I've been around for about a year and a half, so I don't consider myself "new" anymore.
Huh, I thought you were a lot newer than that.
Registered Jan. 2009 and lurked for half a year. Then I was largely in the Mafia boards before I migrated up here a little bit less than a year ago.
(@Vector)While you may not be relatively new, there are still a fair few people around (primarily on IRC, as mentioned previously), who joined far earlier (2007 seems to be a large step-up from previous years in terms of numbers of users). It's not a matter of being "new" or "not new" as much as it's a matter of a "generation gap" of sorts. Most people who joined a year ago appear as part of the issue to those who joined in previous years, as much as those who joined in those years appear as symptoms of a decline to those in further years, etc..
From what I've seen here and elsewhere, the likelyhood/magnitude of this increases exponentially as places get larger, if only because there are an everlarger number of posts made that simply involve people complaining.
I don't even know who 3 is, or why he(?) is being so rude.
This I am quite proud of.
Eh, I remember you.
As far as the other stuff goes, one of the reasons why I spent such a long time lurking was in an effort to get a picture of the forums and how I should comport myself.
Remember the "blog" threads we used to have about individual forum members' daily lives, and how those are gone now? Remember the weird posts we used to have in Life Advice that really had nothing to do with life advice at all, and the strange off-topicness? I seem to remember far more attempts to incite people "way back when"--I looked over a friend's shoulder at some threads in 2008.
I even remember a thread in Life Advice about some guy trying to get a girl to wear a collar that went on for some 15 nasty pages and traveled extensively into personal fetishes before being locked. That was back when Sofia was Sniper Joe.
I remember reading the first couple posts of the Happy Thread, back when it started, and I remember how the Angry thread went down due to complaining about other forum members in it.
I remember back when the Sad Thread was kind of emotionally devoid, we didn't talk about anything that actually bothered us, and we didn't support other members who posted about things that were ripping them apart, preferring instead to comfortably ignore them until they got with the program. There was a brief period where it was kind of wanky, to be true, but it's improved a lot recently and now seems to be fairly balanced.
I remember that we used to have more female members masquerading as male, and now we've had the first female member (other than myself) to post her picture in the photo thread (I don't know about Mishy, whose gender seemed kind of dubious at times).
Things have definitely changed for the better within the past two years.
I think we've gotten a lot more chill since then, and in many ways less self-centered. Right now, we're spammy and kind of sexist (in Life Advice, anyhow, but that was probably always there). This too shall pass, so long as we make a concerted effort. I don't think there was any particular golden age. I think there was a time I enjoyed being here more, and a time between bouts of severe weirdness. We've matured a lot, in so many ways. It's time to mature again.
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Topic: Regarding the state of the forums. (Read 34329 times)