Although I've only been registered here for about a year, I have been reading this forum on and off for more than a decade. Now, this very well could be just me looking at things through rose-tinted spectacles, but in that time the quality of some of the posts on here seems to me to have taken something of a nosedive. Don't get me wrong - there are still some very interesting discussions on here, but I think there has also been a marked increase in banality in recent years.
On one hand, I agree about some form of tighter moderation during school holidays when the quality of posts go down, yet when I joined TVF in the early noughties as a twenty something, most of the members here were in their late teens who had passion for tv pres.
It's funny: when I first started reading this forum, it was around the time of zero tolerance week. Perhaps another one of those wouldn't go amiss...
To address your point more generally, though, and without wishing to sound like an old fogey, I can't help wondering whether social media has had a lot to do with the drop in post quality. In the early days of this forum, the Internet, whilst becoming popular, wasn't the all-pervading entity that it is now, and social media was virtually non-existent. Indeed, back then, I would say that internet forums were one of the main ways for people on the Internet to communicate. As said forums were populated by users who were genuinely interested in the topics that each particular forum focussed on, the discussions were usually more intelligent, as everyone had something to say, with most people knowing their stuff (and those who didn't quickly being put in their place).
Nowadays, many people who would once have looked for and joined forums that matched their interests can simply join a relevant Facebook group instead; this leads to the situation we have now, where many internet forums seem to have died a death, and those that haven't are largely circling the drain. This forum seems to be one of the few which still has a healthy userbase, no doubt because of its niche subject matter. As I have said, though, I don't think even this forum is quite what it once was anymore. I think a lot of it is down to the culture of social media, where many people seem to just type whatever is on their minds without thinking. That seems to have bled through somewhat to here, where there seem to be a lot more trolls and low quality posts than there once were. In many ways, it's a real shame that a lot of the old internet culture has been lost, to be replaced with something far inferior.
Last edited by Woodpecker on 18 February 2019 7:49pm - 2 times in total