Because you can start a thread on Subversive Cross Stitch, and get quotes from Sartre, Dickens, and rude bumper stickers?
We’re well read around here! 
Meh.
I’m just too lazy to find somewhere else to go.
i think what makes this place special is the curiosity. everyone who stumbles onto the site or reads the books and looks up the sites, is very curious. we love to learn new things. it also makes us rather tolerant.
so there you have it. curiosity and tolerance.
A Doper finds herself temporarily broke and asks a GQ about coping with starvation for a short period. In the end, other Dopers give her enough money to eat pretty decently for the next two weeks.
madmonk, I believe. I’m pretty sure he’s still around, although I’m not sure he’s still in Iraq.
madmonk28, to be exact. And he’s in Indonesia now, at least according to his profile.
What makes this place special for me is, to be repetitive, the level of discourse – all POV’s seem to exist, and are presented passionately; but for the most part*, they are presented coherently and respectfully.
*And sometimes not, but you can’t win 'em all…
How about the thread that listed the best 100 SDMB threads.
Including May 5, 1945 - we shall remember. 
and
The Telemarketer Speaks. I Respond :smack:
and
No banner ads (and when we did it sure was fun watching the sparks fly)
I don’t have a specific example, but this board is so much like the internal BB I participated in at IU. It was called the Forum and was barely tolerated by IT/TBTB, since, at the time, the network was in transition from arpaNET/UUNET to open FTP/WWW. At one time there were loads of college grads and undergrads as well as profs who had questions, answers and banter much like what I have seen here. When the Forum was shut down, I was in despair of ever finding such a community again. I feel fortunate to have found this one, despite the problems since 2005. The SDMB is what the Forum would have been if it had been international, not just limited to one educational institution.
Vlad/Igor
For a general interest board we have people in many fields who are willing to take time post answers.
We have doctors, lawyers, mechanics, and every kind of IT professional you can think of. We have people who write TV shows, manage libraries, teach, go to school, are experts in various scholarly fields such as bible history, cold reading, magic, constitutional law, how to make the perfect martini, and as Dex mentioned, nuclear safety! And again, these people will take time not just to answer questions, but sometimes to engage in multiple post dialogs over hours, days or weeks to answer questions.
I asked a question on Excel spreadsheets and got someone (Morbo, who I think works for Microsoft) along with others who gave very specific instructions on how to make simple changes that made my spreadsheets 75% smaller and 80% faster to load.
Dipsticks? We’ve got a few, but then again, too few to mention, or at least too few to complain too bitterly about. The moderation here is some of the best I’ve seen on any board. The couple of times I’ve got warnings were well deserved.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all high brow discourse and the choirs of angels. The political discussions run the gamut from talking points spouting toadies to incredibly well informed posters. Some questions get lost in a grammar nitpick. But all in all, there are very few places on the web, especially general interest boards, where the signal to noise ratio is anywhere near what this place usually puts out.
Throw in that this is the official home of Cecil on the net, and how can you resist?
You guys make me smarter. I find myself pushing the wittiness envelope just to keep up.
And the hoarding thread is typical of the insightful, thoughtful, discussion we have around here.
I keep reading the thread title as, “What is the SDMB special?” and answering it in my head as, “Crockpot brownies with a side order of bacon salt.”
This is one of the most dynamic forums around. There are new posts on various topics no matter what the time of day. A grand community of literate members with a great sense of humor. Expert opinions, and folks with google fu to the nth degree. Being this kind of Doper is something you can rightly boast of, to young children and senior citizens alike.
(And it doesn’t have avatars or posted images!)
No one discriminates against us OFs!
There are plenty of examples of Dopers with babies that had serious problems. I know at least in my case, not only was the board a good place to vent in real time while at a very depressing Neo-natal ICU, but also that I received a number of unsolicited offers to help. Eg, people willing to buy and Fedex special high tech baby bottles at their own expense that day if I had trouble getting an on line supplier to ship overseas.
Let me get this straight… We’re kind, generous, snarky, witty, smart, well-read, humble, curious, lazy, tolerant, creative, crafty, dynamic, and… edgy (have you ever heard about pan-fried semen?). :dubious:
That’s why I love this place so much.
I started a recent thread asking for help buying sheets. Sheets 1 ... Ruby 0 - In My Humble Opinion - Straight Dope Message Board
Within 16 posts, I got a response from
.
It’s amazing to me how generous the people are here with not only their wallets, but their knowledge.
I’ve recently been lurking at another board just because they are the “largest” general interest board just to see what it’s like “out there”. (I usually don’t go anywhere else but a few of the neighborhood forums like Opal’s place.) With flashy avatars and “d00d that suxxors” posts, I’m always glad to come home.
Plus we we don’t just have people from the office/academia/admin/legal end of the spectrum. I remember a thread about how concrete trucks worked and a guy who’d driven a concrete truck for decades chipped in.
Then there was the time there was news that a Kiwi scientist made certain fairly startling claims consequent upon the recovery of remains of a gigantic squid. A thread was started, one thing lead to another, and next thing we know the very same scientist is posting as a guest in the thread in question, defending his claims. We have pull.
That was Poster #6, and there have been a couple others contributing first-hand knowledge in that relatively short thread since then.
Poster 6’s (Santo Rugger) first observation, before going into more detail: “I write safety basis documents for a facility that processes weapons grade plutonium. The previous four posters have it pretty much covered.”
This points up another thing I have noticed, our non-experts hit pretty close to the mark, and quickly.
The upshot of all this medical expertise is that although you can’t ask for medical help on the boards, if you collapsed at a doper meet, you’d stand a good chance of survival.
I like the solutions to painful yet seemingly elementary problems with PCs that we get on the boards. Answers that come quickly and succinctly too I should add.
The incidence of people posting “First!” is way, WAY lower than pretty much any other board I have ever visited.