Are we dying?

[RenagadeOfFunk]

Originally posted by cphilip
I believe that may be the first time in a long time I been called young!

Your signature is out of compliance by the way...

Thanks phill...can;t believe i read the sig post ...
...ill resize (even though i think larer is more efective )

[davidnj]

I think cphilip nailed it. Many of the posts Im reading are repeats or along the same subject of posts I read when I first joined. I still come and browse, Ive never posted much, but lately alot of the posts seem to be things Ive read before. Good thing? Bad thing? I dont know. To me its sort of bad because there aren't many interesting topics to read. To others that have never seen them, it may not be such a bad thing.

To answer the topic though, no I dont think AO is dying.

[Chris]

Originally posted by cphilip
...again... the fact that YOU are less interested has less to do with overall quality than it does with what you have already been exposed to. That means your already caught up on all those rehashed subjects and are only looking for new subjects. But as to a rating overall...show me the data! There is none. It's all subjective and personal. I don't doubt your take on it at all. I am just pointing out that its more to do with your longivity here than it is with what the subject is. But its only YOUR take on it. A new member might find it quite facinating.

I thought I was very careful to make it clear that it was MY thoughts on the subject. I am only able to speak for myself, and I have personally found that the quality of posts has declined, maybe I should say that the quantity of what I would determine worthless posts has increased. Because of this, I have come to the determination that the overall quality has gone down. The fact is that there are still many good posts. The number of quality posts may be the same or higher, but now I have to sort through 2 pages of posts in order to find them.

[GoatBoy]

This reminds me of the whole "there's no such thing as right or wrong" argument.

Of course these ideas are subjective, but we can't bury our heads in the sand and say, "la la la la la la I can't hear you." For instance, we can't live our lives without having some concept of right and wrong.

Posts do have a "quality" to them. Just because it is not exactly quantifiable doesn't mean it doesn't have this property, and that it can't be observed as being increasing or decreasing. You might not be able to exactly pinpoint where it is, but I think you can spot what direction it's going. It's like... the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle or something.

I would think any of you head honcho mods would understand this, unless you hold yourself STRICTLY to forum rules for posting behavior. You argue against measuring "post quality" since it's "personal and subjective", but on the other hand, don't you have to make some sort of "quality" determination when you read posts? I'm sure there have been posts and behavior that you regulated or didn't regulate that didn't neatly fall within posting rules.


If you really MUST have quantitative data, I wonder what kind of results you'd get by just running all the posts through a spelling/grammar checker to score the mistakes. Then you could sort the scores by date. I think that would be a pretty funny exercise, if not wholly conclusive.


Anyways, I've sort of noticed a 2-party system around here. We have the AO Cult and the PBN'ers. Both parties are equally capable of souring discussions around here. We have a few "Libertarians" running around who keep things interesting, but... they're not a major party.

Is this supposedly ethereal post trend killing AO? Of course not. AGD's happy with the forum statistics. It's like they practically have a line of people waiting to come and join one of the two parties. If any of us become disinterested (I count myself in this group, and I think I know a few others that might as well)... who cares? Well, other than Cryer.

[SpecialBlend2786]

yeah, school's been beating the crap outta me lately, gotta study for all my AP tests and finals and SAT's are next week and and and AAAAAARRRGGGGGGG!!!!

yeah, so thats why I havn't been active lately

[Cryer]

an example of what I am talking about:


I just got home from work, log on to AO and click on Get New Posts and the search returns with the result:


"Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms."

Now I realize its the middle of the day, people are at work, school, etc... but that has never happened to me before. Usually there are at least half a page of active topics around this time...

[robdamanii]

I think if we put Cryer's crotchgrabbing storm trooper on the front page, we'd get a whole lot more discussion...

[shaunyoung000]

i think people are just forgetting about the magic elves