According to this website, SciForums traffic is down 34.7 % over the past year. What's happening here and is there any way we can reverse this trend?
http://www.trafficestimate.com/sciforums.com
Sciforums is an old-style internet discussion board. It isn't Facebook or whatever, one of the go-to social media sites that all the teenagers frequent. I read several boards like this and traffic is declining at all of them.
Well we could talk about science. That might draw some people back...
Pitching Sciforums at too high a technical level might just drive laypeople without much education in science away and intimidate new arrivals.
The forum can't seem to decide if it wants to be about science or woo.
If people want to emphasize that distinction, then they need to have some way of distinguishing between the two. That's the 'demarcation problem' from the philosophy of science. It seems to me that many/most of Sciforums' threads (at least the ones that aren't obsessed with left-politics) revolve around the issue of what does and doesn't count as legitimate mainstream science and how the distinction should be justified.
That's a perfectly fine topic of discussion, if the board would just let themselves accept it.
My impression is that it is the issues and questions arising from misconceptions or unorthodox ideas that generate the most discussion.
Exactly. What generates the most interest on a board like this isn't the arcane mathematical expression of string-theory, that virtually noone would understand anyway. It's the epistemological issues at the boundaries of science, where it comes into contact with religion and "pseudoscience". That's what fires everyone up and makes them feel like they have something to say.
This entails a certain level of tolerance for cranks. If everyone is in violent agreement, discussion soon peters out.
There are plenty of disagreements among scientists about scientific matters. But discussing those matters intelligently requires more technical background than most of our participants have.
However one does still need a mechanism to eject egregiously stupid, incoherent or tiresome posters, as without that, the forum is soon dominated by imbecile rubbish that is not even worth responding to.
I don't think that they should be ejected entirely. But I agree that the moderators should perhaps be more aggressive in moving threads from the 'science' forums up on top down to the 'alternative' categories. I think that those fora should be pretty-much 'anything goes'.
But again, that requires that a sound and convincing demarcation can be drawn between 'real' science and what our board oddly calls "woo". (I always thought that was what young lovers did to each other.) I was just skimming through that latest issue of
New Scientist yesterday and it had a cover article about a minority of astrophysicists proposing modifications to Newtonian gravity's inverse square law as an alternative to the currently trendy dark-matter speculations. (That isn't new, but some recent mathematical models seem to accord better with astronomical observations than the dark-matter models do.) It's a legitimate alternative hypothesis, but I suspect that anyone proposing it here on Sciforums would immediately get their asses flamed off and the discussions would have to take place in the 'alternative theories' forum.
I'm still convinced that some of the board's best and deepest discussions are likely to take place down there in 'alternative' exile, and that's where most of the board's intellectual interest might ultimately lie.
The question I would pose, though, is whether the volume of traffic is the best measure of the health, or the quality, of a forum.
That raises the question of what Sciforums' owners want the board to be.
Do they want to maximize traffic and advertising revenue? Or do they want to discuss science?
If they want to discuss science, how do they propose doing that? What kind of science discussion board do they want it to be?
A place for informed discussions of the latest theories and hypotheses? I don't think that our current readership would sustain that. To do it properly would require that Sciforums' participants be working scientists with advanced degrees in the subjects they are discussing. Enforcing that would leave Sciforums with one or two participants at best, none of which would be me. I don't see Sciforums ever becoming a scientists' shop-talk forum.
A place for discussion of basic scientific concepts at the level of beginning undergraduate classes? (I personally would fit in best at that level.) But making that work would require that we have some participants who not only are knowledgeable about science at that level, but are
willing and able to teach. I've seen little sign of the necessary patience and teaching ability here in the several years I've been posting.
A place for posting layman's-level news stories about scientific 'discoveries' (they often turn out to be somebody's speculations), the more counter-intuitive the better, where everyone goes 'Oh wow! That's cool!' and then has nothing more to say? That's kind of what it is now. I sense that a few people here treat science like a religion and these news stories provide them with a constantly expanding store of revealed holy doctrine about the Secrets of the Universe. I find it boring and a little stupid, unless there's some inquiry into where the new ideas come from and what justifies them.
My own interests lie in the philosophical questions that science raises. Questions of what science is, what its relationship is to other areas of life like religion, ethics or everyday phenomenal awareness, what its boundaries are (are the "social sciences" really science in the sense that physics is?), what science's methods are, what kind of reasoning takes place in science (what's 'scientific evidence'? How does scientific evidence make hypotheses more or less confirmed?), what science really tells us about existence and fundamental ontology, and how these various ideas vary between sciences and change over time in the history of science. I'm not convinced that Sciforums' current readership will sustain those kind of discussions either, but it takes less specialized training to engage in them and we do approximate university-level discussions pretty well at times.
In my opinion the best discussions usually arise at the boundaries, in response to problem cases, which is why I think that heretics are valuable and why the alternative fora might end up the most stimulating places on the board.
(shrugs)
