Some of us actually still care about the place, and aren't just going to roll over and let it die without at least putting in some effort to save it. I get that everything has its time, but that doesn't mean that there is nothing we can do to give it a fighting chance.
[...]
This sort of giving up attitude isn't going to help at all, in fact, that negative attitude is counterproductive to what the few people that DO still care and that DO want to save it, are trying to do.
Hey now! I think it's unfair to imply that people don't care about the forums, or want them to stay alive, just because they're not actively making new threads. I've been around since before I was born again (in 2004 - it's a long story), so I've naturally grown quite attached to the forums and I'd love for there to be a bit more activity around here, but I don't feel like the problem is a lack of threads to post in. I think it's more that there's nothing truly
interesting to talk about. It's hard to maintain a conversation if the topic at hand isn't very engaging. The way I remember it, some of our hottest threads over the years have concerned things like sexuality, religion and politics... but after years of arguing with random people on the internet, I imagine one might become sort of jaded, what with these things being pretty personal and all. I think a lot of people just can't be bothered with that kind of stuff anymore.
Most people don't even really "leave" as such; but I guess when you've been hanging out with the same group of people for years, you eventually run out of meaningful things to publicly discuss, and maybe you kind of end up growing close to a handful of members and you talk to them in private about everyday stuff. I think it's a pretty natural progression. Tossing a few icebreakers out there certainly can't hurt, but those longtime members who've stopped posting probably won't come back to talk about, like, shoes or whatever.
Sometimes you just can't force life back into things. It's like when your pet frog dies, you know? And you try to revive it with an advanced combination of chemistry and neurobiology, and you get it to move around and croak and things? Just like it used to? And you can hold your little Gulliver and pet him and he just stares at you with those cold, dead eyes, and you realize it's not the same? But you keep him around anyway, and you introduce him to all your friends and say "Hello, this is Gulliver, he's my pet frog, he used to be dead but I made him come back!" and they stop being friends with you, but at least you have your pet frog? It's kinda like that, I guess. I think an important lesson to take away from this experience is that if you fall in love with a girl, but she starts going out with a guy who has an actual live pet frog, and you become depressed, and you sit in your room all day clutching your dead pet frog... I forgot where I was going with this.
Something that might possibly attract interest would be a compelling philosophical discussion, I think. We've had some of those throughout the years, it seems like the sort of thing people enjoy. It promotes interaction, since you actually have to respond to each other as opposed to just butting in to tell everyone your favorite mollusk color. That's the sort of thing people could perhaps get invested in. But hell if I can think of anything to talk about. Maybe the ethics of restoring dead animals to life?
