Dumb Ideologies wrote:Alright, I'm gonna comment seriously on this now.
There's a thread like this every six months or so. Part of it is nostalgia; the people you recognise stop posting, you fall out of the loop with in-jokes, don't feel so connected etc. But certainly, since towards the end period of the Jolt era I feel like standards have dropped dramatically.
We've lost a lot of good posters. That's going to have an effect, and quality accumulated over years isn't going to be compensated for quickly. But it's more than that. I think it's a lot down to Forum 7. Not to say for a moment that it's a bad place or should be got rid of. But it's very much a separate community with relatively little overlap with NSG. In the past, we had social threads where we'd discuss non-political or non-'hard' news items. Now they pretty much get carted over to F7 without much question. So there's not much opportunity for generalites to hang out and get to know each other.
I remember in the past I was reasonably friendly with some posters on the right. It's because in the social threads we could talk about non-political things. You don't so much flame and troll people you feel that you know on some level. Along with the disappearance of the old 'core', this has created a situation where I feel the social element has gone, and it's effectively a dry debating club between people largely - like most of the population - incapable of quality debate. I fully admit I've got dragged into the mess of nothing but childish partisan bickering and that I've been part of the problem.
In reality, it's only habit that keeps me here, since the elements I used to enjoy are gone or severely diluted. A community takes a long time to build up, and I think if we want to re-establish it a lot of conscious work will have to come from all sides.
My name's Nadkor, and I approve this message.