The Straight Dope is not popular because it’s not cool, and doesn’t even try to hang out with the cool boards to try to become cool. The Dope insists on wearing pocket protectors in a button down white shirt buttoned up to the collar without a tie. The Dope wears socks and sandals, a pair of black rim glasses held together with tape where they join over the nose. The Dope has bowl haircut and a cow lick. It’s pretty much hopeless. Damnit, you won’t even help people do their homework. The other boards have the Straight Dope’s lunch money and bicycle, the Dope has to take the long way home to avoid getting the crap kicked out of it by the bully boards.
> I think there’s a good reason
> why atheists are more likely
> to comment about their beliefs
> than theists on the SDMB.
> Where else does an atheist
> have to talk about their beliefs?
> Theists have places to do so,
> but where does an atheist go?
Reddit, specifically /r/atheism and the tens, if not hundreds of other atheist subreddits. “As an atheist …” posts are also plentiful, regardless of the thread topic.
Atheist Republic.
Atheist Forums.
Atheist Discussion.
Atheist & Agnostic Forum.
Hundreds of atheist, agnostic, and humanist blogs.
My bold.
“A button down white *NYLON *shirt…”
I’d say the main reason, aside from changing landscape of social media tools, would be that our namesake has faded.
I found my way here many years ago after being a fan of the Straight Dope books and column. It made total sense to me that if I liked the tone of Cecil Adams, I would be interested in a set of forums that followed that vein more or less. I have not been disappointed over the years.
I also agree with those who mentioned a cool reception to many newcomers. Surely this place would be annoying if inundated with people who couldn’t form a complete sentence, and much of the cool reception serves as an important filter to the quality of posters here. Nevertheless, when the aim of nitpickery descends from “precision” to “I see your tiny mistake and therefore I win!”, it becomes tedium.
I love the fact that we have diversity here. I don’t have to ever delve into the Pit or Great Debates and I still find stirring discussion. And I’m certain there are many people who come to sharpen their debating or sparring skills and have little need for the parts I like.
elmwood, you define places to go differently than I do. I don’t think of social media as being places to go. I meant places in the real world. I never think of websites as being where I’m going when someone asks me where I’ll be going this weekend. Some of the local clubs and national organizations have message boards, Facebook pages, E-mail conversations, etc., but that’s just things I fit into my spare time whenever it’s possible, just as I think of posting to the SDMB as something to fit into my spare time. Club meetings are regularly scheduled things. Conventions are too, as are vacations.
Religious people go to events weekly or whatever at a location that’s usually built for that purpose. They have worship services, Sunday (or whenever) schools, classes for members of the congregation, etc. that are held regularly and at which they meet their friends. For many supposedly religious people, these social events are really almost all that defines their religion. They have only vague religious beliefs, but they don’t contradict the truly religious people in their congregation and they do their best to pretend they have deep religious beliefs. Are there that many real social events for atheists?
And they have to be dark socks.
Church attendance is down in pretty much all western countries including the US. Also down are groups like Elks, Moose, Rotary ,etc - they are not getting many young members and a lot of older members are dying. There are many more options for young people such as meetup, video games, exercise, etc.
I don’t know why this is a response to my post. I was pointing out that I like to bump inactive years-old threads, and I’m no newbie!
There is one love/hate thing I have about this forum.
On every other forum I use if your post is quoted by someone in a reply you receive a notification to inform you. It doesn’t matter if it happens two minutes after you hit submit or if you logged back in for the first time in six months. The forum software will let you know.
SDMB is a throwback. You have to manually click on the thread, go back to where you left off and slowly go through new posts, or even pages of new posts, to see if anyone quoted you.
On one hand I like that this forum is the odd one out in remaining old-school as it pushes you into reading the thread from where you left off rather than the new forum software, where as I said, you click the notification and it automatically takes you to the post concerning you. You bypass every other post that was made after you. On the other hand forums that have been around for so long develop characters, they have established posters, posters who are either very cliquey or very antagonising to each other and as a newbie that can make it hard to get involved if you make some effort to make a contribution but upon coming back and going through the threads you just get ignored.
Bijou Drains, you’re talking about the Bowling Alone effect, I assume:
Define “nice”.
Speaking only for myself, if they can’t deal with that, they’re not going like this board and should go away.
I’m wondering exactly how many zombie threads were revived to add something really worth reading (even excluding spammers). Only the mods could tell us for sure, but I could count the ones I’ve seen on one hand. So potential that these “highly potential” supposedly have is negligible.
Occasionally some naive newcomer appears in the news by acing all the experts. Do you know why that makes the news?
-
Non-experts like most of us like to read those stories because they comfort us and makes us realize even the experts don’t know everything.
-
The experts being right happens almost every time. That’s normal, so it’s not news. Experts being wrong is rare. That’s big news.
Define “nice”. It’s not nice to begin posting in any forum without first reading the rules, forum descriptions, FAQ, and lots of posts. Speaking only for myself, if someone initially won’t do that minimum, I’d rather they not post.
The solution to that is to not post on that subject until you improve your arguments, or stop posting on those subjects entirely.
That’s an option. They just set it to “no” by default. Click on “User CP”, and then on “edit options” Scroll down the page until you see:
And set it to receive emailed notifications if you want. I think that would drive me nuts, and I’ve left it off on every forum that allows it.
The vast majority of zombified threads are bumped to make an inane, stupid, or irrelevant comment, or to insult someone who last posted 10 years ago. If a comment is at all relevant, I generally will leave a thread open. I would say maybe one in fifty is bumped by someone who is making a genuine new contribution to a thread.
Puzzlegal, I get notifications here and they are just to inform you of any new activity in a thread you have participated in. What Boycott is referring to is that many boards notify you specifically about someone replying to (quoting) one of your comments in the thread. Not just any new comment in the thread, unless you choose that option.
Statler, is that you? Or is it Waldorf? Your post could be summarized as “it’s a feature, not a bug”. Ok then!
Thank you for the insightful analysis, Mr. Berra.
Oh, you got yourself one o’ them new-fangled “phonographs,” eh? I’ll be honest; I’ve toyed with the idea of getting one, but if a gramophone was good enough for my grandpappy, it’s by-god good enough for me (I miss Grandpappy. He always used to tell us such great stories of the days of his rebellious youth. Like when he scandalized the neighborhood by selling his Edison Graphophone and came home with a Victrola).
I think you mean “bad, bad, bad Rock star! 
”
Hey, kayaker, you left out “mercifully unencumbered by any compulsions toward false modesty.”
In the before times I’d meet my atheist buddies at a place that served us alcohol. I occasionally have dreams about the before times. You know, every social event is atheistic when there are atheists there!
Jackie is cool. insert Nancy emoji here
Oh, yeah, that’s not the same.