One aspect of the people here is that they have strong opinions, and often those opinions can be things about sex, race, gender, etc. I think the tone has tilted a bit too far in ensuring that no one is offended, but that can make the discussions more boring. Maybe that makes it more pleasant, but it also likely drives down page views. A controversial thread will have thousands of heated posts going back and forth. Just because someone is offended does not necessarily mean that the speech was offensive. As it is, it doesn’t seem really worth it as much to try to dive into controversial issues because the opportunity to really dig into the nuances of the disagreements is tamped down if someone is offended.
And all I know is that your previous examples have fallen flat, and your newest post is so vague as to be useless- “At some time someone changed something and something happened”.
People have said the Dope might be finished soon for want of money.
Can’t we just take the whole shooting match over to Reddit? Create 8 or 9 subreddits that would be the various SDMB forums? Or however they do it there?
I would certainly favor a policy that was explicitly more tolerant of conversations that are heated, when people are simply expressing strong opinions with forceful rhetoric. That’s completely different from being disrespectful toward people’s dignity as human beings. But I think part of this problem is that some posters lack the insight to distinguish between the two.
So I don’t think that you can attribute “toning down” just to moderation. I think a large part of the problem is that many people lack insight into their own behavior, and are incapable of distinguishing commentary that is (say) misogynistic from commentary that is perfectly acceptable - talking about sex in a non-sexist way, for example. So they just respond by sulking and throwing out the straw man that they aren’t allowed to say anything.
Subreddits start with an r/. Can you deal? 
[And for the avoidance of doubt, this is totally intended as a lighthearted joke to clear the air, not to resurrect a heated debate!]
We’ve had many threads over the years asking about other boards that were similar to the SDMB. Nothing suggested ever stuck as a true equivalent. Either the boards were single topic or overly political or too trivial or too small or too something. The Dope had a niche where several itches could be scratched all at once by a community rather than huge numbers of individuals.
Our community has suffered attrition. Some of it is just plain aging. After twenty years people are going to die, age out, lose interest, get swept up in other interests. A steady stream of new members is needed, but as a community we are seldom welcoming to new posters, often with good reason.
Why are the new posters so unpleasant? Maybe it’s because of what they see when they lurk on the boards. We supposedly have a single overarching rule: don’t be a jerk. Yet jerks are never moderated for being jerks. The result is that we are overrun with sexist jerks, racist jerks, homophobic jerks, transphobic jerks, political jerks, religious jerks, and petty nitpicking jerks. We have jerks who never respond and jerks who flood a thread with fifty posts on a tiny point. We have jerks who live to argue and jerks who can’t admit they were wrong. Every long thread eventually devolves into jerk on jerk warfare. If you doubt me, pick a few long threads at random, read them as if you had never seen the names before, and ask yourself whether you would want to jump in at the 200 post mark.
This is nothing new. Eve, a transwoman who was a star poster, left in 2012 because of the transphobic comments. More and more woman and transpeople followed her. Fewer and fewer women start threads or get involved in political threads or anything but anodyne subjects. I don’t for a second believe that it’s a coincidence that many of the jerks we have are men.
Reddit began as a total free-speech, anybody can say anything site. That failed spectacularly. Today most of the hate is shunted off into cul-de-sacs and modbots rule. Reddit is too large to generalize about, but generally nevertheless it draws active users because of upvotes, images, and endless “flair.” When a subreddit has a million members, it just needs 1% activity to feel active. Our 1000 needs a much higher percentage.
We can try those Reddit-like things. They’re demonstrably what younger users want. We can change the outmoded names of the forums. (Instead of telling people they could have googled that question, call GQ Let Us Google That For You and boast about the discussions a simple question can engender.) We can -gasp- try marketing. But we need to figure out a way to deal with the jerks and make the site attractive to outsiders seeing it for the first time.
The problem with this approach is that some core aspects of Reddit functionality, such as upvotes/downvotes, sorting of topics/comments by voting, and comments being nested inside one another instead of a flat style based on the time of post as done by the SDMB, etc., will still remain.
These aspects are, IMO, big impediments to the type of reasoned debates we see here. As far as I’m aware, there’s no way for even the admins of a subreddit to do away with this core functionality (they can hide the vote buttons with CSS styles, but tech-savvy users can still find ways around it).
Does anyone know how @Giraffe’s board (however it’s properly named) is faring?
IIRC / AIUI (I’ve never been there) in large part it was created when a bunch of the “fun” (read “snarky argumentative”) people took umbrage at what they saw as the latest outrageous tightening of SDMB’s already-overweening moderation policies and marched out in a huff. At least to vent that part of their spleen there; many stayed here too at least at first.
IMO they’ve always been our quirky younger cousin in some sense. What they’re doing differently and how well it is / isn’t working for them may give us some good clues for what will / won’t work for us.
I was wondering that too.
Active members-360.
There is some truth to this; I mean, just the inclusion of avatars really seemed to rub some of you crotchety old farts the wrong way 
Here we have people complaining that somebody might post an animated gif! ANIMATED! Woe to those that cross that line.
But that’s just how younger internet denizens communicate now; on reddit, a long, well-thought-out post might have 20 “hilarious” animated gifs in its list of replies, but that still makes it an active discussion; and they will be interspersed with actual, written responses as well. Here? First person to respond with a gif/meme/fucking-youtube-link-without-a-fully-written-synopsis gets bitched at. For a younger person, that’s just openly hostile to how they think the internet works.
IOW:
Pictures. Because words are too hard.
We’re going to have a hard time swallowing that one.
Another thought is it sounds like a lot of what folks do on other social media venues is exchange either cute ideas or funny ideas. It’s all about tugging heartstrings and eliciting chuckles.
We have jokes here, but that’s the 10%, not the 90%. What we’re talking about may be just as mundane and pointless, but we’ll do it relatively straight-facedly.
https:// media.giphy.com/media/14smAwp2uHM3Di/giphy.gif
Edit: Fair enough.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but I also can’t wholeheartedly agree. But if the way things are done here is just leading to board death, maybe, just MAYBE, we can all relax a bit? Or do we just want to hang out here while it lasts, and watch things slowly sink into the tarpit?
@Darth_Sensitive Thanks for the demonstration!
I spend a lot of my professional work time strategising TV marketing campaigns to younger audiences (16-34s) and they are a very sophisticated audience, much more savvy to cheap marketing tricks than older audiences. They will see right through anything that’s inauthentic. So trying to make the Dope into something it isn’t will not work and will simply piss off the people who are already here.
Sure, place something into areas where there might be a higher reach amongst younger people but we should not try to act like anything other than who we are. So get onto places like Instagram, YouTube and TikTok somehow if you can do it authentically. And if younger people like what they see, they will come.
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Yes. I have never posted on a forum that has its finger less on the pulse of how web-native generations interact than this one. The only “hip” thing here is “I think I broke my”.
Rather than reply to specific posts, I’m going to just shoot off a bunch of general reactions…
- Why is membership declining?
Because it’s a message board, and membership is declining on every message board. That’s partially reddit, but it’s partially twitch and twitter and tiktok and youtube and a huge fraction of the reason is Facebook. Facebook is the behemoth that has eaten most of my old mailing lists, and a lot of message boards.
And there’s nothing we can do about this. What we CAN do is think about how to stay viable despite the lower profile of message boards.
- What’s the best way to add younger members?
Do they need to be younger? Well, probably some need to be younger. But the broader issue is attracting new members of any ilk. Every community dies out if it doesn’t have a steady influx of new members. I like hanging out with younger people. I was surprised when my son hosted a party and half the people he invited were people I thought of as my friends. But if this board was successful in attracting new 50 year olds every year I don’t think it would be in danger of dying.
We could market. We could be more welcoming to new members. Marketing is almost certainly a good idea, but it’s well outside my wheelhouse, so I’ll let others comment on that. Being more welcoming is a form of “changing what this place is”. I guess which changes might be worth it, and which would diminish the value for current members is a hard question.
A related question (and maybe the more immediate one) is how to pay for the existing board. I wish I had a better sense of the finances involved. I do know that having it all be owned by a giant corporation, with the overhead that entails (and I include the overhead in decision-making at least as much as the overhead in $$) complicates the matter.
I think targeting the 35 to 55 year old market would be the way to go.
And still make the board’s average age younger. 