I was talking to a friend of mine here about the difference between where I see TOL and where it was in my first few years here...I'm an optimist so I keep waiting for the new influx and the turn around, but I think we've narrowed appreciably and fragmented almost to the same extent.
Take rep. Several years ago I went from new guy to the top of that particular (froze the machinery) without any particular alliance or effort. Now that wasn't to note my total, but to set up this observation: I got there because we had a wide number of regular posters who could appreciate a difference or who were different enough across a wide strata of issues to meet you on a point or more any given day.
I've watched those members slowly drift away or be driven from the boards by the extremists, the folks who only hear or appreciate an echo of their voice and that's a shame. I think that can give the appearance of activity, but underneath there's a sort of rot. New people happen by and quickly get that sense and are in equally short order gone. It's one reason I stopped doing the class members by year thread. There just weren't enough who began and remained, outside of a few hostile voices. It's been that way for a few years now and it concerns me.
I suppose that fracturing is part of the reason we no longer have an ecumenical week when posters have to be on best and positive behavior. Posting would dry up, so many of the voices capable or interested in it having long since departed. And I think Knight letting go of the annual awards will only further emphasize that break. It used to be a thing that united the membership. It was a broad enough recognition that even if you weren't on the inside you felt a degree of possibility and appreciation. You weren't winning the top spot, but you could place and seeing who was placing around you made everyone feel a little better about things, a little more a part of the community, like the HOF.
Now (and no disrespect angled at the folks attempting to take the reigns) it might as well be chrys' awards or my own old faux version. And that makes one less point of cohesion, one more reduction from that community to a group of people writing on various walls.
Anyway, sorry for the serious turn. I know it's not what people stop by to see for the most part, but it's been on my mind of late. I'm one of the lucky ones. I got to see this place in a wider, more diverse and genial stride, when friends of all sorts and differences were here to be had and could be differed with without the level of acrimony and anger that's all too much a part of the scenery now...even if we've always had trolls, bikers and anti theists descending on us from time to time in waves. We also had waves of interesting and interested people who sensed that community and found enough voices within it to expand and enrich it.
Enough of those remain, the old friends if fewer and fewer new ones. to take the place of those I liked and struggled with or against and I wonder if that's just the inevitable way of things...if that shift might be a natural part of a cycle and people like me are just the latest old folks shaking their heads about the kids' music. Maybe this is what most want and will be for a time. Maybe I'm just part of an increasingly odd man out.
But I hope not.
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