"All I know is that the opposite of change is entropy, or to stop changing is to die."

If you don't renew something living, it dies. But that's not the same as changing, at least in the short term, which is the term in which we live.

There's good change that you help along, and bad change which you resist. And you get times when the various changes cancel out, so that things stay more or less the same, but you still get renewal.

The thing is though, we're at a time when the number of people using the Internet is expanding, so I don't think equilibrium is really on. Which means sorting out the good change from the bad, and helping the one and fighting the other.

There doesn't seem to be a time machine allowing copmparison with the way thigs were a couple of yeasrs ago, but I'm pretty sure there were a lot fewer people on the Mudcat, and fewer threads, so they didn't get lost of the page quite so rapidly, and lost in the crowd while they were still on the page.

I suppose there can be technical fixes that help out, but I think the main answer has to lie in people nurturing threads that need and deserve nurturing (a subjective judgement), in various ways, so that they have a chance to grow and bear fruit. I think the kind of threads that Art is lamenting the presence of are the sort lots of us would like to see - and potentially they are there.

Has anyone done a census of the numbers of people posting, and the time it takes for a thread to drop off the page, and the length of various sorts of threads?