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The only other forum I was seriously involved in for years was one about the murder of Meredith Kercher, and the trials of Amanda Knox, Raffaele Sollecito, and Rudy Guede.
It was really fascinating because the board had a lot of serious experts and intelligent people in many different fields, from Italy, Britain, America, and many other countries. Lawyers, experienced police officers, forensic experts, medics, scientists, local people in Perugia who could take photos and get information, people willing to translate documents from Italian, etc.
Large quanties of police photos, forensic data, transcripts of police interviews, court documents, and all kinds of background info was posted on the board, analysed, and discussed in depth.
Sometimes other cases were discussed, and there was quite a bit of general discussion on a wide range of topics, especially when there there was nothing much going on in the case itself.
Like this board, you got to know people over a period of years.
The board is gone now, but all the information that was collected is preserved on The Murder Of Meredith Kercher Wiki Site.
And, yes, Knox and Sollecito are guilty – there’s no doubt whatsoever in my mind, and that was the general consensus on the board.
I don’t get why Amazon is the bad guy in this. They bought IMDB in 1998, started the message board in 2001 and ended it in 2017 when it was overrun with trolls and bigots. Even the man who started IMDB and sold it to Amazon thought it was a good idea to close the MBs. It’s not like MBs were on the rise in 2017. I’d say running a message board for almost 20 years on ad revenue is a pretty damn good run.
C-D actually has a lot of non-city, and general interest (if rather specific) boards. Pets, travel, gardening, history, and more; they’re all there. Its problem (at least the way I see things) is that it has so many forums, sub-forums, and sub-sub-forums, that no sense of community emerges, as it has here.
Thanks for the link! It was quite the rabbit hole. I didn’t realize this case was still so controversial. I was tempted to try to relitigate the particulars here – but it would be a threadjack of the highest order!
I was a heavy-duty message board user back in the day, spending lots of time and effort using and creating content, as well as acting as a moderator on some forums. I have varied unusual, technical interests, and message boards were incredibly important to my learning and inspiration.
I remember realizing back in 2005 or so, how incredibly cool and useful it was, that now I could have direct one-on-one discussions with far-flung experts whose books I used to read in the 1990’s, wishing I could pick the authors’ brains. It really was like a dream come true, and the best thing in all of the Internet.
When Facebook turned big, I hopped on that train and enjoyed it, too. I didn’t exactly abandon message boards, but soon learned that most were reduced to mere shells of their former being, as the 2010’s chugged on. On the surface, no worries, since those specialty hobby guys I used to do the message boards migrated into FB, as well. Specialty FB groups soon sprung up, so a new format but the same gist, yei.
The truth is, FB Groups are a shitty replacement for message boards. No-one does long, thoughtful, carefully composed replies on FB, the format just doesn’t work like that. Worse, whatever fruitful discussions happen, they go with the flavor-of-the-second flow of FB, to be seen for a short while and then never again. This is of course by design, since to keep up with what’s going on, one then has to visit FB constantly.
One side effect of the FB format is that, since there are no Libraries or Stickies, there is nowhere to direct newbies to with their newbie questions. So a FB Group stream ends up being dominated by the same basic questions asked by yet another new guy, ad infinitum.
Creating content for FB is a useless exercise. Back in the message board days, I could spend a day crafting a really useful, well-composed How-To, put it as a sticky on a forum and leave it be. Within five years, hundreds of people would read the text, learn from it and then proceed to ask specific, intelligent further questions on the forum. Time well spent. With FB, even the best, most useful replies drown in the inconsequential mass of insta-fluff.
One of the coolest things about the old hobby-specific message boards was that people often have multi-year projects for whatever reasons, and following them long-term is easily accomplished within the forum realm. It didn’t matter if someone dropped out for a year. If he came back and updated his three-year-long project thread, everyone was on board and enjoyed the proceedings.
Within the past year or so I’ve all but abandoned Facebook, due to the reasons mentioned above (and not for data mining concerns etc.). There are a handful of specialty forums that haven’t been turned into ghost towns. These days, I spend my free screen time there, again composing well-thought-out, long musings and enjoying the long-term discussion they bring forth.
Because amazon is the current default Bad Guy in any issue with which it has even a tangential relationship. 
When in doubt, slam Jeff Bezos, or if he’s not available, Bill Gates (who is tangentially related to just about everything in the world).
Besides the IMDB message boards (which I also loved) being taken over by trolls, I didn’t see any upside for the owners to continue it. To keep a message board (or any format which allows comments) on track requires serious moderation. Which means staff-- only so much can be done automatically.
Even The Atlantic discontinued reader comments because they quickly deteriorated into utter, disgusting, insulting, offensive crap. (Ralph Waldo Emerson would have been rolling over in his grave.) The NYTimes and WaPo reader comments are heavily moderated, and the former don’t even post immediately. Amazon has recently removed the option to comment on reviews. That was too bad, because frequently the sellers/manufacturers gave helpful comments. But I digress.
The IMDB is the ultimate database for information on movies and TV. They didn’t need the headache of moderating a message board. The boards were a popular service, a freebie, a lagniappe, but the virtually essential function of the IMDB as a resource stands without the boards. IMDB is the only game in town.
I got the impression that reddit is indeed skewed to younger people, but not at all skewed to male posters. That was however based on discussions for TV shows with female appeal. So I guess it depends very much on the specific subreddit.
Everything about reddit depends on this.
It’s not possible to make a meaningful generalization about reddit, except to say that it’s a giant mish-mash of brain-twistingly far-flung interest groups on every conceivable topic. The tone of a subreddit reflects the mindset of its participants, from intellectual and polite, to soul-crushingly sarcastic, to geeky, to warmly fuzzy and supportive (the last especially when it comes to the death of beloved pets). If you pop into reddit and don’t like what you see, rest assured you’re not seeing all there is. It could take a long time to find a sub whose culture you like.
I looked for some demographic data about Reddit, and there statistics showing that Redditors skew young and male. Googling “demographics of Reddit” turns up a lot of stuff, but this article is a pretty good compilation of the available information (there are links to sources at the end of the article).
Interesting, thanks for posting that. By the way, I noticed that they call Reddit a ‘network of communities’, which may indeed be an apt description.
Obviously the depends on the subreddit. The one for classic cars or crafting or 70s TV would have totally different demographics. There are plenty of great subreddits that are for general discussion with a manageable size where people tend to know each other but for most of those you need an invitation. There is one called askoldpeople where younger people ask questions to GenXers and older. It’s full of great discussions.
It’s the entitlement that gets me. “These guys gave me a free place to hang out and discuss movies for 20 years. When it got to be a pain in the ass to run they shut it down. How dare they!”
Snopes was the closest I’ve seen to the SDMB, but that’s long gone. All the knock off Dope boards are/were all but useless as you could read all the new posts by going there for an hour every month. Every six months if you didn’t read posts bitching and moaning about the Dope.
Now, the only other place I go is some subreddits, but they are no use in having a back and forth conversation. The upvotes, hugs, money shit just ruins the experience for me. Now I just do factual answer sites like whatisthisthing? or whatbirdisthis? I can usually browse an hour or two on those.
Exactly. Those boards had totally gone to shit anyway. I never posted there but I would sometimes read them after an episode of the Sopranos or something to see if there was anything I missed. I gave up after the first three pages were something like “that was so intense. I will post more tomorrow after I have had time to process it.” Process it? Seriously? It’s a fucking tv show not combat in Afghanistan.
At first you just have to laugh and think “Wow! This guy is too wrapped up in this show” but it’s hard to laugh after the fiftieth guy says the same thing. By the time the boards were closed down they were all but useless. The actual IMDB site is so useful, I always frown a little when someone links to a wiki page instead, knowing I’ll just end up going to IMDB anyway.
All the different boards have personalities of their own. I also was on IMDB since 2001, but sometimes too many members can be a bad thing. The only positive I can think of with a board like that is you aren’t second-guessing whether you should hit “Reply” or not. I tend to like specialized boards, because even all of them have sub-categories and I find people who have great taste in music usually do in movies and in comedy, which are the boards I frequent. One thing I do is notice is a few are banning politics.
Someone commented that reddit is a network of communities, and it took me a while, but I use it for sports… It’s just too slow for my old computer, just like Facebook, but I never liked it, because as someone pointed out, even the best threads get drowned out. I also don’t like the other garbage I have to sift through to get there…
EDIT: For those who are looking for something rare, google something like “Proboards + _______”
One thing I’ve noticed about Reddit is that its posters seem to have an awfully high number of one-night stands and casual hookups.
It all depends on what sub you’re reading. Never hear about that in the tea or espresso forums or the places where I hang out, r/CatsInBusinessAttire, r/Zoomies, r/MadeMeSmile, r/toebeans, r/HoldMyCatnip, r/tuckedinpuppies.
Where are YOU hanging out? Wait… don’t tell me.
r/AskReddit is the biggest one, and that’s the one I usually look at.
People stopping by certain subfora of Ravelry might also come to the conclusion that crafters and fiber artists are a bunch of not-so-closeted alcoholics and abuser magnets. Some of its biggest groups are, and that’s why I seldom visit them. As another Raveler put it, “these hideous relationships which almost always involve several children…” and I understood. Like-minded people do find each other, that’s for sure, and I found my niche there.
Are there a lot of questions about casual hookups at r/AskReddit?