If you worry too much about it then it's only going to get worse.

How quality of discussion is declining?

I have seen one or two posts that give a feeling of coming out of /jp/ or something but I did not notice any drecrease in quality of posts lately so I cannot be sure of what you are talking about.

I haven't seen any significant decline of quality in any way

Who are you spoilering?

>>2978
Aren't most people here from 4chan?

>>2982

I haven't been on 4chan regularly for over 2 years, dunno if that counts as "from"

>>2982
I am, like, insulted and stuff.

>>2982
We're all cute little middle school girls straight out of 2chan.

>>3003
I'll believe that when you guys stop talking about your drinking problems and masturbation habits.

Today /fb/ has proven we do have plenty of people here at TC, but no one likes to talk about anything.
unless it's bitching about the site.

>>3011
It's always a relevant subject.

>>3014

>>3017

I have been here before we left ib4f and yes, I can say for certain that post quality has been declining, but at a very subtle rate. For example two years ago this thread would be unlikely to be 13 one-liners, but if it was six months ago, then it probably would.

>>3022
The OP offered no ideas, it's a shitty thread, anyway. Now do something useful and go agree with me about how shitty kakusu is in the kakusu thread.

>>3024
Rather, the lack of ideas demonstrates that a decrease in quality is unavoidable, and that 4chan standards of posting are already common here.

Besides, even if I did put some ideas there it would just get heckled like usual, so I would rather not put that much investment in the post and leave the input to those who can put forward better solutions.

Post edited on 29th Oct 2012, 4:45pm

>>3025
I don't think it's the lack of ideas, I think it's the intolerance for those ideas.
for example, when TC started out, a thread asking how you like your stakes in /ot/ might have been fine, but now people would report it as retarded.

>>3022
It's not the lack of words that should judge whether a post is "good" or not, but the idea and thought put into it. A single one-word post is sometimes enough.

>>3028
yup

>>3027
Hey, I remember that thread!

>>3032
High five mofo~!

>>3022

What >>3024 said. Not only that, OP didn't even mention what he meant by 'steadily declining' discussion quality.

Now I understand that he referred to the fact that nowadays the posts are much shorter, no effort gets put into writing them and they are simply half-assed but he could at least write that. Not to mention propose a solution because, to be perfectly honest, I can't think of one. Install a filter that would discard all post shorter than 1000 characters? It's just not possible.

It's not like we get 'lol so randum XD' post or image macro barrages. It's just that people aren't willing to put in the effort and if they aren't you can't simply force them to do so.

>>3056
Do you really need a rigorous definition of 'declining discussion quality'? Discussions are simply not as objectively enjoyable, witty, interesting as they used to, people don't take it easy as much, people don't put as much effort into posting, we see the same threads on the same page for months on end, etc. And its not just me getting bored of threads, things were objectively better in the past.

Its possible you simply haven't noticed any decline, because you haven't been observing it on a long enough timescale. You're more likely to have first started visiting this site during the more recent snowballing periods. Indeed the decline in quality is subtle (see the graph), and it might even be approaching a limit. The graph is just to illustrate my subjective opinion of how things were starting from when I first started visiting (after .tk and during ib4f) and I don't pretend to have any quantitative measures of these things. Maybe the exponential rise in users should be more subtle, but you get my point.

I really can't think of any effective measures to stop declining quality and/or reverse it and I hope by making this thread someone (smarter) will come forward with an answer. So I apologise for being lazy to put forward whatever feeble ideas I can think of and seeing them get ripped apart.

Post edited on 30th Oct 2012, 3:18am

>>3061

>Do you really need a rigorous definition of 'declining discussion quality'?

I need spcific examples. What I'd like to see would look like this: 1. what it looked like back in the day 2. what it looks like now 3. why it's a bad thing 4. a possible solution. Just complaining 'it's shit' is actually making the situation worse.

>Its possible you simply haven't noticed any decline, because you haven't been observing it on a long enough timescale. You're more likely to have first started visiting this site during the more recent snowballing periods

That's a stupid ad-hominem. And I'll have to disappoint you, I have been around since ib4f (although I started browsing /tc/ only two or so months before the ib4f /tc/ went down). And if you think it used to be better on ib4f then sorry, you're just being delusional. A healthy dose of /jp/'s cynical elitism actually improved the site as a whole in my opinion. The place might be less friendly but that discourages circle jerking which was a big issue on ib4f (at least in my opinion).

And like I said, I actually agree but if all you have to say is 'it's bad, what now' then I'd rather not see such a thread in the first place. And you can't just play your 'yeah, sure, it's much better to just stay passive and let matters get even worse, right? At least I tried to help' because if you really want to do something about it you simply have to propose some kind of a solution when you create a meta thread like this. If it'll be a stupid one you should prepare to get flamed (and it'd be best to prepare for that even if you think it's a good one), though.

And of course I agree with the graph you posted but that's inevitable in my opinion. I could say 'I wasted away my entire life browsing the 'net' with a clear conscience and I can only name one community which didn't get hit by this. I have some theories behind why it keeps happening (I told you about imageboards) but explaining them wouldn't really help.

>>3067
You think tohno-chan is better for the same reason that I think its worse, so I think digging out examples wouldn't support my case any further.

I just want to deny that I made an ad-hominem attack, at least intentionally. Coming here later doesn't mean you're a crappier person, its just that it likely would've skewed your perspective.

Short of some kind of major structural change (like I dunno, making the post reporting system more efficient or some horrible incarnation of upvotes) I think the best bet would be to try and change the board culture starting from the top. Users seem to take the words of the admins, mods and the rules as gospel so this shouldnt be so hard to do. First off, people should just stop being so angry. People should be friendly and not insult each other. /mai/ is a pretty good example, people are usually very friendly and supportive of one another and I'd like to see more of that elsewhere on tohno-chan. Somehow this needs to be balanced with our 'Gestapo' where we heckle the crap out of anything we perceive as a threat to our board. Secondly, I think the 'banned+discouraged stuff' list needs to be simple and all-encompassing rather than being implemented on a patchwork basis. There should also be a general guideline to the expected standard of post quality, nothing too specific (else this place would get bland and really stagnant), just enough to give the subtle push to write nicer.

>>3070

> You think tohno-chan is better for the same reason that I think its worse, so I think digging out examples wouldn't support my case any further.

No, if you were to read my posts carefully you would notice that I agreed with you not once but twice:

>>3056

>Now I understand that he referred to the fact that nowadays the posts are much shorter, no effort gets put into writing them and they are simply half-assed but he could at least write that.

>>3067

>And like I said, I actually agree

I just said that - in my opinion - ib4f wasn't much better than /tc/ is nowadays. Just for the record, I enjoyed /tc/ the most around April~May 2011. The boards were active, lots of discussions which were of interest to me took place and the posts seemed to be well thought-out most of the time. Now I'm not saying it was perfect since increased activity inevitably leads to incresing drama but that trade-off seemed fair enough to me back then.

>Short of some kind of major structural change (like I dunno, making the post reporting system more efficient or some horrible incarnation of upvotes)

What would you like to delete in the first place? I was sure you complained about the 'decilining standards' because the posts were shorter and simply more half-assed. I never would have though there's an increase of content that might bother someone (which is why I asked you to be specific in the first place, that way we could avoid misunderstandings).

I think the mods do a good job even though sometimes content I report is left alone (but deciding whether something is deletion-worthy or not is the mods' job). No complaints here.

>There should also be a general guideline to the expected standard of post quality, nothing too specific (else this place would get bland and really stagnant), just enough to give the subtle push to write nicer.

In a way there is, we have lots of unwritten rules, it just so happens that a lot of people like to break them and leave Tohno with little choice but to update the existing rules.

I, for one, think things are fine as they are on the nice-mean scale. Being too nice and friendly would result in another ib4f. I think the negativism and - let's be honest here - aggression as soon as someone is perceived as a threat to the community is a good thing in reasonable doses (and I don't think we're overdoing it right now, although I DO wish people would just report stuff instead of complaining about what a 'quality thread' something is).

>>3056
Not everything people have to say can take up a half dozen paragraphs. Sometimes there just isn't that much to say.

I know I for one can safely say in my past experiences I have been given a hard time(well maybe not hard time, more like poked fun at a bit? you know how those guys are) by people from around here and the irc channel more than just a few times for my little bad habit of excessively dragging out the things that might wright on any given topic or subject that don't require as many words as I normally would shove in it just to get across a simple idea, I believe this could possibly be called rambling in any event. too long didn't read and what not: I use to many words for simple ideas.