the state of the forum

[pryor15]

I'm writing this off the top of my head, so take that into consideration.

As some of you may remember from the multiple threads on the OOT split, I was, for better or worse, at the center of much of the battle, and while I won't bother bringing up the specifics of that whole mess, suffice it to say that in some ways I consider myself to be one of the architects of the forum (along w/ several others like db, dom, blarg, el d, etc).

That being said, this is not the forum I envisioned.

The idea, as I understood it, was to create a place where long-form discussion, the type that was easily buried in OOT, had a place to flourish, where nuances could be explored and the obscure could have a place to find an audience. I saw a place where a discussion of the French New Wave would be next to an exhaustive study of different types of whiskey and small details from TV serials and alt.country albums and the like. There may only be 5 or 6 active posts, but they would be 5 or 6 really good active posts, and all other rubbish would be shipped to OOT.

What we've got instead is polls about movie trilogies and trip reports about board games and multiple posts in multiple threads that just name things. Everyone likes the same pizza toppings. Horay. Hell, we've even got a thread on Thai food that's running concurrently in OOT. Why? I haven't a clue.

What happens with all these polls and lists and nomination threads is it does exactly what OOT does to long-form discussion: it stiffles it. It creates a mentality where to the average poster, TL;DR is no different from OOT, only smaller. You get the exact same replies as over there, just fewer of them. The lists all end up being the same 10 movies that everyone's seen (favorite movie musical number?: uh, well I really like the dance scene in Pulp Fiction...) and doesn't do anything to create content, it's just clutter.

We've had some good threads. I thought El D's film lecture thread showed promise, as did Boro's film still quiz (although, that may be a bit borderline OOT. Still, it worked), and the QT plagarism discussion. We can do much better though. Put some thought into theads and posts. Regardless of what the FAQ says, I'm going to encourage people to do list and polls in OOT. I couldn't care less about the dramabomb that created this change. Some of us put forth a bit of effort and risked our good names (Blarg, for example, went out on a limb defending me when I was unable, and for that I'm thankful) to create this forum. To simply turn it into something different simply because of some petty politics is pretty lame.

And I realize that part of the problem is that I haven't really been creating any long-form content. I got myself over-extended with an on-going move, and I don't tend to review many of the summer movies, because I don't find them interesting. But, I've got a couple of half-written things that I should get a chance to finish in the near future.

It's also possible that the 2p2 community isn't mature enough to fully support a forum like TL;DR minus all the noise, but I highly doubt it. There's just too many intelligent people around here.

I'll probably come up with more ideas as people reply.

Oh, and this is nothing against diebitter, who I consider to be a friend. I think the forum was going in the wrong direction before he made the change.