State of the Forum

[jason_t]

SS sucks now

There. I said it. And I mean it. This forum used to be one of the best on this site. But this forum is in an awful state right now and it has been for about a month with the past two weeks being particularly god awful. A few weeks ago there were regular posts about how OOT had started sucking and it had and since those posts it has improved. Hopefully we can do something about this wonderful resource we have here in SS; losing it would be a tragedy.

There are too many news users. Whatever the reason, and I don't care what it is, lately we've been overwhelmed with an influx of new posters. They post too many hands. Most of the hands they post are standard. Or boring. Or low content. Or no content. We in SS should be past these types of hands. Those types of hands belong in Micro-Limit. We thrive off the interesting hands where we are calculating our equity or finding value bets and discussing theory and so on. The interesting hands involve marginal situations, not what to do when you flop quads. There is so much noise right now it's drowning out the quality hands and the quality posts.

There are too many good posters that have essentially left. For a variety of reasons, many of our best posters have stopped posting here. This is obviously killing us.

There is a horrible consequnce to the above two. They have led to many of our other good posters that are still around to decreasing the number of threads they get involved in. I used to read every hand posted in this forum. Now there are too many to do that. I used to read every post in SS by Evan, Johnny Boom Boom, sfer, StellarWind, sthief09 and others. This meant opening threads that I wouldn't normally open. Now that they aren't posting as much, I'm not opening many threads. I've talked with others. They say the same thing. I know some fantastic posters that don't even read the forum anymore; they only look for threads from people they know. This has caused the signal/noise ratio to take a turn for the worse. As that happens, the problem recurs and signal/noise ratio gets worse and on and on.

There are too many garbage posts. Whether it be a stats post, a "is Party 3/6 getting harder" post, a "I can't beat Party 2/4 or 3/6 at night" post. The correct reply to most of these threads is "you suck at poker. Kill yourself." The best reply is none. There are also too many bad beat posts and no content/low content posts. I don't care if you limp reraised with 67s and caught a flush draw fish. I don't care if he called down with Jack high. I don't care if he capped every street drawing almost dead. I don't care if he capped with the nut low. I don't care if he needed runner runner straight flush. No one else does. A lot of us are playing 20k hands a month. We've seen it all. In my opinion, the only acceptable low content posts are ones where somehow we're getting to know each other better; we work best with others after seeing their human side. Some posts belong in other forums like Psychology or the zoo. Even some veterans are making this mistake.

There is another thing that I'm guilty of and that many others are too. We're not elaborating our thoughts enough. We say "easiest value bet ever" or "clearest fold ever" or "standard" or "idiot" and don't say why. We should be. And we should especially not be making posts like this in a thread if we're the fifteenth person to do so. There's no point.

There might be a way to save the forum. I don't know what it is yet but I don't think the situation is hopeless yet. I have ideas. A FAQ will go a long way. I'll be sending some PMs later today with other thoughts. Maybe you'll share yours here. I hope you can help.