The suspension mechanism in Discourse is designed to encourage forgiveness and offers common time intervals along with the suspension – a week, a month, 2 months, 6 months, etc. (But wouldn’t people who really wanted to come back, be able to come back with a different email address?)
I dunno. In my experience, people who can’t be civil with the tough topics … “when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
It’s been mentioned, but perhaps the most straightforward way to grow is the most obvious one – share interesting discussions via the share link under each post!
That’d be neat, and it would be cool if @Cecil_Adams created some interesting topics every now and then to cultivate fun, irreverent discussions. Right now Cecil’s created… three topics.
I’ve been shouted down for mentioning this before but we, the current users can do this ourselves. Just pop into FB and post ‘this topic requires more nuanced and reasoned discussion than can be had here. Join me @ for a higher quality chat!’. See what happens.
I will say I had never opened the Trolls R Us thread until it was mentioned as a low point here yesterday, and when I see posts like this:
I frankly just don’t understand what value that thread, or threads like it, and the sort of posts it generates, are adding to the forum. To be frank I’m not even sure that r/The_Donald, before reddit shut it down, would allow such invective and deranged ranting targeting individual posters. That just isn’t a healthy sign for a community. If I had never been on these boards before and stumbled into a thread like that, I’d surely not have ever registered here, like that’s as bad as stuff found on 4Chan or etc. It also just literally advances nothing positive at all for the SDMB.
I think a lot of the interminable pit threads that are thousands of posts of people just spewing hate filled rants about one thing or another are not only bad for the board, I think they’re likely not great psychologically for the people participating in them. I don’t think participation in community like that is a healthy or good thing, and having seen the bile in some of them for the first time I frankly feel a lot more strongly that the pit needs seriously reformed or removed.
I agree with all of this. I also believe that The Pit has the opposite of the effect claimed for it. Rather than acting as an outlet for people who feel the need to share their hate and anger, it makes it seem normal to want to share it. It’s not normal and it spills over into other forums.
I agree that allowing the Pitting of other members is not conducive to healthy membership numbers. That is the one area of the SDMB that I steer clear of in general.
Frankly given the corporate ownership of the forums I think the Pit is a serious risk to the board’s future. Like there is no way on any of their newspaper commentary pages the Sun Times Media Group would allow the sort of comments seen in the pit. I could fairly easily see a scenario where a disgruntled or angry poster collects some of the Pit’s “worst hits” and brings them to the attention of Sun Times, or find a way to get them “Twitter exposure” and suddenly it’s going to be a bad look for the corporation and the end result of that will be fairly predictable in my mind.
Here’s a good example of how we could promote the board:
Veritasium on Youtube had a very interesting video claiming that a propeller driven cart could go downwind faster than the wind.
This is classic Cecil-ish demonstration of something that’s weird but true. So weird that a Physics prof bet him $10,000 that he was wrong. He wasn’t, and won the bet.
Now, the opportunity for marketing: he’s using the money to offer a series of prizes for the best 1-minute video illustrating a commonly misunderstood physics principle.
I would suggest that if others are interested, we pick one of the many threads we’ve had on such topics, and get someone to volunteer to make that one-minute video. Submit it to Veritasium from ‘Cecil Adams’ at the Straight Dope. If the video wins any money, use it for the board’s purposes or have some Dope contests and give out free memberships or something.
The video in question has received 6.3 million views. For a one minute video, there’s a chance to expose the Dope to a massive science-oriented crowd.
I have a candidate for an easy one-minute video: The Bernoulli Effect, and how it’s usually taught wrong. We’ve had multiple threads on that. Or possibly a plane on a treadmill…
Anyway, I thought I’d just toss that out there as an example of the kind of stuff we should be doing if we want to promote the board. It’s right on point, not too much work, and has the potential to bring a lot of new people here to check the place out.
I joined this board as a teenager around 2000, stayed for a while, then left, and re-joined (whether as a more mature person or not is in the eye of the beholder) after a long hiatus a couple of years ago. That story also illustrates how I perceive the SDMB. It’s very late 90s-y, and it was a super cool fount of knowledge back then, much the same way as chatting on ICQ with someone on another continent was super cool in the 90s. But the world has changed. People consume media differently than they used to, and there are tons of other sources of information available now that weren’t around then. I still appreciate the SDMB as one of the most knowledgeable and insightful places online that I know, but to someone who gets in touch with it for the first time now, it feels like an oddity compared to the online world around it.
Agree, and this is why I’d like the Pit to either be abolished, or transformed into a forum for locking up trolls (trolls or disciplined members can only post in the Pit but nowhere else). Venting anger makes things worse, not better.
I think there are just too many peoole on this board whose purpose and main source of entertainment not open debate, but to find people with ‘bad ideas’ and attack them as viciously as they can get away with. They probably think they are doing the Lord’s work, and the Pit is their weapon. They’re never going to give it up. They have no intention of being civil to certain people or arguments from the ‘other’ side.
The Board’s stated aim is fighting ignorance. These days there are an increasing number of people determined to spread ignorance, either out of genuine belief or malign intent.
One can certainly argue that the way in which members counter such misapprehensions and falsehoods could be more constructive but doing so is, if not the “Lord’s work”, certainly the Board’s work.
I found the SDMB waaaaay back in high school (late '90s), when I stumbled upon the Straight Dope column while searching for interesting topics for a journal I was keeping for a class. I kept posting, but eventually stopped by the time I graduated high school. I’ll admit my behavior wasn’t the best, but the pile-ons were vicious, especially when you consider that adults were aiming these comments at a high school kid. I missed some aspects of the board though, to the extent that I came back (with a name change) when I was in college.
I think the Pit is very much a product of the board’s origins; in those days, practically every forum or message board had a place set aside for venting or arguing. I try to stick to the venting threads in the Pit; I’ve seen some pile-ons that were deserved, but many that were not, particularly when directed at new posters. Those don’t make for comfortable reading.
When I’m not here, I’m reading articles and comments on a news aggregator. Its commenters range from pure trolls to genuinely thoughtful people; a time limit on how long threads can be open keeps things from getting too heated. Interestingly, there’s been quite a bit of discussion there lately regarding a decline in posting.
As far as what the SDMB can do – I’m not sure what can be done without the board being attached to something, like a new column or some other posting site that’s going to make people want to discuss things. I’m thinking of G/O Media as an example; yes, you can accuse them of masquerading as news when most of the subsites are really just fancy blogs, but their comment sections are very lively, with plenty of repeat posters. Plus, many article authors engage with the posters, which keeps things interesting.
