“If someone makes a comment at #12 and I dont join in until comment #93, I’m forced to copy/paste what they wrote so my comment can be understood in context.”
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You don’t have to copy and past the post you are responding to at all. All you need to do is reply to the post, and then a reader can simply click on the replies link below each comment to see your response and any others, or when reading down a thread and encountering your post, can click on the link below it to see what you are replying to. Easy peasy.
As for your other comments, Jim Rob has been in ill health.
Yes, the quality of the posters has declined and that damage was done during the primaries back in 2016 when bullying of disparate views reached an all time high, and moderators were banning good conservatives whom they disagreed with over this or that candidate rather than being neutral and just enforcing civility, with no emphasis on posters having to source thair assertions.
As a result, the bullies won the day and the site devolved into being dominated by name-calling and crude insults, childish harassment, mindless propaganda posts, rising racist and crude posts, as the most thoughtful people just brushed off their feet and moved on rather than go to the trouble of wading through the garbage. Without their contributions the number of new threads plummeted.
Very few people left are bothering to post threads any more, the majority just read what other members have found and shared. I will admit that I have not posted many new threads either, due to my own financial situation leaving me little time to spend on social media.
I don’t recall seeing your name come up here. Have you posted any threads from materials and sites you have found? That is one way to help improve the site.
As a result, the bullies won the day and the site devolved into being dominated by name-calling and crude insults, childish harassment, mindless propaganda posts, rising racist and crude posts, as the most thoughtful people just brushed off their feet and moved on rather than go to the trouble of wading through the garbage. Without their contributions the number of new threads plummeted.
Bingo. I left for nearly two years for those very reasons. Before then, I had posted many original articles here that are still on my site and refer back to FR. They are lengthy thorough, and well documented in the hope to elevate the quality of debate and the stature of this site as a center for thoughtful conservative discourse. I refer often to those old threads, in part to give people a sense of what this site was.
FR is still a good aggregator, but since other news sites offer "comments" threads, the objective value of discussion here has declined by comparison. There are still some very special and prolific posters here, but it isn't what it was in total.
There is one other singularity in FR's history greatly reducing its value, which was the damage to the Archive pursuant to the LAT/WP lawsuit. I had posted a LOT of material on those threads. Instead of excerpting them and retaining the replies, the entirety of those threads were simply erased. I managed to find some on the Internet Archive, but the loss of that work was without consideration of mine.