Re: Towards a new RI
Posted: Fri Jul 25, 2014 8:31 pm
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.
So have I! Many times! Endorsed! Please?Grizzly wrote: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?
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.
Nostalgia. Thanks fer the laughs this am.