Maybe a little truth in advertising. Straight Dope Message Board: Sometimes, online, it’s functional!
Sadly Social Media Giants are taking over everything.
Forums are very 2000, but they can be very interesting! I like forums, but the new generations likes new technology.
This is such a long thread that after I started reading around the third page by the time I finished I had been logged out. But I don’t think getting logged out is the problem here. Perhaps the problem is first agreeing on what popularity is and what it means.
I fear the cheapest form of popularity means a lot of engagemnt by the users: participation as measured by quantity, not quality (which is difficult to measure anyway). FB, Twitter and the other “successful” agents know that the best way to get a lot of traffic and many interactions is to foster hate, controversy and polarization and then let it run its course. That which I call Fascism, although that is arguably a short hand place holder expression for what I really hate. Here, in this forum, the moderators do a good job of preventing the most rampant expressions of that spirit, so “not being very successful” is perhaps a positive thing. I like it. Don’t be a jerk.
I never visit Reddit, I feel intimidated by a thread with thousands of posts. I will never read them all, what is the point of getting posts in faster than what a human can read? If this is success it looks pointless to me as a user.
We shall see how long the Dope can survive in a world where everything has to pay off, but it is slowly becoming one of the pages where I spend more and more time, mostly reading, sometimes posting. I hope it stays, does not have to be much more successful to satisfy me.
JC, I greatly appreciate the depth of experience you bring to this place, but if this place isn’t special or different, why do we periodically get posts like this:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=22261758&postcount=24
That one was from just a few hours ago, but there have been others like it, including the occasional one-liner from old-timers saying something like “this is why I love this place” in response to some in-depth answer to an obscure technical question, or maybe something as trivial as creatively humorous snark.
Reddit may be more popular but it’s just an aggregator of unrelated forums that are mostly crap, AFAICT, and Quora IMHO has an overly inflated opinion of itself.
We really are special, IMHO, but the trick is how to leverage that into membership growth, and I don’t know how to do that. Most of the popular sites I know of are all specialty sites, and general-interest places like this seem at risk of going the way of general-interest print publications. But the few general-interest publications that continue to be successful – to cite the New Yorker as a prime example – do it my maintaining a consistently high level of quality, both in serious in-depth reporting and in well-honed humor.
It would certainly appear the new poster REASON was banned for being too right wing. I don’t even see any warnings about any of their posts. They were annoying for sure, but didn’t appear to break any rules as far as I could see.
Seriously? You clearly haven’t read through his posts. He was engaging in some of the most blatant trolling I’ve ever seen on this board. Jonathan Chance warned him for trolling here, and then he immediately started trolling another thread, and was banned. He also made racist posts, referring to the coronavirus as “Kung Flu.”
But I think he should have been banned for posting in multicolored fonts alone.
But I’m not sure what this has to do with the board’s popularity. Although it could well be the case that racist trolls who post in multicolored fonts might be a much larger demographic than the one we have now. 
I looked at his last five or six posts, and didn’t see any moderator action or commentary after any of those.
I also think you are conflating “expressing extremely common right wing viewpoints” as “trolling”, which is kind of the point people were making upthread. Yes, those common right wing viewpoints are annoying and lowbrow, but I’m having trouble seeing how expressing those wrongheaded but sincerely held opinions constitutes “trolling”.
ETA: I think what it really comes down to is “we don’t want those kinds of people around here”, and while I am instinctively sympathetic to that opinion as I too find them irritating, it flies in the face of the protests that the board does not have a left wing slant or that right wing posters don’t face a headwind if they attempt to participate.
If you see his posts as merely “expressing extremely common right wing viewpoints” then there might be a gap too wide to be bridged here. I would like to think that such beliefs as he displayed were rare among those on the right.
It’s because we banned The Grapist and the “my post is my cite” guy.
Go to this thread. Do a search for “triggering.”
Because lefties find it triggering when the same level of rhetoric is used to support Trump as is used to attack him. And triggering lefties –> trolling.
Part of the reason why the SDMB isn’t more popular is that it is so slanted to the left, and especially that the slant is denied. To claim that we are so smart and hip, and then deny something so blatant, tends to undercut the claim. IOW the claim that it isn’t slanted is not simply false; it is “global warming is a myth” kind of false.
Regards,
Shodan
Ruken-
You jest, but there’s a lot to be said for the Internet theory that whack jobs lead to page views lead to ad dollars. Say what you want about Jack Dean Tyler and the others but they generated interest.
Get me, wolfpup, I’m not saying we’re not a community and that we don’t touch each other’s lives in many ways. We do.
When I say we’re not special, I mean that there are thousands of smallish Internet communities where people come together and touch each others lives in a positive way. That’s a great thing. But it means that we’re one of thousands of places people can go to get that sort of special feeling. That’s the thing we need to get past. We need a reason for people to be drawn here in particular instead of somewhere else. Without that there’ll be no turnaround.
It can’t be all personality. At some point there needs to be some actual net benefit for people to come here compared to somewhere else.
What I’m hearing is a need for more I waterboard! and Pan-fried Semen.
Who among us is up for the challenge?
As I remember the “If The Lord of the Rings was written by someone else” thread generated a lot of interest outside the usual crowd, as did the one about the unusual names of NPR news staff.
All you are doing is admitting that you really haven’t read many of his posts. I’ve already linked to Jonathan Chance’s warning.
How about these:
He admitted to trolling over and over and over again. He says quite explicitly that he is posting in order to piss people off and laughing about it. I have rarely seen a troll come out and admit to what they were doing so explicitly.
There’s plenty more stupidity and goading in his posts, but how anyone can say that this guy wasn’t trolling is beyond me.
If you wanted to make such a point, you picked one of the worst possible examples to do so. I’m quite sure we would have banned a left-wing troll who behaved in such a fashion.
Not to mention the Private Messages I got wherein he admits to posting to create outrage and upset others.
If you see a leftie boasting about deliberately triggering conservative posters and laughing about it in GD and PE, please do report it.
That explains why the squid has started playing the banjo.
Yeah, those posts are admissions of trolling, fair enough. But when his last half-dozen posts are not like that, and there’s no sign of moderator action in the threads he was posting in before getting banned, and no thread about his banning, (1) why wasn’t he banned earlier? (2) how can you expect people who see his “BANNED” label and look at his last several posts, to understand what the reason was?
Moderator Instructions
SlackerInc, you’ve been given more than ample information about the reasons for this banning. Continuing to ask about it once again verges on trolling itself. Anyone who was so extraordinarily unobservant that they didn’t see the guy was trolling could have simply emailed or PM’d a mod if they were puzzled, which is standard practice anyway.
He was banned about 7 hours after he started posting, and got out 28 posts in that time. It took a little time to discuss it in the mod loop. Jonathan warned him about 6 hours after he started posting, and he was banned about an hour after that. Even for the most blatant trolls, it may take a little time to go through the process.
In any case, we don’t normally discuss trolls in the first place. We would have deleted his posts, except there were too many and too many people had quoted him. I’m instructing you to drop this subject now.
Colibri