I had noticed this in the past in other audio related forums too and I see it lately happening in ASR. Some initially small forums with high quality of content due to a rather small and very dedicated member group get due to their quality and other reasons more and more popular which is of course something positive as this results more and more people subscribing and increasing their knowledge and understanding in those topics. Unfortunately such popularity attracts in parallel though disproportionately more members who combine very limited interest to learning with a high self esteem and output flow rate. Members with high knowledge level initially try to counteract on those posts but get tired in the long run and reduce their output resulting an decreasing "forum signal to noise and distortion" ratio. I used to enjoy some high quality forums and learn a lot from them but when this happening I feel I am just wasting time reading the same discussions over and over again which can be shortly described with pigeon chess. I know this will possibly sound elitist to some and I hope I could provide some solution so people (I had talked in the past with some members which felt the same when they left their previous forums and joined also ASR) don't need to search for the "next ASR" all the time, except some unpopular ideas like limiting number daily posts per member so they might consider well what they write although damage can be done of course with few posts. This is also no criticism to the moderation which in my long experience with internet forums is here doing one of the best jobs I have experienced but in the end has also limited options and resources. Would like to hear your opinions and experiences about it.
What do you expect from this thread?
1) If you only want a highly knowledgeable, small group then you need a private forum with limited member access and vetting in advance. You could make your own private forum, send out invites and allow new members on the basis on voting by the group. That is one solution.
or
2) One way to increase knowledge would be for the experts here to writer primer/introduction to x papers. A lot of information about audio is buried deep in 500 pages books, so few except the dedicated will read. Some won't have the mathematics ability to comprehend what is in these books, so that is a barrier to entry.
Perhaps you could write a primer about something, thewas, maybe some others could too, then you wouldn't have to repeat yourself ad infinitum, just link to the primer.
As a non-expert, I have to say,
SOME experts (caps and bold, for emphasis) have a less than patient attitude with we dabblers, and occasionally reply with sarcasm/derision. Maybe they are bored of the same old questions, maybe they have heard it all before, but maybe...they were also once as ignorant as we are, and can cast their minds back to such a time when they asked and said stupid things.
This is an open forum and presumably
@amirm wants it that way, so with increasing membership what you describe will happen, sooner or later, as on
all open forums.