Re: What happened to "mockery of stupid people"?
Posted: 2018-03-01 03:12pm
Yes.
Get your fill of sci-fi, science, and mockery of stupid ideas
http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/
I find it ironic that it's easier to get the attention of someone through Facebook than his own site.Lagmonster wrote: ↑2018-03-01 03:13pm Go to Facebook and ask him. He's a guy, not the Great and Powerful Oz.
That may have been the purpose, but I wouldn't say it's been a reality at any point.Lord Revan wrote: ↑2018-02-28 11:36pm Personally I think the new Motto reflects the orginal purpose better anyway, the way I saw the purpose of this forum was not to insult and belittle those who thinked differently from me but to mock ideas that were frankly idiotic and had no basis in reality.
Or shit up every possible post with pro-Pump/Colonel Slanders bullshit. Or anti-vaxx idiotology.Elheru Aran wrote: ↑2018-03-01 05:00pm If I had to ascribe reasons for keeping the site up-- maintaining the community that's been built here, nostalgia, a bit of ad revenue? Frankly it's a low-intensity investment for him, he bought the server years ago and hasn't had much occasion to do more than make sure the lights are on.
For my part I enjoy having a more or less fixed group of people that I've gotten to recognize somewhat over the years, at least online. Facebook is more of a crapshoot-- you can limit your 'friends' to people you actually know, and then I have a few who I don't know personally but who I enjoy the content they post, and a few people from here. But frankly the intellectual content is a bit on the low end because most people don't have the time to do more than post memes, share whatever's the current fad, or comment some bit of inarticulate inanity. A few select people will maintain coherent arguments, but for the most part... it's just not worth it. And, of course, you kinda just have to tolerate some people being on your list, family mainly.
Vashon wrote:For those of you who dont know, SDN was once SBs younger rival, before SV. Long before. And for a while, had a larger userbase and more visitors. It also had a venomous, nasty reputation, and frequently started shit and got shit started with, and its owner, Mike Wong, used to have a hate mail section that was fairly active and to this day, a fun read.
Unlike most pre Chan online communities, SDN openly allowed users to insult, or "flame", the living dogshit out of each other. Now, its focus was almost purely "debate", and for a time, you could even hold certain views that were severely contrary to Wong, so long as you defended them. Although even way back, you could get banned on a moments notice. The two popular subjects were scifi and religion. I dont think there was ever any pretense of good faith(FUCKING LOL) on Mike Wongs part regarding religion.
Nowadays, the majority of the active pop are, or were, staff, that is mods. And Thanas in particular seems to live for logging in and finding someone to ban. Permanently. In fact, as time went on, I dont think SDN even kept handing out tempbans. No, it was perfection or gone for ever. And for the last long long time, Dalton has been running the site....mostly checking to see if there is anything to ban.
But why did it die? They didnt, evidently, ban everyone. Not enough pages of ban log.
Vaermina wrote:You really answered your own question there.
When the choice is between a forum where you can actually debate and one that's forced to be an echo chamber for Mike Wong, people will naturally gravitate to the one that you can actually debate and participate in.
emperorsolo wrote:Wong, IIRC, tried to legitimately argue that having the President's official resort be called Camp David was akin to some european country naming their retreat "Camp Adolf." All because he viewed David from the Bible as a genocidal maniac? That's how crazy he was or is on the religion bandwagon.
darthdavid wrote:I actually have fairly bittersweet memories of SDN since it was, I think, the second forum I ever registered for and the first one I participated in seriously (and was actually how I found out about SB in the first place, though I didn't start going there regularly until well after I was basically done with SDN). I was around middleschool age, and had just recently gotten internet access at home. I got into this tick-based online strategy game called Dark Galaxy and ended up poking around on the forums a bit. Someone started an ST vs SW debate and SDN ended up getting linked. The whole ethos there of 'it doesn't matter how an argument is presented, just whether or not it's logically/factually sound' that defined the site at it's peak really resonated with me and reading and participating there really had a big impact on me, as I went through middle and highschool. I ended up falling out with the place after an extremely ill-advised April Fools' 'prank' on my part towards the end of HS got me slapped with a hefty temp-ban and then no avatar or sig privileges and an insulting custom title after it expired. I came back a few times (including a while I spent participating at SDN's own splinter-board, New Testingstan), but I was never able to get my account privileges returned or my custom title revoked, so it always felt awkward trying to hold conversations with people when I was effectively wearing a dunce-cap for something I did as an idiot teenager.
Still, even with some of the obvious flaws in SDN's approach (and some of the flaws mirroring that approach created in me) I still can't help but look back on the place with fondness as the site that helped me articulate my feelings on religion, first got me interested in debating people and introduced me to fandom and fanfiction.
Coiler wrote:I was a member of SDN back in the day. In fact, the main site was how I found SB (in a roundabout way that started with me googling "M2 Bradley" and ended with me seeing one of Wong's rants on Spacebattles and deciding to see what that 'SB' he was talking about was). Ok, here's my opinion on why it failed:
In some ways, SDN was doomed from the start. That's probably hyperbolic and exaggerated, but it did have major structural weaknesses. The first and most prominent was that it was basically an extension of an old Usenet group. Take a look at any one big Usenet furball on any subject and you can see some similarities. Widespread flaming, and an attitude among many that any restraint or civility is a sign of wimpy weakness to be shown nothing but contempt. Many Usenet-izens also took that 'logic' and applied to boards-by their standards, board rules are nothing more than a shield for those weak wimps to hide beyond (a lot of groups were unmmoderated, and proudly so). So trying to take a lot of those attitudes and applying them to a structured, rule-filled board was bound to be tricky.
So it was always more insular than SB, and always had more of a "dominated by an old group of ol' buddies" feel even as many of the specific users left/got banned. It was also smaller than SB even at its height-slightly smaller rather than massively smaller, and SB was a fraction of its later size, but still generally had fewer users on. And it felt like it. The setup and culture basically enforced a lot of that insularity, with the Hall of Shaming and banning trophies, along with a feeling of "tread lightly or you'll get roasted" that SB never quite had. This was not conducive to new users. I could go on and on, but that's by far the biggest reason.
I have no schadenfreude at seeing SDN decline-there were good people there, and I did spend a lot of time there. But I nonetheless quietly slunk away, and many others evidently did the same. And I could see why.
Inteb wrote:I lurked there for a long time, found SB that way too. I could never register because IIRC they wouldn't accept free email accounts like hotmail, and I have to say I'm glad they didn't. The place was pretty oppressive and even though I often agreed with the 'establishment' at the time (mostly the anti-religion, anti-conservative stuff) I could see that they were just driving away users by discouraging, to put it mildly, any exchange of viewpoints. The history forum was pretty good but once that came under the tyranny of Thanas I rarely went back.
Omegastar wrote:who?Inteb wrote:Thanas
Inteb wrote:I think it was the guy with a West Wing character for an avatar. He was given the history section and he mercilessly closed any thread that was even close to not being solely about history and any thread he considered that had gone off-point.Omegastar wrote:who?
Coiler wrote:My most active time there actually coincided with the board's implosion beginning in earnest, with old-timers engaging in suicidal flamewars before my very eyes. The moment the viritol began being aimed inward, the whole board was bound to dissolve
Their 180 degree turn on Stuart Slade and his works (which arguably propped the board up for a little longer) was something to behold. He went from being a True Expert who was massively 'respected' by the entire board to someone who got heavily criticized, chased off, banned, and then mocked by all but his few remaining diehard supporters. When you combine that sort of "Oceania Has Always Been At War With ______Asia" shift with their attitudes, it wasn't a good sign.
Ironically that's what that thread is basically saying is that SDN is run that way.U.P. Cinnabar wrote: ↑2018-03-02 10:15am Other forums have standards?! Oh," what the admin and his cronies says goes" must be a standard now.
Sure it's in the rules, but it certainly hasn't always been that way in practice.U.P. Cinnabar wrote: ↑2018-03-02 10:24amThis forum has rules that the staff attempt to apply to everyone fairly. Only Art Eaton's old starfrontiers.org forums even come close.
I kind of miss being able to Google my online alias with a few other phrases and see people incensed at my very existence back when I ran a fairly popular Team Fortress 2 server for my gaming community. One exchange was great since, due to my profile, you could see the City, State I lived in. Some kid was like "Think we can get his info and someone can 'talk' to this asshole?" And someone responded with, "Dude, he lives in Texas. They hand out guns with Happy Meals down there. You'll be dead before you knock on the door." And another guy pointed out the multiple posts I had made in the OT forums about guns and self-defense. Then it devolved into "He must be a Waco style nutter, we should call the FBI blah blah" before the entire thread got deleted.
I always liked the people who avoided any moderator action by focusing on "safe words" with shit like "your mother should be ashamed of you" which is actually a pretty scathing insult if you think about it while I'd get actioned on other forums for saying shit like "they never should have scraped you out of your father's jerk-off sock." And channers have ruined a lot. "Butthurt" being one I can't use because supposedly they own it now even though it was a popular phrase among all my friend in the early-90s. You don't even know what triggers twitchy admins on a lot of forums.mr friendly guy wrote: ↑2018-03-02 11:46amThese days at least Spacebattles have some more standards, but I got a warning for calling a person snowflake, after she complained about being called an idiot (by another poster) and how it dehumanises people... when she openly talks about mass killings of people she doesn't like (albeit using euphemisms). Yeah, this place at least had better standards even if I do disagree with the mods or Wong occasionally.
Nowadays, the majority of the active pop are, or were, staff, that is mods. And Thanas in particular seems to live for logging in and finding someone to ban. Permanently. In fact, as time went on, I dont think SDN even kept handing out tempbans. No, it was perfection or gone for ever. And for the last long long time, Dalton has been running the site....mostly checking to see if there is anything to ban.
I'm just glad this is still here. Seeing what I see when I type in Jedi-Outcast.com is depressing in more than a few ways. Damn wayback machine isn't the same. I can see some stupid asshole made a post, but I can't mock him for being a stupid asshole because I can't read what he wrote.Iroscato wrote: ↑2018-03-02 02:29pmI sometimes wish I were born a decade or so earlier. The internet in the late 90's - early 00's seemed like such a fun place, before all of the money in the world got poured into it and behemoths like Facebook and Reddit emerged. This board is practically an historical artifact of that period, and one that I hope continues for many years.
Early internet was a strange and wonderful thing. Dial-up modems, AOL chat rooms (anybody else here remember the ol' Red Dragon Inn? One of the early fantasy role-playing chat rooms, GeoCities sites ...The internet in the late 90's - early 00's seemed like such a fun place, before all of the money in the world got poured into it and behemoths like Facebook and Reddit emerged
I think the fact that there was something truly new to experience every time you opened up your browser is the key. It's something that can never again be replicated. It was unique--call it the digital frontier.Ziggy Stardust wrote: ↑2018-03-02 04:25pm Early internet was a strange and wonderful thing. Dial-up modems, AOL chat rooms (anybody else here remember the ol' Red Dragon Inn? One of the early fantasy role-playing chat rooms, GeoCities sites ...
I'm pretty sure the internet's always been a gutter, to some extent.Iroscato wrote: ↑2018-03-02 02:29pm I sometimes wish I were born a decade or so earlier. The internet in the late 90's - early 00's seemed like such a fun place, before all of the money in the world got poured into it and behemoths like Facebook and Reddit emerged. This board is practically an historical artifact of that period, and one that I hope continues for many years.
This.I seem to be noticing a recent uptick in activity too which pleases me - probably mainly due to there being new SW films to complain about and the United States now being run by six monkeys stuffed into an orange rubber skin-suit.
What a crock of shit. To avoid the main discussion topic, I want to pick on this one.Alferd Packer wrote: ↑2018-03-03 11:16am And now the internet is basically the Times Square Applebees.