Definitely, and it would be a more realistic goal.
I agree. Perhaps we need to think about the target market. Is it users of TikTok or is is the prototypical reader of The Atlantic Monthly? I think the latter.
I don’t mind animated gifs at all - but to mollify those who do, is there any way to constrain the size they are displayed? Maybe if they were limited to about 3X the size of an avatar, not splashed across the whole page, people might accept them?
Ambitious - you want to go really young.
What is the average age of this board? Does anyone know?
I guessed before that we average somewhere in the 50s currently, but that is not based on stats, just 16 years of observation.
I bet it’s older. I’m 44 and I feel like one of the young’uns.
What we don’t want to be is like the Daily Telegraph newspaper in the UK, where the number of new regular readers to the paper is lower than the death rate of existing readers.
This is really cogent, thank you. As one of those who came here originally because of the column, I agree.
But @LSLGuy, your Post #46, Point #2 (SEO ourselves to higher up the search rankings) also seems key. Newcomers who land here via Google tend to bump zombie threads as their first and only post, but some percentage of them must see the light the minute they arrive here, and stick around. Could the SDMB invest some effort in trying to increase traffic from Google?
I’m 48, and so do I. (And kinda still like a newbie after 5 years.)
40 here, and I feel like the annoying kid in the room!
I joined when I was 26 (seven years ago,) but I don’t know that there’s anything the Straight Dope could do to attract younger people. My own joining was completely out of random happenstance - I happened to be doing a Google search for extreme cold and its effect on the human body, and one of the best answers happened to come from a Dope thread, found on Google, so I ended up joining. That’s not an approach that could be…replicated. I don’t know how other “young” people here joined the Dope or what it was that attracted them.
Looking back, I’m pretty sure I ran across individual threads on the Dope over the years, but never stuck around to browse. The time I finally did start browsing around and after a few weeks of lurking join? When I was googling to find other people who remembered that a baloo is a bear and wuzzle is to mix, and found this thread. (So a thread from 2000 on a tpoic from the 1980s.)
You might be talking out of your ass, but your ass makes a good argument.
I do participate on Reddit (not often, but I have an account and sometimes contribute). Comparing the SDMB is like comparing apples to forests. SDMB is an online community. Reddit is not. It is a platform for online communities, and has many communities on there. Or maybe a better analogy is that SDMB is a neighborhood, and Reddit is a metropolis. Maybe if there was a particular subreddit you wanted to compare SDMB to you’d be a bit more accurate. And in that case, I’d suspect that SDMB’s numbers don’t look so bad after all.
As for me, there are only a couple of subreddits I participate in because they meet my interests.
Attracting a large number of young people is just not going to happen. I’m in my late thirties and I feel too young for this place sometimes (which is partially why I rarely visit anymore. I was never a huge poster, but I used to visit several times a day in my 20s). In the early 2000s, when I first joined up, the SDMB was funny, lively, educational, fairly diverse for an online forum, and well moderated. Over the years, the biggest personalities moved on or unfortunately died, and it’s become more insular and cynical as membership has gotten older and less diverse. You can easily create your own forum, of sorts, using social media to follow the people you’re interested in. You can use one account to connect with science twitter, politics twitter, favorite-show-twitter etc. and hear from people who are, in your view, best suited to that subject instead of joining an all purpose message board and expecting one stagnant group to fulfill all your interests.
Well said. I’m aware that there’s a large market of users who prefer a dumbed-down level of discourse (heh), and I don’t begrudge them for flocking to alternative options that cater to their jejune tastes. I’d just hate to see the SDMB descend to the level of those other sites.
This is basically the same story as how I found and why I joined the Dope - I was searching for information related to a sport I play, but somehow landed on this thread from my Google search, and I was captivated by the oddball and heavy-hitting analysis the posters did on what would typically be considered an unimportant topic — a culture that I’ve never found on other parts of the web before.
I’m 59, and I feel young here, sometimes. And despite being a mod and all that, I still feel like a newbie, and like I don’t really belong.
I found the place when a friend recommended it, as another chat site I was on was blowing up.
You know it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea for the SDMB to have a Twitter account that occasionally posts an interesting relevant link to a thread on the board - a bit like Thread Spotting. But a proper Twitter account needs to be managed, it should reply to comments and watch for trends. The boards are not managed like that.
We use to have thread spotting, which was on the SD page itself. But that was one of TubaDiva’s duties. That would have lent itself to being Tweeted also.
That’s exactly what I meant.
I can’t tell if you’re kidding with these questions, but I’ll answer in case anyone isn’t aware.
For purposes of this thread, I think it’s fair to use active membership which is people who have visited the forum.
1,200 in the last 24 hours
1,600 in the last 7 days
2,000 in the last 30 days
The number fluctuates. Summer is usually slow and activity sometimes picks up in the winter months. Several months ago, the count for the last 30 days was 3,000 but it doesn’t fluctuate by the thousands. That’s the highest I’ve seen it in a while.
I think a number of people consider this their online home. Many of them might be sad to see it go.
Ed Zotti is the site administrator.