Are boards users a just bit smarter than people on other social media?

Kylta

screamer wrote: »

I think it is more to do with the age profiles of boards users than twitter users. With age, comes wisdom, or so they say.

If its wisdom you seek, why did I just swallow half a crayon

I suspect it's more to do with the nature of the platform. Social media encourages the use of soundbites, and small paragraphs, with few people being bothered to read anything of substance. Whereas with boards, there's a general attitude that claims and arguments should be supported with evidence/links. Lacking that evidence, most claims will be accepted as opinions. So, there's greater scope to dig deeper than the surface/superficial statements that are so common on social media.

Now, some people here are interested in having proper arguments with each other. Whether they're open to being convinced against their past biases, is a different matter, but generally we get to see people engage in relatively respectful conversations, which explore many aspects of any topic. By engaging in such a manner, you can see people's writing improve over time, along with the degree of logic they apply to their arguments. I don't think there's the same range of opportunities to grow as a poster/thinker on social media.

Lastly, as others have pointed out, your nickname has some importance here. Once you reach a few thousand posts, you begin to care a little about being consistent, and having somewhat of a decent reputation. Some posters do anyway. As with anything on the Internet, you get a wide range of personalities, some of whom love to troll, press emotional buttons, or engage in utterly retarded rhetoric.

I think with boards it's easy to see the history of other posters behavior, so you can take their opinions with a pinch of salt (unless they're very consistent), whereas with social media, they're like butterflies without any firm foundation to their opinions. There's also a very nasty part of social media with it's encouragement of hate speech towards one group or another. Thankfully, boards seems to have dodged the attentions of those muppets.

Are we smarter? Not really. Just better organised, and likely know that we need to prove our opinions, rather than holding to an attitude of "take it or leave it... and if you leave it, you're scum".

paleoperson

Not at all, no.

It's not hard to sound informed and nuanced and have "flowery vocabulary" when you have google at your disposal and (comparatively) unlimited time to work your post up. A lot of these users have years - or even decades - of experience at this as well, of arguing online and what the good counters are. A lot of the time they achieve their goals of making them and their views look like very good ones but it's an awful sink hole.

I think you can learn lots online, but it's very hard to analyze or make judgements about anyone from purely their online activity on a board like this - most of the time. Even if it feels like you can that's generally not really the case. You don't know who it is you're talking to, how they're saying things, what sort of crutches they're leaning on to form their arguments.

Online discussion can be ok for coming up with interesting ideas and information but you should never take it too seriously.

jmlad2020

This is like saying people who shop at SuperValu are better than people who shop at Aldi.

Greyfox

jmlad2020 wrote: »

This is like saying people who shop at SuperValu are better than people who shop at Aldi.

Not true. Facebook and Twitter will never make you smarter but on here you can occasionally learn something or think about something differently due to there been some sensible and intelligent people on here.

Say Your Number

Given how this place turned into the f*cking Peter Casey fanclub after he came out with a cynical soundbite about travellers, I wouldn't say it's dramatically different from most other platforms.