Thursday's Most Active Threads

by Jeff Steele — last modified Oct 21, 2022 11:11 AM

An excluded tween, college alternatives, citizenship in Europe, withholding sex, and college towns were the topics with the most engagement yesterday.

Yesterday's thread with the most replies and views was titled, "6th grade DD is being excluded from social events with longtime friends". Posted in the "Tweens and Teens" forum, the original post expands on the subject line, detailing how the poster's 6th grade daughter has been getting a cold shoulder from a group of longtime friends. I hadn't seen this thread until just now, despite it reaching 10 pages of replies. That indicates that the thread must be very low drama since nobody found a post in it worth reporting. Indeed, looking at a few posts throughout the thread — I am not up to reading the entire thing — it looks like most responses were empathetic and helpful. I noticed the original poster provided a fairly heartfelt post on the 7th page thanking the responders. That was nice to see. DCUM has a well-earned reputation for nastiness, but I've always felt that the good outweighed the bad — even if that required some pretty creative accounting to establish. But this type of thread really highlights the positives of our community. Normally it takes controversy to generate clicks. It was nice to see that this thread was an exception to that rule.

As has been common lately, a thread from the "College and University Discussion" forum was among the most active threads, coming in second for replies and fourth for views, the thread was titled, "College alternatives for girls". The original poster worries that her daughter is not cut out for college and is seeking alternative educational opportunities that might be more suitable. As could be expected, there were many replies along the lines of "marry a rich man", but in general it appears most posters attempted to be helpful. If threads from the colleges forum continue being both among the most active and generally helpful, I may have to reevaluate my opinion of the forum.

A thread titled, "Americans using their ancestry to gain European citizenship - 40% of Americans eligible" posted in the "Off-Topic" forum was third in number of views and forth in number of replies. The original posts links to a Bloomberg story about Americans who have European ancestry and have started applying for citizenship in those countries. In some cases, the ties go back multiple generations, so these are not necessarily recent immigrants. I saw this thread growing yesterday and expected it to be included in this post today, but I haven't actually read it. I skimmed over a few pages to make sure that it hadn't turned into a dumpster fire, but all-in-all it seems to be doing okay. A generally substantive thread lacking vitriol on this topic would be an unexpected but welcome surprise.

Third in number of replies and fifth in number of views was a thread in the "Relationship Discussion (non-explicit)" forum titled, "Is a lack of dates in a marriage sufficient to withhold or weaponize sex?". I hesitated to write about this thread because I fully expect it to be flagged by one of our ad networks as "adult content" and I'll have to remove it. So it may well be gone by the time anyone reads this. Nevertheless, the thread asks whether withholding sex is an acceptable response to not feeling wooed. It appears that the original poster may have withheld any further participation in the thread so perhaps the responses were insufficiently seductive. Anyone with even passing knowledge of the relationship forum will know how this thread is going to go. If you know, you don't need me to tell you and if you don't, consider yourself lucky.

The "College and University Discussion" forum had another top performer yesterday with a thread titled, "Other 'college towns' like DC or Boston?". The original post asks for recommendations of towns with several colleges in them, but not as big as New York City. I quickly glanced through the thread and it appears to align with this forum's new trend of being boring but helpful. There is no drama whatsoever, but many substantive, helpful, and on-topic replies. Such threads are great for the forum, but they don't provide much for me to work with in terms of snarky observations.

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