-
I dunno . I don't even know if anyone would agree to it but if someone did, that would be the only way to bring some new people here.
-
I renew my proposal - maybe some science-themed Youtubers or subreddits can link people to SFN since classic forums are still #1 for long format discussions (Reddit is moderately suited for that, YT comment sections - unsuited at all).
-
There's the third thing I forgot about in the OP - they split constantly. So the one truth turns out to be not so one in the end...
-
This is true for both political and religious totalizing ideologies - the one who disagrees is always either an idiot or a traitor, never just a honest, smart person who looked at the same stuff and just happened to reach a different conclusion. And all of them hate heretics more than infidels - the early Catholic Church spent more time on fighting Arians than on converting Pagans, Stalinist USSR was willing to cooperate with Social Democrats, Liberals and even Nazis (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) - but never with Trotskyists. Modern radical movement also spend a disproportional amount of time on internal purges and policing boundaries, sometimes more than on pursuing their stated goals.
-
Probably not. Need for Closure is a cognitive trait that makes people more likely to seek definite answers to questions. Such people are more dogmatic and more prone to in-group/out-group bias relatively to more open-minded people who tolerate ambiguity and complexity better. Believing that immigrants do have their problems but their causes are complex and multicausal requires tolerating nuance. For some people a simple binary of white = good, non-white = bad is just easier to hold mentally.
-
I think it's just simple inability to tolerate change. There's a name about it in psychology, Need for Cognitive Closure, NFC/NFCC.
-
Not even them - they are themselves immigrants as are all speakers of Indo-European languages in Europe (who started arriving from Ukraine ca. 3000 BC)... and their predecessors too (who started arriving from Anatolia ca. 8000 BC). And H. sapiens itself evolved in Africa. Everyone is an immigrant.
-
Indeed - as Winston Churchill used to say, you cannot logic someone out of a position if they never logiced themselves into it. I debate such people all the time elsewhere, I quite enjoy it but someone else would have gone crazy.
-
IIRC since 2018, Google has been prioritizing Reddit and Quora in the search results - when someone asks a basic question like "how does natural selection work?", they get redirected to Reddit as the first place after Wikipedia. People may not even be getting SFN in search results unless they specifically google "science forum" - which many Gen Z/Gen A people likely don't do since they don't use forums (my 13 y.o nephew doesn't even have a computer, 90% of his interactions on the web are Youtube, TikTok and streaming services which he accesses via an Xbox app). Add AI intercepting the basic queries even from Wiki/Reddit and the old forums' survival loop (good thread → Google traffic → new members) is broken for generic questions. It still works for long-tail niche queries, but that's not a lot of traffic and even that is slowly being taken over by AI. Continued - I think it could be possible for SFN to talk to some science Youtubers or subreddits and suggest they drop a link to SFN. Both Reddit and Youtube are poorly suited for long form discussions unlike forums and 2 mods with PhDs is somewhat of a sales pitch.
-
Forums as a whole lost a lot of membership to Reddit, places like r/Science, r/AskScience, r/Skeptic and subs for individual disciplines like r/math, r/Physics, r/Chemistry and others fulfill the role forums did in the 2000s and early 2010s. I don't think the trend can be reversed.
-
😂 Right but if enough folks support a formal petition to the administration/moderation, it'll be more likely to fulfill our wish. 🤔
-
Maybe we should ask just politely?
-
Thanks for your reply. I forgot the forum is self hosted and the admins do more thdn just manage the content.
-
TIL that CuriosityStream, an explicitly educational streaming service, was founded by John Hendricks, the guy who founded Discovery Channel. As someone who witnessed the decline of Discovery Channel and Discovery Science (that one was actually shut down elsewhere, my country is one of a handful ones that still have it), this piece of news just... feels good.
-
I think it should - I sent a request for nickname change to @Cap'n Refsmmat on October 24th 2025 and the message wasn't even read. It seems the admins show up less frequently here than RIchard Dawkins does in Vatican. My suggestion is for either @swansont, @CharonY or @Phi for All to be appointed as an admin - they're online on a regular basis and are well versed in the affairs and ongoings of the forum.
