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SA is great because once you get out of GBS and FYAD it's a generally well behaved, thoughtful, well moderated forum with a bunch of people in their late 20s-early 30s Slashdot got purchased by Dice in the last two years and it's really gone downhill. It's always been going downhill but it took a steep(er) turn recently. John Carmack used to post there periodically back in the early 2000's. There used to be Plastic.com but they just disappeared one day around 2005. Kuro5hin died one day, it was never healthy though. Reddit seems to have filled that gap to some extent but it's largely been a hug box full of kids in high school or undergrad college from the beginning. Memepool died, was resurrected briefly, then died again in 2010 or so. Boingboing at one point had an active forum but Antonius was an awful moderator and when he left and they switched forum platforms they basically shut it down to stem the tide of "Cory Doctorow is a self-promoting twat with nothing of value to say" comments. Fark has had lively discussion but have really dialed down things since switching to their new advertiser network(?) and have been pushing Total Fark like crazy. Metafilter seems to be one of the last great bastions of smart informed discussion on the web. Maybe everyone grew up, got married, had kids. Maybe I'm getting too old for this poo poo. It feels like every halfway decent forum with intelligent discussion was purchased or sold out and changed with the new owner's "new great vision". Something Awful seems to have a pretty good cross section of interesting people from a wide field of industries but I'm curious what else is out there. Where else do you go to find well moderated interesting discussion from people who are in the late 20s or older? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdofmoYcJNE Hadlock fucked around with this message at 09:54 on Jul 21, 2015 |
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Jul 21, 2015 09:29
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What on earth?
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Jul 21, 2015 16:53
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4chan /tg/ /hwg/, anyone who plays historicals is old For a real answer: I don't know. SA is the only forum I frequent, and I usually stay in a few A/T threads, and Game subforums. Voat was aiming at stealing Reddit's thunder, but it might be a dud.
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Jul 21, 2015 19:12
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It's hard to generalize reddit because the membership of the subreddits are pretty disjoint, moreso than SA I think. I find discussion on the subreddits I frequent (e.g. /r/personalfinance, /r/cscareerquestions, etc.) to be fine as far as internet discussion goes. The structure is very different from SA, threads are basically one-off events rather than an ongoing conversation, which has its advantages and disadvantages compared to here.
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Jul 21, 2015 20:31
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9GAG for the funny and original le memes.
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Jul 21, 2015 20:47
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Some subreddits have pretty good content but all discussion is lovely. You have to collapse like a dozen lovely puns before getting to a good response and then it's another dozen lovely puns At least when SA shitposts it isn't some lame rear end pun
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Jul 22, 2015 05:27
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I am a big fan of the straight dope message boards. A lot of really chill people asking and answering some really interesting questions.
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Jul 22, 2015 07:54
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Can anyone recommend a site like businessinsider but not poo poo? So covering topics around general business interest, professional development, profiles etc but not 90% "10 things warren buffet always eats for breakfast" click bait poo poo.
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Jul 23, 2015 06:23
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Facepunch is basically what would happen if you took SA and mixed it with the worst aspects of the reddit/imgur communities and took literally all the self-awareness out of it. I spent way too much time on that God Damned forum. Is neogaf any good?
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Jul 23, 2015 16:15
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The best discussions to be had on these Internets may be found on niche forums for obscure topics. They should be running an outdated version of vbulletin or better yet, phpBB and should have approximately a hundred sub-forums, only one of which sees any action and currently hovers around 500,000 posts. Every user should have a signature full of inspirational quotes from other posters from 2003. A ranking system should be in place so that instead of having 3000 posts, you're a "Pro-Level Fly Tyer" or what have you. All you need to do is get on there and express an interest in fly tying and bam, you've got a whole new set of eFriends.
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Jul 23, 2015 17:40
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Kanine posted:Facepunch is basically what would happen if you took SA and mixed it with the worst aspects of the reddit/imgur communities and took literally all the self-awareness out of it. I spent way too much time on that God Damned forum. Neogaf is exactly the same thing
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Jul 23, 2015 19:43
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I seem to remember in the hey day of TF2 there was a lot of cross pollination between SA and FP in regards to the tf2 mapping communities but haven't been back since. Has it really gone downhill since? I guess that was about 4 years ago.
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Jul 23, 2015 19:52
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Hadlock posted:I seem to remember in the hey day of TF2 there was a lot of cross pollination between SA and FP in regards to the tf2 mapping communities but haven't been back since. Has it really gone downhill since? I guess that was about 4 years ago. I think probably because Gmod and other source games/mods have gotten older and faded away, but more generally I think forums like SA or FP or Neogaf are the same size as they ever were, it's just the rest of the normal person internet has exploded around them and they have not changed
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Jul 23, 2015 20:04
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You sound like you would enjoy Quora.
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Jul 24, 2015 00:30
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Kanine posted:Facepunch is basically what would happen if you took SA and mixed it with the worst aspects of the reddit/imgur communities and took literally all the self-awareness out of it. I spent way too much time on that God Damned forum. Hadlock posted:I seem to remember in the hey day of TF2 there was a lot of cross pollination between SA and FP in regards to the tf2 mapping communities but haven't been back since. Has it really gone downhill since? I guess that was about 4 years ago.
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Jul 24, 2015 01:04
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Hadlock posted:I seem to remember in the hey day of TF2 there was a lot of cross pollination between SA and FP in regards to the tf2 mapping communities but haven't been back since. Has it really gone downhill since? I guess that was about 4 years ago. Facepunch has pretty large swaths of people who are still talking about gamer gate. Also they had an actual "men's rights activism" thread last time I was there.
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Jul 24, 2015 18:53
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Hadlock posted:Slashdot got purchased by Dice in the last two years and it's really gone downhill. It's always been going downhill but it took a steep(er) turn recently. John Carmack used to post there periodically back in the early 2000's. I keep seeing Slashdot comments that say this I still find lots of insightful comments there under interesting topics. What's more, by the time I read them, most of the dumb comments have been filtered out already by the moderation system. The ones that remain are the ones with concise rebuttals. Internet strangers do all the work and I reap all the benefit.
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Jul 24, 2015 22:18
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I'm kind of surprised how few there are out there. Given that there's a 3 billion people on the internet, how come the only decent English-language one is one that was popularised on 911 jokes and pants-making GBS threads?
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Jul 25, 2015 23:00
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spog posted:I'm kind of surprised how few there are out there.
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Jul 25, 2015 23:27
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Forums are pretty much a dead concept these days outside of small communities and niche interests. All the big general interest forums I would have recommended five years ago have disappeared, dried up, or changed substantially for the worse. I suspect their demise is linked to the social media explosion and the rise of centrally-managed mega discussion platforms. Reddit was supposed to be the next big thing that replaced the forum as a platform for discussion, but it ended up being a wasteland full of walled gardens rather than a high quality meta-community. On the other hand, Quora has plenty of smart people with intelligent things to say but is more of a Yahoo Answers for Geniuses than a give-and-take discussion board. Anyway, this is a lot of words about internet forums, so I guess I'll just say good luck in your search and enjoy SA while it lasts.
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Jul 26, 2015 09:29
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Terrorist Fistbump posted:Forums are pretty much a dead concept these days outside of small communities and niche interests. All the big general interest forums I would have recommended five years ago have disappeared, dried up, or changed substantially for the worse. I suspect their demise is linked to the social media explosion and the rise of centrally-managed mega discussion platforms. Reddit was supposed to be the next big thing that replaced the forum as a platform for discussion, but it ended up being a wasteland full of walled gardens rather than a high quality meta-community. On the other hand, Quora has plenty of smart people with intelligent things to say but is more of a Yahoo Answers for Geniuses than a give-and-take discussion board. Reddit had 150 million unique users last month dude.
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Jul 27, 2015 07:22
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Clemocracy posted:Reddit had 150 million unique users last month dude.
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Jul 27, 2015 17:43
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Reddit has ok quality. It just happens to be a cross section of almost the entire human spectrum, so you get to see all of it, including the bad stuff. Some people are really dumb, some people are caught inside echo chambers, some people are into deplorable things like kiddie porn and misogyny. But there are also people with interesting lives, who share it with others, and those who know a lot about finances who use that to help others, and so on. You can't just look at one aspect and determine that as a whole, it's a "dead concept", or whatever other adjective you want to use. It's a naive and incorrect statement.
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Jul 27, 2015 19:44
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Reddit is big and varied enough to have quality discussion but every once in a while you'll come across an idiot who doesn't understand sarcasm/jokes and has likely anger issues and problems dealing with people they disagree with.
Justin Godscock fucked around with this message at 01:44 on Jul 28, 2015 |
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Jul 28, 2015 01:41
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Reddit can never fully take the place of a normal discussion on a forum because most comments just fall into obscurity when a topic becomes sufficiently large, and everything that rises to the top is always the lowest common denominator in terms of popularity. Nothing counter to received wisdom or outside of mainstream acceptance will ever float to the top because people have the power to push it down. It's a bit like the IMDB Top 250 - chances are you'll enjoy a lot of the top films because they are good quality. But you'll miss so many other less well known films you might have preferred if that's what you rely on. Retards from sea to shining sea love to upvote Batman films to be a cinematic masterpieces, while rating other films poorly for being "hard to follow" or "having a sad ending".
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Jul 28, 2015 01:55
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Jeza posted:Reddit can never fully take the place of a normal discussion on a forum because most comments just fall into obscurity when a topic becomes sufficiently large, and everything that rises to the top is always the lowest common denominator in terms of popularity. If you stay off r/all and the top subreddits reddit actually isn't that bad. There's wild variation from community to community. I enjoy the professional communities. As much of a hugbox that old GBS 1.0 was, I enjoyed the talk about news and the occasional excellent nuanced opinion. I really would like the old GBS RSS feed back without the constant threadshitting or SJW's. I gathered a lot of news from GBS at one point. Not exclusively, but it would keep me on here more.
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Jul 28, 2015 03:24
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Jeza posted:Reddit can never fully take the place of a normal discussion on a forum because most comments just fall into obscurity when a topic becomes sufficiently large, and everything that rises to the top is always the lowest common denominator in terms of popularity. This is the wasteland I'm talking about. Ice Phisherman posted:If you stay off r/all and the top subreddits reddit actually isn't that bad. There's wild variation from community to community. I enjoy the professional communities. Note also that I'm not talking about Reddit when I say forums are a dead concept. Reddit isn't a really a forum in the traditional sense because of how it's structured. It hides content by design through nesting and up/downvotes, rather than displaying a continuous conversation. Content is also hidden in subreddits that must be discovered instead of listed on a central directory. This structure isn't inherently good or bad, but it does make it very hars to keep the quality consistently high and bring the entire community together for a talk about whatever is on their minds.
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Jul 28, 2015 04:20
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Yeah Reddit certainly has it's place, and "front page of the internet" is/was maybe a valid tagline, but if you say anything against popular opinion you're immediately downvoted and it's a very short road to a landslide of being downvoted in to oblivion. Imgur did some studies on the subject and got rid of the up/downvote counters as people tended to allow that to influence their judgement and you get this large scale herd mentality. Since they made the voting totals harder to see supposedly this has improved actual results. Contrast with a forum, where if you say something seemingly dumb/against the grain, you may get one to three posts disagreeing with you, but at least you can present your rebuttal and further discussion and dissection of individual arguments can roll out over a couple of hours, or on some of the less traveled threads, a couple of days. There's been a polite argument about the pros and cons of downtube shifters in the Bicycle Commuting thread for about three days now as a recent example. You might loosely compare it to chess by mail. I've seen a huge uptick in adults creating and joining facebook groups. In Dallas there's a surprising number of people in the DORBA mountain biking group and one to two questions posted there about staying hydrated, best trails in the area, trail status (everything here turns to mud when it rains, and it's been flooding lately) etc etc. I haven't seen so much for general interest stuff about news/science etc but again, I think that relies really heavily on strong moderation from forums like Something Awful where you can weed out the jokers and the morons. I don't wander over in to D&D very often but I would imagine it looks a lot better than the comments section of most local news facebook posts.
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Jul 28, 2015 05:07
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I think it's incredibly difficult to maintain a decent internet community without some kind of incentive/deterrent, like a paywall, to keep the general shittiness of the internet out. As bad as Games or ADTRW can be, their equivalents outside of SA are pools completely, rather than partially, filled with diarrhea. Without a paywall, strict moderation is the only real way to maintain a community. Of course, this depends on the people given power on the internet not being sociopaths or generally terrible people, which is super rare. I guess what I'm saying is: given the basic nature of the internet, the only way to maintain a sane community is by building a giant fuckoff wall around it while somehow preventing it from becoming an echo chamber for existing members. SA is the only place I've seen that has accomplished this successfully.
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Jul 28, 2015 14:31
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It's not like SA is a general content site. First and foremost, it's a not-quite-humor forum with some special topic subforums attached to it. On their first day, people watch that boogeyman recruitment video, wander into fyad by accident and get called a fag and banned by a guy with a sarcastic Anne Frank avatar. It takes a special kind of person to think "yep, I wanna be part of this world" afterwards.
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Jul 30, 2015 18:00
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Ice Phisherman posted:If you stay off r/all and the top subreddits reddit actually isn't that bad. There's wild variation from community to community. I enjoy the professional communities. I felt the same way about GBS 1.0 as well. It was good for general discussion of news and other topics, with some sarcastic opinionated humor peppered around to prevent it from becoming too drat dry, and I admit with a little shame I got a good chunk of my news from GBS as well. The GBS 2.0 thing had to happen though because near the end it was the same threads on the first page day after day (and never had much activity within them) and it seemed like people were afraid to crack an off-color joke which is SA's fuel. It was a drat fun ride at first (holy poo poo that first weekend was hilariously deranged because of all that pent-up angst exploded) but now I just use GBS to vent, get bored/discouraged then leave.
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Jul 30, 2015 19:34
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My Man Shran posted:
What were SA's numbers like back in the day? Say, 10 or so years ago? Much as I still like this site, it feels less populated than it did even 5 years ago. That said, I tried Reddit and can't get into it for all the reasons that you mentioned; the fractious nature of it being its biggest downfall, along with its lack of moderation. Hard to get into a topic when people start spewing casual racism which everyone else seems A-OK with...
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Jul 30, 2015 20:31
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am i the last true warrior who only posts on sa and youtube and doesnt give a gently caress about anything else?
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Jul 30, 2015 20:44
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guys our forum is 1 billion strong! with enough reddit vote up button clicks, starbucks WILL add a double vente grande gordo cup size. also before i get probation i apologize i thought this was the tab i had open of GBS, which is my true home now
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Jul 30, 2015 20:45
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Solaris 2.0 posted:What were SA's numbers like back in the day? Say, 10 or so years ago? Much as I still like this site, it feels less populated than it did even 5 years ago. SA has weathered the big forums crash very well. Its traffic is presumably down as people have migrated to other means of internet socializing, but the fact that there are no dead subforums tells you all you need to know about its health as a community.
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Jul 31, 2015 04:55
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I first found out about the forums from a girl in high school, back in 1999 or 2000, she was really proud to know that DPPH stood for "don't post porn here" and we both thought that was really clever. Most of the group from those early years, they stuck with the forums, even through under grad and grad school, but it's been interesting to watch the TF2 community slowly wither away as people got real jobs, got married, or failing that, bought a house and had children. All the original long timers here are finally at the end of their 20s or early 30s and real life just kind of catches up. The Facebook and YouTube kids behind us didn't join the forums as much as we did so I would guess that membership peaked in 2008-2010, perhaps? I think they had more sway over internet culture in 2004-2006, pre social network and pre YouTube.
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Jul 31, 2015 06:32
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Terrorist Fistbump posted:SA has weathered the big forums crash very well. Its traffic is presumably down as people have migrated to other means of internet socializing, but the fact that there are no dead subforums tells you all you need to know about its health as a community. Hey man I paid  to post here so I'm drat well getting my money's worth!
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Sep 27, 2015 15:59
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If you really care about quality just load up Quora or metafilter, I don't use much of them but it seems like they do a pretty good job keeping out the riffraff. TBH even in my old age (31) most of the funny poo poo I see is on fb, instagram, snaps, tumblr, and other stuff that rotates quickly with most replies being "haha", but that's just how it is now. I'm sure there's more that I don't know about because I'm older in internet years. When I got into SA that was before phones and "the internet" was this big old place where forums were actually valuable for how focused they were, but now it's late 2015 and the focus is on silly poo poo that can get passed around for a couple laughs and then forgotten about the next day. I don't know exactly what I'm getting at but the idea of a long linear discussion doesn't really fit anymore when most people just want to chuckle as they wait for a bus or whatever. I don't know if I still love SA out of habit or if it actually has value, but it's the last place I'll ever look for any non-specific conversation. "dat face u make when bae ask u to buy tampons at the store" [screen shot of pensive-looking man from any movie ever] "lol haha (1.5k likes 10k shares)" ^^^ That's the future whether you get a kick out of that stuff or not. I have coworkers in late middle age sharing poo poo on snapchat and fb so I don't think it's a fluke, and i don't think there's anything wrong with a quick laugh compared to f5'ing a good thread in 2004.
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Sep 28, 2015 05:27
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Solaris 2.0 posted:What were SA's numbers like back in the day? Say, 10 or so years ago? Much as I still like this site, it feels less populated than it did even 5 years ago. That said, I tried Reddit and can't get into it for all the reasons that you mentioned; the fractious nature of it being its biggest downfall, along with its lack of moderation. Hard to get into a topic when people start spewing casual racism which everyone else seems A-OK with... As of right now, there are 6000+ users logged in which honestly is around what I can recall 10 years ago (it never cracked 10,000+ users) though if I'm wrong someone correct me. The big thing though is nowhere near as many people are posting now as they were back then. Terrorist Fistbump posted:SA has weathered the big forums crash very well. Its traffic is presumably down as people have migrated to other means of internet socializing, but the fact that there are no dead subforums tells you all you need to know about its health as a community. Oh, SA is nowhere near dead (that whole "dead comedy forum" meme is a gross exaggeration) and the subforums that are dead now were dead in 2007/08 when SA was at its peak. The era of Internet forums is pretty much gone with Reddit and the like replacing Internet socializing for the new generation. We all are hangers-on to this site because it's really the only place where you can make an off-color joke, post unpopular opinions and be a sarcastic monkey and not have a bunch of obtuse and humorless morons lecture you.
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Oct 12, 2015 00:37
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I've avoided reddit forever, until very recently. It's basically helped fill down time at work. It took a while to even get a grasp on how the site works. Couple of the people I work with are "redditors" and they showed me how a few things worked (like installing RES). But it'll never hold a candle to here. I don't care that I'm married, in my late 30's, I still laugh at the complete irreverence of GBS. Nothing will ever replace this place.
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