Is this board dying?

[yung.carl.jung]

The second culprit is that over time forums tend to attract parties that are too aligned in mindset. If everybody agrees on most things, what’s the point of posting comments? Debates on the World History section were what drew me to CFC, and no insult to any of the people still commenting, but the debate has really slowed down over the last few years.

Upvotes, my friend. Upvotes. That's how Reddit survived even though it essentially has homogenous communities in all the big Subs. Dem sweet internet points. The entire website is essentially one big circlejerk, only the small and elitist subs are at all interesting.

 

[warpus]

Not quite, but.. the first thing you do when you get a reddit account is unsubscribe from all the default subreddits. Then you go and find things that interest you and you subscribe to those instead

The problem with "political" "debates" lately is that people break off into 2 camps.. "Liberal" vs "Conservative". Each side has its own talking points and beliefs and.. you can pretty much predict the discussion even before it happens, because 95% of people who join in immediately join one of those 2 camps. These would be a lot more interesting if everyone stuck to their own personal opinions and not just the talking points of their camp

 

[Akka]

Not quite, but.. the first thing you do when you get a reddit account is unsubscribe from all the default subreddits. Then you go and find things that interest you and you subscribe to those instead

The problem with "political" "debates" lately is that people break off into 2 camps.. "Liberal" vs "Conservative". Each side has its own talking points and beliefs and.. you can pretty much predict the discussion even before it happens, because 95% of people who join in immediately join one of those 2 camps. These would be a lot more interesting if everyone stuck to their own personal opinions and not just the talking points of their camp

The problem here is not just that people jump in either side, but that they are spontaneously assigned to either depending on whatever they say at the time, as if issues were all strictly divided according to party lines.
Binary thinking is the culprit here (and in so many more stupid debates and argument).

 

[warpus]

The problem here is not just that people jump in either side, but that they are spontaneously assigned to either depending on whatever they say at the time, as if issues were all strictly divided according to party lines.
Binary thinking is the culprit here (and in so many more stupid debates and argument).

Yeah, that's a very annoying side-effect of such a simple way of looking at the world and complicated issues within.

"Oh, you generally lean to the left, that must mean you belong in the Liberal camp and as such believe everything they believe, so I am going to argue with you and from now on assume that everything you say is wrong"

 

[Traitorfish]

Really? Because all that doesn't seem as important to some as giving them exactly the structure and content that they want in a thread. Not to mention participating in bad faith. There are those who want to be pedantic for the sake of pedantry and won't tolerate anything less, and there are those (probably done this myself) who will enter threads just to get into fights without regard to the subject matter of the discussion.

Forum animosities aside, you can't ask for more discussion for the sake of discussion and then demand that thread starters conduct the discussion in the way you want. That's hardly incentivising thread starting.

No demands made. My point is only that a lot threads that are not direct about some current even or other tend to be framed either too broadly, which fails to encouraged discussion, or too narrowly, which inhibits discussion by forcing posters to either support or dispute the position espoused by the OP. I'm suggesting that we could do with threads which are not intended to be argumentative or polemical, but which still have a clear topic sentence, as it were. Many of the current events threads achieve this very well, but they're limited in scope to the event or to directly related events, and often in audience to those who take an interest in the sort of event being discussed.

 

[Jehoshua]

The second culprit is that over time forums tend to attract parties that are too aligned in mindset.

In my case this. Over time I just found it irksome to post a contrary opinion only to get howled down by the echo chamber (even more so since I don't really fit into the binary left-right political continuum of liberalism that is the political standard, so I get to hear the opposition of all those classical liberals/libertarians as well ).

Its kind of pointless to jump in as well, since if ones opinion is only ever rejected out of hand in a moment of ideological catharsis (devoid of logical dialectic), there is no reason to post since the debate is de-facto non-existent.

-

Also as an Australian, I don't care that much about US politics. So its also a case of recent topics not being as interesting to me as well as the aforementioned "echo chamber' phenomenon.

 

[Ryika]

Many forums I am or was part of managed to completely avoid the degeneration towards an echo chamber and are able to foster open exchange of ideas.
But of course you have to have a majority of people who have a mindset that is geared towards debate, and that is looking to get a more nuanced view of the world.

The OT-forum here has, unsurprisingly maybe, given that it's just a random opinion forum on a random website, not a debating site, is filled with ideologues of all types, probably the highest number of them that I've ever seen, and people who are looking to have their world view validated, and who will jump on any possibility to join an ideologue if they make an argument that sounds convincing, independent from the merit of their case.

 

[Jehoshua]

there's certainly plenty of ideologues, not so sure about the diversity of views though.

Now If I am permitted to clarify though, when I say (in my case) entering the debate is pointless/irksome, I mean it in the sense that there tends to be (in my experience) firstly - very little genuine desire to understand ones interlocutor and debate on equal ground. Most people (not all ofc) seemed (its been a while since I went into off topic so it might have changed) to be content with rhetoric rather than getting to the substance and making a worthwhile point, and it was a constant hassle debating with people who insisted on arguing to what they thought I said, rather than what I was actually saying (lots of strawmen). It even got to the point in a few cases that my interlocutor would actually edit a quote of what I said into something else to try and make me look bad.

Secondly - very rarely if at all is anyone ever willing to reconsider their opinion. Everyone is set in their ways and so having a deep discussion, I found, was quite difficult since it just evolved into people yelling over each other. Why enter into the debate if no one is willing to change their mind? its far less hassle to just observe when the alternative is to have tens of people saying how terrible you are for being contrarian, and/or making logically unsound arguments or not even making arguments at all and going on some weird tangent. That's not to say there are people I liked to have discussions with here (Plotinus is an example of a good interlocutor, although I hit one of his tender spots once and he went ballistic ), but on the whole... it just got irksome.

 

[Akka]

To be fair, these kind of behaviour (strawman, not changing mind, arguing against what one think the other said and not what he actually said) are par of the course for most humans, and not specific to this very board.
Though I agree it's incredibly irksome, it's among the (many) things that makes me go banana.
Even worse because I know I'm not unguilty of them from time to time.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

It's pretty dead.

It would be more active if people would actually use it and that was enforced. The way things are now, I might as well post anything anywhere, and have a precedent for it.

(Plotinus is an example of a good interlocutor, although I hit one of his tender spots once and he went ballistic )

The only thing I ever saw him get more than a bit upset about was when I trashed a Doctor Who episode, not knowing that a friend of his had written the script.

That was a couple of seasons ago when just about every episode was based on some fairy tale or other such fantasy nonsense. I know that show has never been about anything close to hard science fiction, but really...

It just goes to show that even the mildest, steadiest people around here have that line that they don't want to be crossed.

 

[azzaman333]

CFC isn't dying, it's dead. All that's left is a rotting carcass.

 

[Snerk]

What is dead may never die, but rises again harder and stronger.

 

[Broken_Erika]

CFC isn't dying, it's dead. All that's left is a rotting carcass.

What is dead may never die, but rises again harder and stronger.

Behold, the Undead CFC!
Brains. Brains! BRAAAAAIIIINNNNSSSS!

 

[Lexicus]

 

[Sommerswerd]

If CFC is a rotting carcass... are we the flies buzzing around the stinking flesh? Or the man with the stick beating it?

 

[dusters]

For a board which is over 15 years old, it is very alive. A good and healthy centenarian in human age.

 

[Takhisis]

How can it be dead, when even Jehoshua has returned?

Isn't this one of those sequential numbered threads? Random Raves, Member Photos, Are We Dead Yet?

It will be when we get to 1k posts.

Yeah, but how does it track historically, like back in 08'-09'?

We now have to contend with Twitter and Facebook (and *shudders* Instagram); forums are no longer the only place available for communications and discussion -see warpus' drunken post-, but we remain alive. Also, play forum games!

 

[Jehoshua]

How can it be dead, when even Jehoshua has returned?

I never really left, there just hasn't been anything I've felt the need to comment on lately.

 

[Fippy]

Well that's funny, just yesterday i thought "wow this must be one of the most active forums i ever saw". (not visiting over hyped places)

 

[Sommerswerd]

Forum relativism... One man's "dead" is another man's "thriving"

I think the OP basically says... "I think the forum is dying because people aren't posting enough threads"

Which to me implies the unsaid caveat... "about the things I want to talk about."