Towards a new RI

[Luther Blissett]

Ha, TIDS is an amazing resource. How often does that return search results for you? Quite often for me. I don't care if it resides in the Data Dump but it doesn't annoy me.

[JackRiddler]

Anyway, I've asked before and never received an answer and I'd really like one before this place goes away, (if it does) however, I'd really, pretty please, and would pay for a consise archive of this site. Anyone?

So have I! Many times! Endorsed! Please?

Active topics, people: if you're not using it already, discover it! No matter how many sub-forums, it's actually all one forum: latest posts. Please someone consider if it's possible to implement my idea of requiring that every new thread also be assigned to a sub-forum via a required drop-down menu, so that we have a top-level order to this damn thing.

So on the larger issues here:

1) This board is 9 years old.

2) I've been around for 6+ years. Since the beginning of my R.I. experience, I have seen about 30 flamewars (an estimate), usually involving at least a half-dozen and sometimes up to 20 members in rhetorical combat, accusations and insults. These have often ranged across multiple threads that inhabit the top of the board for days. I doubt there's anyone on this thread who has never taken part. Or had their conniptions over it, sometimes ranging to ridiculous rhetoric, as if crimes are being committed. (That may also have happened, of course, for example back during the Legendary ARG Affair.)

3) Jesus, I've been on message boards for 20+ years! (What a tragedy, this is why I do not look back on six published books. Sigh.) On all of them, on a regular basis, I'd say at least once every three months, there have been threads bemoaning the board's decline; denouncing a change in its character, politics or subject focus; complaining about unloved and/or stinky members; claiming that the atmosphere is poisonous to new readers or members, and chasing people away; or averring personal persecution and efforts by others to censor subjects and members. Many such posts have been justified, or entertaining, and most have been disposable. (Your perception of which part is which will probably vary from mine.) I doubt there's anyone in this thread who has never taken part.

4) That being said, there's no doubt the board's character, politics and subject focii have shifted around a great deal, and several times. Has this been for the better or the worse? Do they continue to do so, or has a stasis been reached? Are interest and quality greater or lesser than before? Answers to these questions may vary. Sooner or later, everything dies.

5) As of July 25, 2014, R.I. has accumulated more than half a million posts, 526,222 according to the board stats, in 35,815 threads. If printed out in single-spaced pages, given our post lengths and frequent copy-pasta, this may amount to anywhere from 100,000 to upwards of a half-million 8.5 x 11 pages. Don't take it to bed with you.

5) There are 2,971 registered member profiles. You can see all registered profiles, for example ranked by number of posts. That lists 50 profiles per page, for 60 pages. These do not seem to include banned members, for example HMW is missing from the top 10. I'll wildly guess there have been about 100 bannings, though probably less than 20 of profiles with high post counts.

6) 1,900 profiles show 2, 1 or 0 posts. More than 1,000 of those are at zero. Nevertheless, many of these may be occasional readers or long-time lurkers.No way to tell how many of these are active readers, but probably a very small group. (Perhaps 100?) Nor can we tell how many are sock-puppets, search-engines, drunken larks forgotten the next day, etc. Of course, this is a public board, so anyone on the WWW can read any post here.

7) Another 900 profiles have 20 or fewer posts, though many of these were no doubt very interesting. About 500 profiles are above 50 posts. More than 300 exceed 200 posts.

110 have more than 1,000 posts. (Jakell has exactly 1,000 and Col. Quisp, I see, has 995.) 37 member-profiles have more than 3,000 posts. (#38 is Nathan28, come back man!) Eight are in the 10,000 club. The all-time current champ is SLAD, at 13548. This is actually a typical phenomenon, as also seen with Wikipedia and income distribution: a proportionately small core forms that accounts for a very large share or even most of the action. So you have 1-2% of Wikipedia posters accounting for 40-80% of the writing and edits (I don't remember the exact number.)

9) Even in the ridiculously over-posting groups, perhaps half are currently active in posting, which one would expect as average for any message board, for reasons that should be obvious. People have lives, or they lose interest, or they come and go. Or they throw up their hands in dismay and go away forever, at least until they suddenly appear again 3 days later. Also, everyone dies. I wonder how many of us are dead?

10) When I've looked, a typical new thread that gets zero responses still gets about 75 reads in the first day. This is a rough indicator of the likely minimum "clicker-ship," if not readership, of a thread. (Once responses begin, every reload on the thread ticks up the read stat.) Or of the board itself. If I had to make the crazy mostly-unfounded Bayesian guess, I'd say there are about 200 regular readers and about 50 regular posters, with a current (always evolving) core of 20 every-day posters.

11) So, to the problem of difficulties faced by lurkers becoming new posting members: Obviously, as the board accumulates all this enormous gobs of material and has prolific regulars weighing in on multiple subjects a day -- possibly good things -- the first "intimidation factor" is not necessarily in the atmosphere, politics, general ridiculousness, bullying and censorship, or subject choice, but in the sheer volume of stuff to read just to get a sense of the board's variety of concerns.

12) Nevertheless, a mean atmosphere, or perceptions of wackiness (or concerns about being "seen" by THEM!) could all also be factors. R.I. may be a bit meaner and more contentious than it was, but I remember a lot of mean stuff from, say, five years ago, and not just from or towards me. Perhaps also it's just how long you've been here and how much you've seen things, including things that repeat, creating the perception of stasis.

13) This is an amazing archive, nevertheless. I vote we a) thank the mods! thank the mods again! and b) let it continue rolling along, changing, growing, declining, exploding (in posts and flames alike), all this stuff, because in the end everything's still here to read. It merits archiving, and a bit of curation, like Luther is suggesting. That might really help: some kind of annotated board index, greatest hits, etc. I keep planning this, at least for my own obsessions and of course (as one might expect from most of us) focusing on my own best posts, and did in fact start an outline here, but doubt I'm getting any further before I disappear myself most of the time for at least five years, in no more than five weeks.

14) To the suggestion of shorter posts, friendlier language, less antagonism, fun graphics, limited copy-pasta, and easier digestibility, I think there's a popular site just like that, and the supposedly disappeared Jeff Wells can be found on it, sometimes all day long. For better or worse, this is a message board, and those tend to be places where cores of people form who want to engage in longer analysis, good or bad, that they like to share and respond to. As well as provide mountains of often interesting cut-and-paste to back up what they're saying, or for others to scroll through on their way to etc., etc. I think there should also be a place for stream-of-consciousness threads, as these a) serve members and b) might be interesting resources to someone and c) can be ignored!

15) Thank the mods, again! And for all the problems as well as changes, don't doubt there's a need for them, and for the occasional shutting down of, say, racist hate speech. That's the kind of thing that can grow very quickly if tolerated and really change the board into something you would not recognize or want to hang around in.

16) Did you know about friends and foes? I don't know what friends does, but since breaking down and using it I've found foes helps a lot with annoying scrolling through posts you might not want to see again. And if you do want to see, that option's available within each thread where a "foe" appears.

17) Now if there was also a hide-thread option... that would certainly solve one of the most frequent complaints being voiced here.

18) This is an amazing archive, nevertheless. Thanks, Jeff Wells.

So it goes.

[justdrew]

However, I would love to see the following change, if someone like drew can code it for phpBB: Every new OP should include the requirement of specifying the sub-board to which it belongs.

the next major update will (I hope/intend) bring us a nice tag system (like hashtags) to aid in classifying ad finding related content. hopefully tags will be applicable to individual posts as well as whole threads.

[Wombaticus Rex]

14 bans to date, more than half mention "spam" or "spambot" in the message field.

When I can answer questions, I do.

Sometimes.

Cannot speak for deaths among us -- none, I would hope. Live long; prosper.

[Perelandra]

I think there should also be a place for stream-of-consciousness threads, as these a) serve members and b) might be interesting resources to someone and c) can be ignored!

There are options for this, as I've harped on.

17) Now if there was also a hide-thread option... that would certainly solve one of the most frequent complaints being voiced here.

I have suggested it before and agree it would help.

18) This is an amazing archive, nevertheless. Thanks, Jeff Wells.

Agreed. It can be better, too. Thanks, Jeff and past and current mods.

[freemason9]

Everyone knows being a dick to others is fucking hilarious.

Your opinion of what 'being a dick is', might be different than that of other folk.


Add; Apology accepted.

But why would you assume you would be automatically ignored here...?

I'm not 'automatically' ignored, I assume that some folk enjoy and pay attention to what I write. While others with different or competing pretenses just grit their teeth or put me on ignore.


Still generally, I have been ignored ever since I landed here trying to make the simple point that we do not HAVE to structure our mentality around a split model of reality (nature).

The split is not intrinsic to reality and we can if we so choose evolve our consciousness toward a continuum and relationship based model of reality, that may sustain a greater percentage of the population with dignity, as distinguished from our object oriented model which seems to negate good works with its overlay of, and encouragement of, manipulation and coercion.

Are you new here?

[JackRiddler]

14 bans to date, more than half mention "spam" or "spambot" in the message field.

By you, or in the entire history?

[jingofever]

14 bans to date, more than half mention "spam" or "spambot" in the message field.

Some of those are suspected repeat offenders, right? How many people have flipped out and tried to go through their comments one by one and delete them? I can think of a few instances.

This message board is like a mall that has lost its anchor store. Where did all of the blog commenters go? I do not think they came here. There was some intersection of the two groups of course, but some people are exclusive to this board and others were only on the blog, like that Shrubageddon fellow. I think mostly the two groups did not get along. I might be extrapolating from one comment but I certainly did not like the blog people. They were too fly by night.

[barracuda]

Nice to see you back out of hibernation, barracuda. Something unusually important must have provoked you to break your silence.

I've posted here off and on this summer. Many of the people I considered close friends have mostly left for good, though. When I'm participating, there's a nostalgic flavor to it for me. And melancholy. Such is life.

These days I post on what catches my fancy: Courtney Love, crisis actor nonsense, board gossip threads like this one. Lately, yeah, it's been the riot of threads on the Israeli offensive against Gaza, a partial list of which you quoted from my previous statements.

1. To whom is it embarassing?

I can really only speak for myself.

2. Why, exactly?

Ugh, thread after thread after thread. There are a lot of horrible situations, genocidal wars, land grabs, and occupations which get little, if any, attention here. I agree with much of what is being said here:

Selective Internationalism

and much of what is said here:

Norman Finkelstein Interview

If people think Israel should cease to exist, they ought simply be forthright about it and defend their belief, rather than this endless beating about the bush. I understand fully why someone might feel that way - just honestly out with it, please, even though I am completely certain that I'm too tired of it to argue about it, anyway.

3. Exactly what is embarrassing about it?

IMHO, it makes this High Strangeness/Deep State/Conspiracy discussion forum appear to conform to certain stereotypes which pervade the rich "tradition" of examinations of such conspiracies. The pervasiveness of which, I'm not super into, except to look at how wrong they are. I mean, sometimes I scan the topic list in GD and it reads, "they faked the moon landings!", "the zionist murderers' vast control network!", "the jellyfish invasion!", "feminist death squads!", and I wonder… is the whole deal here just some crazy form of crypto-antisemitism, where the jellyfish are actually symbolic of the neo-liberal zionist plague, and this image is really a visualization of an Israeli military incursion:



Am I lucid dreamiing?

And then I think to myself, "oh, you british guys: how the hell do you live with yourselves knowing that in every aspect of your country - your government, your financial sector, entertainment, and religious institutions, (and probably all the rest of it), children are raped and abused as a matter of common course? Why haven't you stopped it yet?", and I say to myself, "oh yeah, but maybe this is some weird part of their culture they can't transcend…" and then I'm like, "oh yeah, but Sir Evelyn Robert de Rothschild, "CIty of London", Larouche,…"

And holy hell, I'm an American, christ, that's the biggest, most twisted raping Nazi sack-o-shit FUBAR to ever exist, ever. Why haven't I stopped it yet? Am I just a useless imperial zionist drone? Paying my taxes? Or a Fourth Reich stooge, a brownshirt fanboy furiously assuaging my guilt by touristing the fora at http://www.secretnazi.com.
?

?

All roads start to lead to the worst areas of Rome for me. I begin to wonder, should an objective observer examine this forum, will they feel as I do then? And yeah, it's embarrassing. After all this time to be wondering if the whole thing isn't a scam, an elaborate satirical essay, a perverse "in-joke" to which I was not invited but decided to try and share anyway. Clueless. Or worse, an ARG where you're being played, or a bland data collection repository for the NSA and anybody to do some fifth-tier project on. If that! Or just a place to keep this particular stuff. Fuck me. I begin to wonder if there isn't some bizarre verboten frisson in the air and I worry that I've been rubbernecking a car accident outside my front window with a bit too much interest. You know the feeling?

4. Do you own a TV or computer or at least have access to newspapers?

Yes, but my "dream board" would surmount the unsurprisingly low bar set by the latest media onslaught, selling page views and thirty second commercials for relief from incontinence. What's the overall media agenda this week, anyway? The numerologists seem to think it's all about 17, 777, 17,000, &c. The Sync. And then I'm like, "oh yeah, but numerology, Kabbalah, satanic jews, Raiders of the Lost Ark, ah, shit."

1. You think this place is a hate-hole?

Is this a surprise to you? I sincerely doubt it is. Tell me you've never angrily chastised a member for the vileness of their viewpoint! You can't, I've seen you do it. You've done it to me, for that matter, many times. This board has always had a share of problematic posters: empathizers with disgraced perspectives barely hiding their extremist beliefs behind innuendo, and edging the line of, what? human decency? Fascism? Manipulation? Preying? Something shitty sometimes, that's for sure. You know this.

2. You think this place is an obvious hate-hole?

Blue Nose is pretty damned obvious to me, yeah. We should try and keep the drapes around here to an aesthetic crypto-antisemitism, at least. It's got better graphics, if you ask me. And then I'm like, "oh yeah, Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, Schicklgruber, ah, fuck."

Stupid reverie.

Welcome, SoulsQuiver.

[82_28]

LOL! ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

SoulsQuiver, wassup? Whatchoo got? Diggin the name though.

SoulsQuiver, we invite you to pen a post or comment.

[Wombaticus Rex]

I might be extrapolating from one comment but I certainly did not like the blog people. They were too fly by night.

We have blog people? There's a whole other RI?

Jack - looks like 14 total because most of these aren't bans I did.

[DrEvil]

I started out here as a blog-person. It was horrible. The only commenter whose name I can remember was GalacticGreenGoblin, who was going on and on about transcendental meditation and projecting orgasmic energy at twelve year old girls.

[Plutonia]

I started out here as a blog-person. It was horrible. The only commenter whose name I can remember was GalacticGreenGoblin, who was going on and on about transcendental meditation and projecting orgasmic energy at twelve year old girls.

That was the infamous Drew Hempel, wasn't it?

If I remember right, Sounder started out as a blog person too? Is that right Sounder?

[Perelandra]

Noooo...don't go there. I remember a different couple of names for that guy. WR will surely recollect. There was some horrible ARG-y stuff in there back in the day.

Nostalgia. Thanks fer the laughs this am.

[MacCruiskeen]

I certainly did not like the blog people.

We have blog people?

We have bolg people. Underground bog poepl. Ask P.V. Glob.