tell me what you think of splitting 'a&e' into a separate forum

[JaredL]

[ QUOTE ]
I have not read a single response on this thread

Don't do it. The cream rises to the top, the useless, trivial, and worthless get sent down to die.

It's natural selection.

[/ QUOTE ]
This isn't true at all. In the strategy forums the threads that stay at the top are the really good strategy posts from big name posters, controversy/cheating posts, and posts by argumentative types with differing opinions. These are for the most part very good or at least interesting posts.

In forums like OOT the threads at the top are good or interesting posts, flame wars, pretty much any with pics of real women, trainwrecks and so forth. Some of these are good but many of them are not. They just get a lot of attention.

It's like saying that Creed, Brittany Spears, the Backstreet Boys and their current versions are the cream of the musical crop. That's clearly not true.

If you don't like that analogy consider this forum before politics and sports were moved. There were basically always 4 or 5 threads on Israel - Palestine, another 2 or 3 on Bush, and a couple other random political threads on the front page (and at that time I had a default sized front page). This was certainly not the cream rising but a bunch of pointless arguing between people whose minds were already made up. These threads were "useless, trivial, and worthless" and certainly did not get sent down to die. Similarly, during the World Series, March Madness etc. sports completely dominated the forum. I like sports so I was fine with it but a lot of those threads weren't very good but were simply flamefests between Yankee and Red Sox fans. Dead alone caused these threads to remain at the top.

WRT the arguments in this thread, I don't think anybody is "scared" to come here. There are several of us here that don't like the current state of OOT as well as the trend. It's not that I'm scared of it, probably over 60% of my posts on this site are in OOT, it's just that what you wrote here is not true at all and precisely the problem. Reading the top threads it's a lot of juvenile "show us your boobs" type crap. I'm not opposed at all to threads dedicated to pictures of women, I've started them a time or two. I'm not even opposed to the quantity of these no content posts. The problem I do have is that I feel that it stifles good threads. It does so not only by pushing them off the front page but destroying them from within.

Take the Paxil thread. That was a reasonable thread, OP noticed a change in a girl he knew and was interested in and was wondering if her taking a drug was potentially why as well as what he could/should do about it. Given the population of OOT this type of thread is very applicable to our lives. That thread exploded, "rising to the top" not because people were giving advice and there was good dialogue but because after people repeatedly asked the OP for pics of the girl he was foolish/not familiar enough with OOT to actually provide them and not savvy enough to change the file names and so after he posted there was a huge surge of excitement over the pictures, the girls myspace, contacting here and so on. The thread exploded in popularity as it became "useless, trivial, and worthless."

I think OOT is still an ok forum, but has gotten much worse for reasons mentioned above. The problem is that as Astro points out repeatedly there is a huge snowballing effect. This leads to multiple demands for pics in every single relationship advice and idiots at the edge of their seats waiting for a "trainwreck" and other issues that often derail otherwise pretty good threads. It also leads to things like the "ask X about Y" threads which were good for the most part and actually did feature natural selection to a large degree.

Jared