Decline in OT activity

[Hygro]

Also, conservatives lost the arguments, so now we have to go to more obscure topics.

 

[Zack]

Also, conservatives lost the arguments, so now we have to go to more obscure topics.

Well, there's also the weekly thread about why feminism is the apocalypse.

 

[Narz]

Fifty in all his glory. It's a truly beautiful thread so don't merely treat yourself to the one post. The forums feminists will enjoy it in particular.

How this guy created a circle around him speaks to the lost-soul/young-angry-male demographic on the forum back then.

edit : Ah, timely x-post by Zack

 

[Hygro]

Well, there's also the weekly thread about why feminism is the apocalypse.

I know, and you can tell where people are at given that almost no one actual debates in them, everyone declares it

 

[Bootstoots]

Fifty in all his glory. It's a truly beautiful thread so don't merely treat yourself to the one post. The forums feminists will enjoy it in particular.

How this guy created a circle around him speaks to the lost-soul/young-angry-male demographic on the forum back then.

edit : Ah, timely x-post by Zack

Wow, I'd forgotten just how bad he could be sometimes. Nowadays, anybody who posted something like:

it's ok to DATERAPE a girl if she is really drunk. daterape in my usage is like when a whore runs around flirting with you all day, and when she is really drunk and things get hot & heavy you have sex with her even when, if she weren't so chemically impared, she would normally not have full blown intercourse with you. If a girl says "no" or "don't" or whatever, I call that "fullblown rape" not "daterape"

Would be banned on the spot, and probably for quite a while. Yet the action taken against him in this case was quite mild. It's interesting how forum standards have evolved over time. At least in that respect, we've gotten significantly stricter. I'd argue this is clearly for the better.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

As I think we’re all aware, the activity of OT has been declining for quite a while. Back in early March, I decided to quantify the decline. I forgot about it until coming across a thread on ths subject in IALS, and I finally got around to putting the data into Excel and charting it today.

I went to page 10 of OT, then page 20, and so on at 10-page intervals all the way to the beginning. I wrote down the date of the last post in the last thread on each of these pages, which gave me a measure of how long it took to generate 450 threads in OT. I assumed that the thread creation rate is roughly equal to the thread abandonment rate (with a time delay, but I’m ignoring that for now).

There are several things to discuss here. I’ll throw out some possible questions:

• What is your opinion of the decline in OT activity?
• Why is this happening, in your opinion? Feel free to mention any possible factors, including moderation as long as the discussion is general and mentions no specific cases.
• Does it bother you that the forum isn’t as active as it used to be, or do you prefer a more sedate posting rate?
• Is this a site-wide phenomenon?
• Do you have any suggestions for slowing or reversing this trend?
• Did I pick a useful measure of OT activity?

It's unfortunate that there seems to be fewer things to actually discuss. A lot of times when I look in, I see a long list of serial threads that generate very little actual discussion. I might care about what books people read or the movies they watch if I knew why they liked those. Threads that are basically just adding one more item to a list don't interest me.

One thing this forum has done right has been the "Ask a(n)..." threads. Somebody from another forum thought this was such a neat idea that she proposed it for their version of OT. It's still in discussion stage among their staff, but looks promising that they'll at least give it a trial run.

Something that forum does right: Awareness that the site has an international membership. There's a current thread going on called "Tell me 8 things about your state/country and city." Like CFC, that site has a very cosmopolitan, multi-lingual membership, and the thread is amazing. I'm still composing my contribution, as this is something that people tend to put a lot of effort into it, with photos, history, personal/family connections, and so on.

So what I'm leading up to is this: If you belong to another forum and there is some activity or type of thread/discussion done there that works well, maybe we could try it here and see if it takes off. Call it a cultural exchange, of sorts. You never know what might work until you try it.

That's true. I never thought to look at that, and the effect might plausibly be pretty significant. The top 11 threads have all been posted in during the past year. The old restriction of threads to 1000 posts is likely behind much of that, though.

If threads are specific time-relevant, they're going to die off, such as those dealing with elections. And there are only so many times we can talk about our favorite pizza toppings before it's a case of "been there, done that 6 times before, on to a different thread."

Sometimes the longest threads (on various topics) aren't in OT. The longest thread I've started is in IALS.

I do not know the dates offhand, but the splits of arts and entertainment, sports, and science & technology killed a lot of threads or discussions on those topics. Combined with the advent of the chamber and the tavern discouraged the activity of a variety of forum posters (regardless of whether those posters had legitimate complaints about the forum structure or not).

The enforcement of a&e or s&t were particularly arbitrary (many active threads would be moved to a&e, but not all threads related to a&e created in OT were moved). Now they pretty much are dead so those topics just get made in OT again.

I used to belong to another gaming forum 9 years ago that had a specific section of subforums for the sorts of topics that we have in A&E. They called that section of the board "Media Mosh Pit" and it included places to talk about movies, TV shows, books, comics, and had a dedicated subforum for writing and writing competitions. This area was quite far down the main index from the actual gaming (ie. "product") forums and the "off-topic" general talk area. But it was a very busy place, because people knew that this was the only place on the site where these topics were allowed. And no, this didn't kill their general talk area, even considering that politics and religion were not allowed to be discussed there (seriously). They did allow more personal threads as long as they offered scope for a more general discussion (ie. the time I mentioned getting a flu shot, and composed the OP in such a way as to steer the conversation onto the issue of vaccines in general).

*Can we overlay the rise of other similar posting opportunities (Reddit?) that may be sucking members away?

There are certainly a couple of places I post instead of here, due to the kinds of topics allowed and the way in which people are allowed to post. Facebook and Reddit aren't among them, though.

One comment about whether or not this is a useful measure: I agree that there are better ones. I picked thread creation mostly because it was easy to measure and probably correlates passably well with overall activity rates. Anybody who knows how we might get better or more interesting data should say so.

The thing is, some people are quite active, but don't tend to create threads very often. According to a search of my own activity, the forum says I've started 29 threads during the last 10 years, either in OT, A&E, or Site Feedback. The threads I started in various social groups are not counted.

Something I noticed also... my Cosmos thread was the busiest OT thread I started, at 330 replies. But I was just blown away by the fact that it had 13,314 views. That's something I hadn't considered. And while a lot of those were obviously views by the participants, it also suggests that a fair number of people were following the thread itself but not posting.

My NaNoWriMo 2013 was the busiest A&E thread I started - it had 315 replies, and 11,087 views.

Site Feedback isn't worth mentioning as far as thread starting for me, as the only times I ever do it is when I'm having a technical issue that doesn't already have a thread to post in. I am quite active there, but as a participant, not a thread starter.

So posts are not the only indicator of how busy a forum is. The number of views matters as well, especially when it's many more than might be expected, given the number of replies and the number of people active in the thread.

It would be interesting to see how many lurkers read OT. I've noticed a lot of them reading various Civ forums, but never thought about OT or other non-Civ forums.

 

[Hygro]

@At Boots: Yet that was precisely the level of ridiculousness that drove high forum energy.

edit: x-post

 

[Narz]

Not really. Look at that stupid thread I linked to. It wasn't very long.

Many similar trolling attempts killed threads rather than lengthened them.

The forum was booming when he showed up, he rode the tide, did not create it.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Wow, I'd forgotten just how bad he could be sometimes. Nowadays, anybody who posted something like:



Would be banned on the spot, and probably for quite a while. Yet the action taken against him in this case was quite mild. It's interesting how forum standards have evolved over time. At least in that respect, we've gotten significantly stricter. I'd argue this is clearly for the better.

@At Boots: Yet that was precisely the level of ridiculousness that drove high forum energy.

edit: x-post

Things were quite a bit looser back in 2006. I don't think the point infraction system was in use then so you were warned or given a 1-3 day ban.

 

[Hygro]

Not really. Look at that stupid thread I linked to. It wasn't very long.

Many similar trolling attempts killed threads rather than lengthened them.

The forum was booming when he showed up, he rode the tide, did not create it.

No vote counts but every vote counts.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Is there any reasonable way to deal with calm, passive-aggressive trolling? I can't think of how to do that without shutting down even more discussion than we already do.

It requires context-based moderation rather than strict adherence to a structure of etiquette (you used a certain word, etc etc). I've tried to explain this to mods over the years several times, as I struggled to deal with passive-aggressive trolls, but to no avail.

Also, was it better at any time in the past in your opinion, and if so, what decisions were made that led us to the current situation?

I think it was better in the past (before 2011 or so), if only because moderation was less strict and less intense across the board. The problem is not inherent to stricter moderation, but rather that moderation has been badly turned up since then: enhanced in an asymmetric way. Given a choice between bad strict moderation and more lax moderation, I would choose more lax since it's generally even-handedly uninvolved rather than harshly strict on some and totally enabling of other kinds of harmful behavior.

 

[Bootstoots]

It's unfortunate that there seems to be fewer things to actually discuss. A lot of times when I look in, I see a long list of serial threads that generate very little actual discussion. I might care about what books people read or the movies they watch if I knew why they liked those. Threads that are basically just adding one more item to a list don't interest me.

One thing this forum has done right has been the "Ask a(n)..." threads. Somebody from another forum thought this was such a neat idea that she proposed it for their version of OT. It's still in discussion stage among their staff, but looks promising that they'll at least give it a trial run.

Something that forum does right: Awareness that the site has an international membership. There's a current thread going on called "Tell me 8 things about your state/country and city." Like CFC, that site has a very cosmopolitan, multi-lingual membership, and the thread is amazing. I'm still composing my contribution, as this is something that people tend to put a lot of effort into it, with photos, history, personal/family connections, and so on.

So what I'm leading up to is this: If you belong to another forum and there is some activity or type of thread/discussion done there that works well, maybe we could try it here and see if it takes off. Call it a cultural exchange, of sorts. You never know what might work until you try it.

Looking at what works on other forums and trying it here is an excellent idea. I would strongly encourage you and anybody else with the time and inclination to take ideas that work from other forums and just create them here. Maybe once you create your "8 things" post on that forum, you could also use that post to start a similar thread here?

Any member here who is an active member of another forum and sees something that works and doesn't break CFC rules should just go for it in OT. Things that would require a rule change are harder because we're very slow to make substantial rule changes when we make them at all, but most ideas shouldn't require one.

If threads are specific time-relevant, they're going to die off, such as those dealing with elections. And there are only so many times we can talk about our favorite pizza toppings before it's a case of "been there, done that 6 times before, on to a different thread."

The first part is true but probably not very important - there should generally be no shortage of current events to talk about in a given timespan. Unless the world has gotten more boring lately and interesting things just don't come up as often.

As for e.g. "What's your favorite pizza topping", it is quite likely that an older forum is going to have tried most of the obvious thread topics already, usually multiple times. Also, with fewer members joining and the population consisting mostly of old-timers, topics that have already been done are less likely to be tried again because there hasn't been much turnover and everybody knows how the most recent similar thread went.

There are certainly a couple of places I post instead of here, due to the kinds of topics allowed and the way in which people are allowed to post. Facebook and Reddit aren't among them, though.

What sorts of things do those sites allow that we don't? In general I'd be interested in knowing what sorts of things we might plausibly allow that would boost interest without just causing the decent post-to-drivel ratio to crash.

The thing is, some people are quite active, but don't tend to create threads very often. According to a search of my own activity, the forum says I've started 29 threads during the last 10 years, either in OT, A&E, or Site Feedback. The threads I started in various social groups are not counted.

I'm the same way - I've very rarely created threads since leaving the Civ 3 Democracy Game sometime in 2005 or 2006. What I am assuming here is that people's average willingness to create threads has stayed more or less constant over the years, and that we don't have a higher proportion of users now that reply to threads but rarely create them than we used to have. Whether I'm right to make that assumption is debatable.

Something I noticed also... my Cosmos thread was the busiest OT thread I started, at 330 replies. But I was just blown away by the fact that it had 13,314 views. That's something I hadn't considered. And while a lot of those were obviously views by the participants, it also suggests that a fair number of people were following the thread itself but not posting.

My NaNoWriMo 2013 was the busiest A&E thread I started - it had 315 replies, and 11,087 views.

So posts are not the only indicator of how busy a forum is. The number of views matters as well, especially when it's many more than might be expected, given the number of replies and the number of people active in the thread.

It would be interesting to see how many lurkers read OT. I've noticed a lot of them reading various Civ forums, but never thought about OT or other non-Civ forums.

That's all true. I wish I knew how to write some sort of script that would go through and tabulate the number of posts, the number of views, and maybe other stats so we could see how they've all changed over time. I collected data on threads per day manually, and it would be quite tedious to do this for posts or views, which is why I haven't done it. Both of those would probably tell us more than the number of threads.

It is sometimes kind of amusing to do view/post ratios on various threads. Threads on feminism, for instance, tend to have very low ratios of views to posts - people who are interested enough to click on them are unusually eager to post their opinions compared to average. The babe thread, on the other hand, has a very high view/post ratio.

 

[_random_]

I'm pretty sure I was the harbinger of this; sorry, guys.

I know I definitely find this place a lot less interesting than I did in 2009 or so. I'm sure that's a combination of the forum changing and me changing. I'd probably prefer Domination Domination to this to be honest.

 

[trader/warrior]

This got me reading some vintage 2006-2007 OT, and boy were things different back then. Some choice thread titles:

Why didn't we plant evidence of WMD's in Iraq?
Aleister Crowley may be Bush's grandfather
Wil the terrorists win the "cream shaver" war?
Are spaceflights and the construction of tall sky scrappers immoral?
Is homosexual penguin sex moral?
Abortion!!!!!!!!!
Would you forgive Bush if you apologized, became moderate and changed his views?

And last but not least,

Gay gay gay. Also, homosexual homosexual homosexual. Oh and BTW, gay gay gay. (Multi-page thread 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ... Last Page)

Or maybe it was the same, just a bit more blunt about it.

 

[JollyRoger]

I thought it was a cyclical thing related to initial releases, but apparently, things declined right through the release of Civ V. That was the height of strict moderation, so maybe there was less fun to be had so we didn't get the bump.

 

[Narz]

No vote counts but every vote counts.

That's a nice platitude but I'd still say more were turned away. It's like inviting your obnoxious a-hole friend to a party. He'll stir things up, get attention, some will love him & some will hate him but if he pushes away more friends than he brings to you it's not worth it.

This got me reading some vintage 2006-2007 OT, and boy were things different back then. Some choice thread titles:

Why didn't we plant evidence of WMD's in Iraq?
Aleister Crowley may be Bush's grandfather
Wil the terrorists win the "cream shaver" war?
Are spaceflights and the construction of tall sky scrappers immoral?
Is homosexual penguin sex moral?
Abortion!!!!!!!!!
Would you forgive Bush if you apologized, became moderate and changed his views?

And last but not least,

Gay gay gay. Also, homosexual homosexual homosexual. Oh and BTW, gay gay gay. (Multi-page thread 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ... Last Page)

Or maybe it was the same, just a bit more blunt about it.

CFC OT used to allow a bit more silliness, the perfect amount really. Not just a pile of retardness like Apolyton but a little less stiff than now.

The smashing of trolling I appreciate now but the restriction of certain topics, unnecessary closing of threads & not letting people be a little goofy in thread titles, opening posts, etc. is a bit cramping.

The forum was suffering before the weird split (I forgot the names of the new two OT subforums, probably because I was mostly absent during that time) & that split put the nail in the coffin for the CFCers who were on the fence (including myself).

 

[Birdjaguar]

It requires context-based moderation rather than strict adherence to a structure of etiquette (you used a certain word, etc etc). I've tried to explain this to mods over the years several times, as I struggled to deal with passive-aggressive trolls, but to no avail.



I think it was better in the past (before 2011 or so), if only because moderation was less strict and less intense across the board. The problem is not inherent to stricter moderation, but rather that moderation has been badly turned up since then: enhanced in an asymmetric way. Given a choice between bad strict moderation and more lax moderation, I would choose more lax since it's generally even-handedly uninvolved rather than harshly strict on some and totally enabling of other kinds of harmful behavior.

Cheezy is on target here. Over strict moderation first came to my attention in NESing in 2009. It seems to me that it is often driven by an urgency to curtail behavior immediately as if there is no other option than to respond at that moment in a big stick way. Such flare ups will produce response flare ups and things can quickly get out of hand as one thing leads to another. Moderators can feel like they are playing whack-a-mole, but actually, have the power to turn down the speed of play to a manageable level.

Passive aggressive trolling is tough to deal with. My only suggestion is to ignore and move along. If one doesn't respond, they have failed. Bad behavior happens everywhere all the time and most of it can be ignored.

I think that with the infraction point system addition to moderation "punishment" became a higher priority than it had been in the past. Prior to it, moderators tried to point out bad behavior or just sent you on vacation for for a few days to settle you down. then it was over and life moved on. I was not a mod until 2009, so I do not know what went on in staff prior to then, so I could have a very warped view of things from, say, 2003 to 2008.

With points, one's transgressions stayed with you and became a very formal part of a poster's history. Points and accumulated points became a means of punishment over time and the on going punishment of chronic "bad boys" became part of the system. Looking back, I would dump the infraction point system and go back to warnings and 1-3 day bans without record keeping.

 

[Bootstoots]

Things were quite a bit looser back in 2006. I don't think the point infraction system was in use then so you were warned or given a 1-3 day ban.

I didn't post much in OT at the time and I don't remember exactly, but I'm under the impression that moderation was somewhat more ad-hoc back then than now. The rules seemed less codified and maybe enforced more rarely but more arbitrarily, in part because there was no infraction system, just modtext warnings and bans. To some extent, I wonder if making the rules more explicit and putting formal systems in place to deal with violators led to more harm than good.

It requires context-based moderation rather than strict adherence to a structure of etiquette (you used a certain word, etc etc). I've tried to explain this to mods over the years several times, as I struggled to deal with passive-aggressive trolls, but to no avail.



I think it was better in the past (before 2011 or so), if only because moderation was less strict and less intense across the board. The problem is not inherent to stricter moderation, but rather that moderation has been badly turned up since then: enhanced in an asymmetric way. Given a choice between bad strict moderation and more lax moderation, I would choose more lax since it's generally even-handedly uninvolved rather than harshly strict on some and totally enabling of other kinds of harmful behavior.

I try to moderate by context to whatever extent I can, but it is difficult to do and opens us up to accusations of favoritism, bias, and the like. We aren't very good at dealing with posters that have no individually infractible posts but a toxic overall posting style. Periodically somebody like this will appear and end up getting flamed, and we are forced by the way the rules work to infract the people who flame them while often leaving the problematic poster alone.

I don't know what we can do to get around this, though. As just one example, someone who comes in and makes a large number of conservative posts will be more likely to stir up trouble than an equally clueless liberal, and moderating based on context might hit them more often. Further, posters (of any or no ideology) who have generally detrimental posting styles are rarely able to be helped to be less irritating. They sometimes adapt to the culture around here or just mature and improve, but there's no moderation I can do to make people less passive-aggressive or just generally less obnoxious. And I really don't want to run anybody off without a really good reason, in part because that would just reduce activity further.

Being less strict would seem to be the least-bad option. To everybody: in what ways have we gotten stricter in the last 4 or 5 years that are counterproductive? I would not, for instance, favor a return to allowing people to say things like what Fifty said in the linked thread. But maybe a loosening of the more nitpicky stuff like "no calling people a troll" or "thou shalt not post even partially bleeped swear words" would be called for.

Also @everybody: are we moving in a positive, negative, or neutral direction in the time since the Tavern and Chamber were re-merged in December 2013?

 

[JollyRoger]

My first points infraction was on December 5, 2006, so that marks about when the points system began and the beginning of the decline of the forum. On page 32, so that is 150+ with it significantly trailing off since 2012. Prior to that, I had two 3 day vacations that each lasted less than a day (upside American flag avatar at start of Iraq war that required me to be unbanned to change my avatar & a ban during AoA's last stand). Think about that - from 2001 to 2006, I only received two half-hearted bans - this when the Iraq War was starting and there was a stronger and deeper team of conservatives here. You can imagine my level of (perceived) trolling and flaming during that time period (with my introduction to Mobby coming in 2005), but no real problems from the mods until the birth of the point system. In looking at my infraction history, it seems I was passed around as there were time periods were x mod was giving out most of my infractions, then y, then z, etc. My theory is an OT moderator doesn't get access to the staff beer fridge until infracting me.

 

[Hygro]

I would not, for instance, favor a return to allowing people to say things like what Fifty said in the linked thread.

I think it's not a discussion forum if people can't discuss stuff. Fifty's view then is still a very widely held viewpoint, it's just a taboo viewpoint in public discourse and outright banned here. But if we can't discuss things in an anonymous discussion forum where can we? It's precisely the anarchy of topics and viewpoints that makes this medium so successful.