Refugee thread!

[Dr H]

Thoreauvian, I saw that you PMed a brief discussion. Can you do the same for me? I'm curious as to what happened. I missed the last throes of drama over there. But it seems this place is good one to inhabit.

I'll just post this here instead of sending you a PM.

At the end of September, Seth decided to close the Thinking Atheist discussion forum.  He wanted to do it in just a couple days, but then relented and gave us a week.  He would not allow us to copy the forum to a new location and continue it as it was, so Mathilda took the initiative and created the Atheist Discussion forum. 

http://atheistdiscussion.org/forums/

Many of TTA's previous members immediately signed up for the new forum and we are now continuing our discussions pretty much as before.  Some came here instead, and some like me started posting regularly at both forums.  Unfortunately we lost a few members, like Jennybee and Momsurroundedbyboys for instance.

In most people's opinions, Seth never provided an adequate explanation for his decision, though we asked him to.

<shrug> The Lord of the Forum giveth, and the Lord of the Forum taketh away.

Life goes on.

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Seth probably closed the forum because many of you were an embarrassment to his brand. At Amazon, we were an embarrassment to Amazon. He didn't explain that to you because there was no polite way to say it.

No way of knowing for certain, but there may be some truth in the Amazon parallel.

When Amazon started their fora, they apparently envisioned a place where their customers would gather, hanging out at Amazon, discussing Amazon products, and making Amazon purchases.  Unfortunately (from their point of view) they left the structure a little too open, the discussion groups developed into communities, and took on a life of their own.  People spent a lot of time discussing pretty much everything but Amazon products.  Eventually, from Amazon's point of view, they were expending resources to maintain something that was only supporting a small part of their target population, and not appreciably helping their bottom line -- so they ditched it.

I've watched some of Seth's videos, but in two years at TTA I never had any direct interaction with him.  I did try to contact him by email a couple of times, to see if there was a way I could donate to supporting the forum without having to put my credit card online; never got a response.  So, I'm not sure exactly what Seth's "product" is.  But if he's trying to make it as a "professional atheist", well, there aren't too many of those, and it can't be an easy road.  If he decided TTA had become more of a burden than an asset to him in his quest, then it made sense for him to ditch it.

Could he have been more cognizant of the fact that the forum was made up of people, and perhaps found a more polite way of giving us the boot?  Sure.

But being an atheist, or even an in-demand public speaker, doesn't guarantee that one has great social skills.  I can cut him some slack, and wish him well.  I'm grateful for the 2 years I had with TTA, and I've since found new pastures to occupy my time.

C'est la vie.