Due South out of Bitches. (Possibly Smallville and Farscape too, I disremember.)

Smallville spun out of Bitches, Due South out of Smallville. Both at WX.

There's been a sort of sea change in the board culture since then, partly due to platform shift, partly in response to Buffy being off the air, and the real shift to Natter and Bitches as the true cores of the community, and I think splintering now has more of an adverse effect than it did then.

Right.

I guess I'm a minority in that I prefer talking in the non-natter/non-Bitches threads.

and the real shift to Natter and Bitches as the true cores of the community,

This kind of makes me think of London with its two central loci: City of London and Westminster.

eta: Randomly, I dig that The Millenium Wheel has already established itself as a focal London landmark.

It's a new Eiffel Tower thingie. It'll be that iconic for the next couple centuries. (Barring alien invasion.)

I guess I'm a minority in that I prefer talking in the non-natter/non-Bitches threads.

Says who? The threads are all passing so far. I think the people that don't want the thread are being more vocal and the people that do want the thread just figure that they'll vote and see how the numbers shake out.

You mean the arguement for threads is more easily understood than the argument against threads?

You mean the arguement for threads is more easily understood than the argument against threads?

No, I just think that you feel like you're in the minority because the people against threads are being the most vocal right now. I think there are many who are for the thread that just aren't arguing the point but will vote for the thread. The majority of the votes for new tv threads have passed, so I don't think that you wanting the thread puts you in the minority.

Although there do seem to be more whitefont issues with this thread, so who knows how the vote will go.

One of the reasons I like the bucket threads is that I actually interact with more people now. As Plei mentioned, Natter and Bitches have become the core community threads here. I know there are people who float effortless between the two, but I've never been one of those. I stick predominantly to Bitches with a few minor forays into Natter (more right now since I'm unemployed.) There are folks who stick strictly to Bitches and those who are only found in Natter. The bucket threads (and the individual show threads) make it possible for me to talk to and interact with more people than I do with just Bitches. I can see where the folks who are primarily Natterites would feel like they were losing something with more of the TV talk being shunted to new threads, but for me it's a net gain. I feel more a part of the community with the bucket threads than when more of the TV is in Natter.

My inclination though is to not treat the Experimental threads as successful experiments that need to be permanently enshrined, but to Slow Down and see what the subdivisions do to the community before we create more.

We did the Experimentals to see if there was a market for them. I'm getting the impression that a lot of people are very dismayed to find that, yes, there is a thriving market for dividing the interaction, as opposed to staying with the one big happy family around the dinner table model.

I very definitely had the impression that the test run of the Experimentals would be followed by serious consideration of real threads. I'm really getting the feeling that some people were hoping that we'd be content with our little experiments but that we wouldn't actually have the gall to propose something that might affect The Way We've Always Done Things.

I don't believe that anything proposed here endangers the community. I do believe there is the potential for fairly significant change. I'm not certain why these particular changes are so disturbing. I do know I don't like the idea of being told, "Now, dears, can't you just hold your little conversation there to the side? We really don't think it's a good idea for you to be allowed out of the room." It's making me feel a tad revolutionary.

I am no doubt a huge old alarmist, let's just acknowledge that upfront. But I do think there is something to at least begin to be alarmed about.

connie, you've been a part of this online community practically since its inception at TT. Why have you stayed this long? Could it be because of the people, the style of communication, the tone and flavor of the conversation, any of those things? All those things?

I certainly don't mind if you in particular have the thread that's obviously important to you. What upsets me is the follow-on that everyone on the board is equally entitled to a thread they want just as much.

I used to walk down the corridors at school, lined on both sides with practice rooms. About eight feet square, you'd have one or two musicians, singers, or actors closeted behind a closed door, working on assignments. It was quite lovely walking along, passing violin, piano, oboe, tenor aria, trumpet, guitar, each thing, one after the other, each separate, wrapped in its own little cubicle.

But it wasn't a symphony. At no point did any of those fragments connect and become a whole. They were just isolated fragments.

This is where the alarmist part comes in. I fear rather than a community we may become a constellation of tiny chat rooms revolving around a hollow core where Natter and Bitches and multipurpose threads used to be. Where a lot of people got together and talked about many things, now there are just fragments of sound from all the little isolated threads.

Am I being silly? Maybe. But this is a very real fear for me. There are other places dedicated to discussing one single show, one single subject. There are no other places like this one. I think what we have is unique and precious, and I think it's worth preserving enough to go slow, and figure out how we want to accomodate as many people as possible without damaging the unique board that we have.

I proposed the experimentals to get a feeling for how we'd talk about TV shows that are less obviously Buffista hits, outside of Natter. I didn't propose them to see if there was a market for them, themselves. Although I realized there might be, I honestly thought they were too broad to work for anything but the short amount of time we set for the experiment.

Apropos of nothing except that it just popped into my head, I am with brenda (I think it was brenda), in that I was a little disappointed that the cable drama thread was the first to be proposed. It felt terribly rushed.

I personally hate talking TV in Natter. It doesn't work for me. Ever. I am very on-and-off with both Natter and Bitches. Sometimes I love them, sometimes I can't keep up with them for the life of me, no matter what -- slow down or not. They may be the heart of the board, but they're not the whole of it for me, or even the half of it. I did come here to talk about TV, and I made a lot of dear friends doing that -- friends who are more important to me than this subject.

Here's what I honestly think is going on with our TV situation. I might be wrong, but this has always been my impression. I think there are a handful of shows that enough of us watch, that would work in their own threads. I was hoping those shows would become obvious to us during the experiment. I kind of thought they did, actually. I think though, that some of us are hesitant to propose single show threads, for the sake of the anti-proliferationists among us, so we keep proposing buckets as a compromise, which is still proliferation, and which doesn't work for some people (even those who don't mind proliferation) because of the spoiler issue.

We're not using any good (to me) criteria in proposing the buckets. We're not matching shows. We're just duplicating the admittedly artificial divisions of the experimentals. I could be wrong about all this, but it's the vibe I get, whenever we have this converation.

I honestly don't care any more. I feel further and further from this board each day. It makes me feel sad, but I'm just tired of the tension that arises when people dare speak their minds. The Supernatural conversation turned me off of us and our group dynamics in a way so huge I can't even express it. It felt like a cyber-text version of "The Pack."

Maybe I'm just (physically) tired and that's having an effect on my outlook. I don't know. Good luck solving this. I haven't the foggiest clue what to do.