was.

While I understand that we were also losing members over lack of a “safe space”, we have become a very welcoming place for people who demand a largely or completely safe space and a very off-putting one for those who are less demanding.

My reputation is pretty safe and bland here and IRL I’m not that much different. But even I find myself censoring some of my throwaway comments in the more “fun” categories. I’m a Progressive guy. My niece who lives nearby and used to live in my house is a raging SJW. And is someone I respect highly for her living the life, not just talking the talk. However … I need to actively censor my talk to her satisfaction in her presence. Which eventually becomes tiresome. I now find myself needing to do the same here and that is off-putting to even me.


In an odd sort of way, this safe spaceness is the most “youth friendly” feature of our current culture. Whether the net result is we lose more current and/or potential members than we gain by it is TBD.


For sure the general polarization / tribalization of US society is harmful. It’s hard to get the two sides to play nice together anywhere on any topic. And accusations of bad faith (at best) fly at the first deviation from orthodoxy, whether here or on Parler et al.

4. Discourse has a bunch of neat features designed to enhance “engagement”. But I think at least one of them is a two-edged sword. Even back in vBulletin I used the board by first reviewing threads I’d posted to for new entries (the “my subscribed threads” page), then by looking in each forum table of contents page for interesting new or newly updated threads. Starting with my favorite forum then working down the roster of forums until I ran out of time or interest. The Discourse “Unread” feature is akin to the vBulletin “my subscribed threads” but by default includes threads I’ve read a bit, not just one’s I’ve posted to.
   
   I propose that an unintended consequence of many posters using the Unread feature is we now have fewer and fewer new threads and each thread is driven longer and longer as folks just keep tacking onto the end. We all know it’s intimidating to first notice a thread when it has e.g. 50 posts and knowing we need to read most of it before posting or else we’ll get bitched at by someone (often that beastly @LSLGuy ) for not having noticed post #17 had the same cite or comment or whatever.
   
   Fewer and more off-putting threads is a double whammy: there’s fewer threads for people to find and less desire to post in the few they do find. Pretty quickly even the lurkers find nothing new to read.
   

5. Starting in about 2015 the board became All Trump All The Time. That pushed an awful lot of our international members away. We still spend way too much time and space riding the RW=Evil hobby horse into the ground, much as I agree with the underlying sentiment. Which hobby-horsing continues to be an obstacle to gaining and retaining international members. Who are some of my favorite posters just for the refreshingly different perspectives they bring and the fun & different stuff they can tell us about.
   
   
   
   All the above is problems, not solutions. But identifying problems is step one. Given the very limited supply of time and money TPTB have to keep the place going, we/they can’t be chasing windmills.