| I've had an account here for more than four years, so I'd like to think I have a somewhat informed perspective on how the community has fared thus far. The first year or so was a private club. I knew many of the posters, and would have great arguments, some won, some lost but it didn't really matter because everyone shared a passion for knowledge, and would rather be proven wrong than not learn something new. The discussion was great. The second year I started losing track of the usernames and thus it became less of a club of peers, and more of a regular forum, albeit a very high quality one. The third year the site had attracted so many users that the original patos of intelligent discussion based on merit started to fade. Based on mere numbers this had to be so; for any given subject there are only a limited number of people that adhere to the standards to which we had becomme accustomed, and new users mistook nitpicking for good discussion. The fourth year I've more or less stopped posting and discussing here, primarily because it's become a game of winning, and not a game of learning. Nitpicking is a great way of winning, but terrible if you want to have an interesting discussion. Negativity is highly correlated with nitpicking in this respect :-) I remember the first year here i had a long discussion with MattMaroon about a linked story where a consultant had saved a company 100 million dollars by changing a few bits and pieces around in the check-out process. He was concinced the company was Amazon, I was convinced it wasn't. The discussion dragged on, and we each tried to throw statistics, numbers and good guesses on the table, until at the end Matt found a link directly confirming that it was indeed amazon. He was right, and we were both happy because now we knew. I don't see many of those discussions anymore. Unfortunately. |