Right, the assertion behind this thread is doubly false. Not only has activity not decreased (as every post in this thread has pointed out), but the Atlas Forum is different from the overwhelming trend among message boards in this regard. The single-subject message board, unrelated to some larger corporation, is basically a relic of fifteen years ago. It should be abundantly clear why Reddit is not remotely comparable.
Yeah, I agree here. I do not think it is a positive development but most "old school" message boards have been on decline. There are exceptions but the medium is sadly dying out and I am not looking forward to the days when kids will have not experienced old school message boards
But the take applied to Atlas in particular is inarguably false (though some of the stats mentioned by others before are really bot spikes; but activity is certainly 150-200% of what it used to be)
I think the point about ideological diversity is more interesting, although reading old posts in isolation may not clearly indicate that back then most prominent blue avatars were basically seen as clowns. Post count was not inherently worthy of respect a decade ago any more than it is now. That said, I was younger then and more tolerant of ideological diversity and more willing to believe that the other side had points worth considering; I think that this is an evolution that has taken place in the minds of a lot of people here over the last ten years.
You talk of this development as if it was a good thing! (especially the bolded part).
I've gone over it in the past, but I think it is a failure that Atlas is so lopsidedly left wing nowadays. The US population is roughly 45-50% right wing. Even if you want to adjust for demographics, the Atlas forum should be somewhere around 1/3 Republican or Republican leaning.
We'd be lucky if that was more like 15% at this point.
The biggest change in that regard doesn't have to do with this forum directly: it's the complete disavowal by the Republican Party not just of intellectual respectability but of coherent thought. The intellectual case for the Bush administration was wrong, but its existence meant that one could position oneself as an intellectual. By contrast, "right-wing intellectuals" online can get somewhere by making obvious criticisms of the Democratic Party agenda, but eventually they face a crossroads where either they have to admit that they voted for Biden anyway or else they have to give away any intellectual pretense by parroting the literally absurd claims of the Republican Party. It's no surprise that people here don't take kindly to the latter option, since that kind of agitprop is not meant for a politically sophisticated audience.
I don't really agree with this take but let's say it is true.
Like I said before, per demographics, Atlas should be in a vacuum around 1/3 Republican; and indeed it was back in the day! You should know better than anyone, just open an old thread and you'll see many more blue avatars and conservatives. Even if they weren't respected (not sure, wasn't there to watch) they were at least here posting among us!
So why on Earth did they leave? It's a bit of a failure that Atlas is echochambery (could be worse but we aren't in a good position)
