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Who knows, maybe in the not too far away future they'll advance the 40-Hz electrical stimulation of the scalp to a user-friendly, safe, and consumer level device.
Does anyone here have any idea of why traffic dwindled, and also what brought about the popularity at a time?
I imagine the device would be non-invasive, ideally making no contact with the user. Computers only gained the ability to see 2 or 3 years ago... I'm making good progress on a device with a night-vision camera running machine-vision algorithms that watch the face and eyes from beside the pillow or the nightstand for rapid-eye-movement patterns. Something like that combined with dream-journaling, mindfullness and lucid dreaming exercises could do the trick.
I believe traffic dwindled because of the rise of Facebook, reddit and the LD Kickstarters that promise instant LDs without requiring practice. I have hope that in the future people will use the internet again to connect with people with shared interests instead of social networking.
I think DreamViews is characterised by a fairly high level of quality in its discussions, with extended explanations and much patience demonstrated, whereas e.g. Reddit is characterised by quickly (and poorly) thought out Twitter-like comments of little value.
My expectation is that once people grow tired of the low use-value of Reddit and similar social media, they will gravitate to forums such like DreamViews (I, myself, went away into Reddit for a few years but have now returned). Not that this would include everyone, because most people will never appreciate extended thoughtful debate, but there are certainly enough people to keep a place like this vibrant. Incidentally, I have a sense that activity is currently picking up. :)
^ This.
I guess I represent an extreme end of taking a lot of time putting posts together, formatting etc to make them interesting and clearly readable, and packing a lot of research into them. Not for my normal posts of course, but for my bloglike posts on the Jung thread, or whatever my current big project might be at the time.
You really can't do that kind of stuff in chat. I suppose you could on Reddit – there are definitely posts/threads like that there, but they do tend to also include a lot of those quick trollish responses or just wannabe cool internet sarcastic posts. I don't know about discord - keep hearing about it but haven't looked into it - I assume it's just a form of chatroom.
Oh, and then there's things like Facebook too. Not sure if there's anything lucid related there, but there must be. It seems FB is going to crumble soon, or so I keep hearing. Maybe DV will get an influx if that happens? I had an account but never used it - whenever I looked in there all the people I knew as intelligent and thoughtful from forums were playing silly time-wasting games or posting pics of all their meals. I felt like it was a potential addiction, just like video games, which I almost got sucked into a few times but always managed to excavate myself from. Well mostly because I never bought a system, just played on my friends', so i wasn't exposed to the daily temptation.
Oh Zelcrow, just saw your question. I think a lot of forums have all but evaporated over the last few years largely because of things like FB, IG, and other social media.
I hesitate to bring this up, and I don't know if it's responsible for a mass exodus away from DV, but a few years back the staff banned all the semi-trollish members, which included some of the coolest and most interesting posters on the board, who kept things really lively. There was a long ongoing debate about it, with some people claiming that this is the way forums commit suicide, and others saying good riddance, we don't need trollish people around here. Personally, being an aficionado of Jung, I agree with him that it's important to embrace the dark side (as my name implies) and that's how I saw the people who were being banned - as the shadow side of DV that contain valuable and necessary elements of its psyche (getting a little too deep into the metaphor maybe :chuckle: – but hey, I really do believe it's true).
Somebody posted an article stating that there are certain members of any forum who serve as the pillars of the community - chop them down and many other members will leave with them and the community will fall into ruin. From where I sat that's exactly what it looked like. But it's hard to tell, there are a lot of factors involved. Anyway, that's my 2¢ worth.
You also asked why the popularity in the past. I believe it was because this was a place where you could openly discuss any subject, ranging all across the spectrum of consciousness, including drug use, religion, spirituality, sensory deprivation and etc. Total free speech policy. That drew a lot of people, and it was a massive thriving community, but of course that also brought in a lot of people and subjects that were iffy - those trollish ones I mentioned earlier. But because it brought so many people, there were constantly busy threads all over the place - you could discuss anything and find no end of people who also wanted to discuss it. But every golden age seems to be followed by a fall, and DV decided to open the forums to 13 year olds, and that's when all the banning began. I wouldn't say there was necessarily censorship, not really, but they did sort of tighten up the reigns on subject matter and certain words etc. Sort of a decency campaign. To me that seemed to be the beginning of the end. Of course, as I say, a lot of factors, and I wasn't an insider at that time, so I can't really say.
Lol, here I go, adding to my post again. Can't seem to help it. :armflap:
I totally think it's a good thing to allow 13 year olds - they need to be able to read about lucid dreaming, and post about it. But there was a discussion that DV should also have a mature section, for all the more unsavory or risky discussion. They ended up deciding against it. I think it would have been a great idea personally, and might have kept things hopping around here.