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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nifft" data-source="post: 3489249" data-attributes="member: 6562">Low barrier to entry + potential for attention = invitation to troll, flame and spam. It's just that on the internet, distribution costs are low enough to justify dissemination of such low quality discourse.Is the effective level of discourse on the internet lower than in print? I'd argue that it's not, it's just a different problem. Okay, a serious point we can discuss. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />First, the anecdotal evidence: I read The Economist, listen to 1010WINS, and visit news.bbc.co.uk and cnn.com regularly. I don't watch TV or read a daily paper; when I want edited stuff, I'm willing to wait for what I consider the best; when I want up to date stuff, I'm willing to tolerate the web. Also, I like the editorial bias in the Economist: it's blatant, and thus easy to filter out. (I consider their blatant bias a form of honesty that's quite rare in the news media.)But enough about me. I think that the recent traffic here (and elsewhere) disproves your point on a statistical basis: people who read Dragon sure as hell do visit message boards. And they start threads.Back to talking about me: easy access to information on the internet has raised the bar. No longer will I pay for mere information; now I require publications to add value somehow. If others are like me, this means death for a lot of inferior for-pay news sources.Back to Dragon Mag: when I bought it recently, I saw pages of ads and "preview" announcements. They were a waste of space -- the information that was in the ads and previews was already available on-line, and I'd already seen most of it. That's a space where previously the magazine could serve both its masters -- readers were interested in some (or most) of the ads, and the advertisers could reach new audiences.So, from what I can see, a lot of the value of that particular magazine had already migrated on-line. The inter-player discussion? Online. The ads, previews and 3rd edition rumors? Online. The job postings, the trading classifieds, the "LFG" messages? Online.Moving the few remaining things online seems obvious, no? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Cheers, -- N</blockquote>

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