Open Discussion restructuring bluelight

I think it is also a social / drug culture issue to split the forum up too much. AFAIK users of dissociatives and users of psychedelics mingle well and the drugs can fulfil somewhat similar purposes even if the MOA and chemistry is pretty different.

For similar reasons I don't think opioid users should be separated from the 'speedfreaks' in OD. But your own statistics seem to suggest that that would be a change that makes the most sense: the numbers support that split in OD more than the dissociatives split from PD.

It seems wise and totally fair for alasdairm to focus on the fundamental change in organisation rather than the work or administrative challenge. But, modding crews would be split up as well which can complicate management of the subfora and communication between them. Finally, the social compartmentalisation would be significant as well.

What would be the real gain from dividing the forum? I think the idea is neat superficially, and having more precise focus on dissociatives is handy for sure... but the same could be achieved by giving PD thread labels: psychedelics (as in serotonergic agonists) / dissociatives / deliriants. Only that way there is no social division. OD obviously has similar issues as PD and in OD the labels are being used already. It's just logical to apply the same solution to PD.

The reason MDMA has it's own forum is, again, probably a drug culture thing. Always ask yourself if the people visiting a forum have a lot in common, not just if the drugs are categorized and compartmentalized properly. This is a message board, not just an information library. I think to purely inform we can make lists, indexes, faqs etc. But to make it all purely business might kill the atmosphere a bit.
 
Last edited:
I'm a noob so this might be dumb or covered already and I just don't know but , how about a like button. Like Facebook has where u can just click if u like a post . I know that mad lame but I see post I lmao at but don't want to add to thread to say that was funny as shit or whatever, u know?
 
Solipsis said:
I think it is also a social / drug culture issue to split the forum up too much. AFAIK users of dissociatives and users of psychedelics mingle well and the drugs can fulfil somewhat similar purposes even if the MOA and chemistry is pretty different.

For similar reasons I don't think opioid users should be separated from the 'speedfreaks' in OD. But your own statistics seem to suggest that that would be a change that makes the most sense: the numbers support that split in OD more than the dissociatives split from PD.

It seems wise and totally fair for alasdairm to focus on the fundamental change in organisation rather than the work or administrative challenge. But, modding crews would be split up as well which can complicate management of the subfora and communication between them. Finally, the social compartmentalisation would be significant as well.

What would be the real gain from dividing the forum? I think the idea is neat superficially, and having more precise focus on dissociatives is handy for sure... but the same could be achieved by giving PD thread labels: psychedelics (as in serotonergic agonists) / dissociatives / deliriants. Only that way there is no social division. OD obviously has similar issues as PD and in OD the labels are being used already. It's just logical to apply the same solution to PD.

The reason MDMA has it's own forum is, again, probably a drug culture thing. Always ask yourself if the people visiting a forum have a lot in common, not just if the drugs are categorized and compartmentalized properly. This is a message board, not just an information library. I think to purely inform we can make lists, indexes, faqs etc. But to make it all purely business might kill the atmosphere a bit.
Click to expand...

very well put & I agree we could just put labels in psych drugs instead of dividing it
 
No offense alasdair, but not every forum is the same that way: in some of the social fora posting "I like that!" is more than fine, but in some HR & knowledge focus fora (at least) posting that can be considered cluttering because it doesn't really add anything valuable and dilutes the forum.
I personally don't like evaluations like that though, and much prefer responding posts that explain what is so good about the initial post. That helps to consolidate it, and may stimulate further discussion. (In that sense I agree with alasdair's point).
Other than that, what are we going to do with likes? Enable a way to sort by rating? No thanks, way too political, I'm cool with the current state of affairs. And I don't see BL going for it, sorry.

C_Numb95 thnx glad you agree with the 'labels', alasdair what do you say? I've asked fellow PD mods about their opinions.
 
Last edited:
In a pharmacological sense, classical (serotonin) psychedelics are closer to ecstasy and other entactogens than to dissociatives. But in a social sense, psychedelics and dissociatives are typically used for introspection in small groups, whereas entactogens tend to be used at large social gatherings, even though the lines blur (5-MeO-MiPT, 2C-B, mescaline, etc).

In a social sense, again, most of the drugs in OD tend to be used for immediate pleasure, heroin and kratom feel good no matter what you're doing, and cocaine and methamphetamine get pretty close to this. Even though the drugs themselves are totally different, the way that the drugs are used tends to be quite similar: cocaine or heroin layers itself over whatever social activity it pleases -- sometimes with concomitant behavior degradation, but that's beside the point.

If you wanted to organize things based on pharmacology, I'd put classical psychedelics with ecstasy, spin off opioids into their own forum, and use other drugs for stimulants and atypical paraperceptual drugs (dissociatives etc).

There are some advantages to this:

* opioids are easily the deadliest recreational drugs, and there are, correspondingly, plenty of HR issues dealing with opioids that are rarely relevant for other drug classes (most addictions are not so insidious); nobody needs a suboxone prescription for their ketamine habit, and even really bad meth withdrawal is rare.

* both psychedelics and ecstasy benefit from a sort of "good vibes"/"trip sit" mood which isn't relevant on ketamine; the "cuddle puddle" threads aren't a terrible idea for people having difficult trips on LSD, but on methoxetamine you don't care and on amanitas shikata ga nai. Candyflipping is also probably the most popular drug combination that doesn't involve cannabis.

* the resulting "other drugs" forum would hold mostly stimulants and dissociatives, which is sort of reasonable considering the stimulating effects of arylcyclohexylamines, particularly methoxetamine, and seems to mesh with the way people like blueberries take dissociatives, which is sort of like the way many people take meth (every day). Also GABAergic dissociatives, like Z-drugs, are no longer questionable.

* in general the lines are somewhat less blurred; you might consider a special exception for salvia as a psychedelic, and mephedrone remains stubbornly difficult to classify, but 6-APB, MXE, and Ambien are no longer ambiguous. You even get a sort of convenient semi-ordering of categories by inherent danger: cannabis -> serotonergics -> everything else -> opioids.

The disadvantages are:

* this doesn't really fit the community that has grown around the current fora; everything is reorganized, and the sizable forum-specific crowds of people who only post in one topic forum would be disrupted and probably annoyed by the change. PD in particular tries to be a little more intellectual than MED when it comes to the use of serotonergics, although we could (arguably) try to redirect this discussion into P&S, or maybe it would benefit from a little more exposure to new attitudes (insularity is never a virtue).

* we haven't done anything about benzodiazepines: the reality of benzodiazepines is that they are relevant -- as anti-drugs -- in MED and PD already, and PD regularly discusses benzodiazepines as "psychedelic antidotes" in the current setup. Ultimately benzodiazepines are sort of cross-cultural, despite carrying their own fearsome side-effect (protracted withdrawal); it is rare that someone uses exclusively benzodiazepines recreationally.

* PD would no longer be the most well-behaved board, and the other mods and I would have to actually work to keep stuff together. (:P)

* of course, you'd have to deal people who don't know that ketamine (also DXM) is a dissociative, or that kratom is an opioid, or what the fuck is tramadol, exactly? The division "makes you see things " / "does not make you see things" / "feels like ecstasy" is pretty hard to fuck up.

But I think any reorganization would have to have compelling advantages, to outweigh the "inherent cost of reorganization" where users are disoriented by everything moving into different places. I'm not totally sure about that yet, though to be honest I started liking this more after I typed it up (edit edit edit...).

The one thing I do think would be interesting would be to move nootropics into their own forum, again on a social, rather than pharmacological basis. This would disrupt the community less, since nootropic users are already creating their own little fiefdoms in PD and OD, and it clarifies some discussions; particularly ethylphenidate and camfetamine seem to be more interesting as nootropic-alikes than as recreational drugs. That would move some stimulants out of OD, and it would do so by removing the ones that fit there the least: stimulants used for practicality rather than pleasure. In a similar vein it absorbs the occasional use of dissociatives as antidepressants, which to be fair is generally less popular than the use of dissociatives to get high. It also avoids questionable situations like theanine, which should seem to go with nootropics despite being itself mostly an anxiolytic, and fixes a currently problematic situation where discussion of antidepressants always ends up in NPD or BDD, and rarely gets good attention. So I think a "Nootropics and Therapeutics Discussion" would almost certainly have compelling advantages, where "Dissociatives Discussion" and "Stimulants Discussion" do not; it could even (arguably) contain benzos.

One thing I really don't think we should do is move towards a model where all of the classes of recreational drugs are in separate fora, i.e. the Psychedelics/Dissociatives/Stimulants/Opioids/Cannabis/Entactogens/Other model used on 420chan. This just makes for more repeated effort in moderation and fragmentation of the community. I'm particularly wary of just splitting off a drug class (dissociatives), unless it's really really huge, like ecstasy (second most popular illicit drug) and cannabis (first).
 
Last edited:
@blueberry and whoever else. Your just wasting your breath here cause in the time ive been here, i have seen many people bring this up but it never holds weight with some of the mods for whatever reason. I myself have started a thread on it but it was a waste of my time.

I completely agree that things need to be put in separate categories and i still dont know why they wouldnt. The answers ive been given have been basically "its fine the way it is" or they dont see a reason to change it. I havent seen anyone say something that made me think it makes sense the way it is. To be honest, it just sounds like a few people are set in their ways and reluctant to change. Just because thats the way its been for awhile doesnt mean it cant be updated. Its the same reason technology gets better. The technology a year ago still works today but the shit today is better than it was a year before.

To me, having things like heroin, meth, benzo etc in such a misc named category as other drugs is beyond me. What do you think of when you hear the phrase other drugs? To me, it sounds like some drug that very few have heard of thats not popular or little is known about it. Nope. Thats where heroin and meth are located. Maybe it should be called every other substance thats not weed, mdma, psychedelics, and steroids. Thats a pretty huge spectrum. This is the only drug forum ive seen where they do that.

So just save yourself the trouble cause its a waste of your time even tho you have sound reasoning
 
Last edited:
I'd definitely like to see OD better separated - I think a pharmacological approach seems like the most logical approach.

I don't think there is currently a huge cultural overlap between MED and PD but there is one and it could be a lot bigger too. I think moderation would become much more challenging though and I think it might make sense to split off dissociatives therefore too. Deleriants fit fine in PD and are too small to worry about splitting.

I think overall we could handle a doubling in activity if it happened and we'd have the support of the MED mods too so it wouldn't be ridiculous.

The tagging system would be pretty nice and simple but isn't the point of this to compartmentalise and streamline advice giving?


Personally I discourage and even UA "I like this!" posts.
 
Last edited:
Solipsis said:
No offense alasdair...but in some HR & knowledge focus fora (at least) posting that can be considered cluttering because it doesn't really add anything valuable and dilutes the forum.
Click to expand...
no offense taken. if you reread my post, you'll find we actually agree :)

alasdair
 
Whatever happens, just please dont go to some kind of system where you can give a post cute little greens stars if you like it and red ones if you dont with a comment after that but then not let the person who made the post reference it in any way like some other site does.
 
blueberries said:
I know dissociatives are hallucinogens and technically they're psychedelic due to their activity at 5HT2a but can we have another board for Arylcyclohexylamines and other dissociatives? Half the page is disso threads and as we are getting more and more ACH's there would be enough threads to warrant a new board.
Click to expand...

I think this is a valid suggestion. I'll see what I can do.
 
If it gets to it... why not (as others suggested) seperate OD's. Stims, opioid/bupe/heroin, opiates etc.,nd certainly benzos/gaba drugs. I was surprised my visit long ago when I saw these were clustered in such a manner. Too many people speaking about things they have no/litle knowledge of or experience because of all the major sub types being grouped together.

Just seems to me, a simple user, that a lot of attention is given to OD's most popular sub types. Even elsewhere scattered among the whole site.
... I wonder if those stats about od's first 5 pages had etiz included with benzos, bupe with opioids and heroin, etc.

On a funny note should we all be surprised stims had the most? Drugs that make u hyper and post more maybe, haha
 
I see what you're saying, Slum. Visually it would appear tidier to have different classes of drugs in their own sub-forum. Like stimulants/Amphetamines, Opiates, Benzos, Methamphetamine, Cocaine and so on. We already have prefixes in Other Drugs to help with sorting them out. What happens many times people are using more than one substance. This makes it harder to categorize the thread as to where exactly it should go. Why fix something that isn't broken? My two cents.
 
Perhaps the first instance for PD could be the tagging idea so that we could see exactly how challenging and helpful this might be. The negatives could not be significant.
 
I agree with pretty much everything in atara's post (all very well articulated and explained) - especially this;
atara said:
The one thing I do think would be interesting would be to move nootropics into their own forum, again on a social, rather than pharmacological basis. This would disrupt the community less, since nootropic users are already creating their own little fiefdoms in PD and OD, and it clarifies some discussions; particularly ethylphenidate and camfetamine seem to be more interesting as nootropic-alikes than as recreational drugs. That would move some stimulants out of OD, and it would do so by removing the ones that fit there the least: stimulants used for practicality rather than pleasure. In a similar vein it absorbs the occasional use of dissociatives as antidepressants, which to be fair is generally less popular than the use of dissociatives to get high. It also avoids questionable situations like theanine, which should seem to go with nootropics despite being itself mostly an anxiolytic, and fixes a currently problematic situation where discussion of antidepressants always ends up in NPD or BDD, and rarely gets good attention. So I think a "Nootropics and Therapeutics Discussion" would almost certainly have compelling advantages, where "Dissociatives Discussion" and "Stimulants Discussion" do not; it could even (arguably) contain benzos.
Click to expand...
 
legalizeall said:
@blueberry and whoever else. Your just wasting your breath here cause in the time ive been here, i have seen many people bring this up but it never holds weight with some of the mods for whatever reason.
Click to expand...
making suggestions at bluelight has never been a waste of breath. we've made many, many changes as a result of community feedback and to suggest otherwise is laughable nonsense.
legalizeall said:
I myself have started a thread on it but it was a waste of my time.
Click to expand...
i am interested to read your thread but am unable to find it. in which forum was it started?
legalizeall said:
The answers ive been given have been basically "its fine the way it is" or they dont see a reason to change it. I havent seen anyone say something that made me think it makes sense the way it is.
Click to expand...
read post #18 again and also read all of the threads to which i linked in that post.
legalizeall said:
To be honest, it just sounds like a few people are set in their ways and reluctant to change.
Click to expand...
that's one way to characterise this. another is that we have a well-established, well-understood setup in place and that we've not seen a compelling enough case to consider fundamentally changign this aspect of the site.
legalizeall said:
Just because thats the way its been for awhile doesnt mean it cant be updated.
Click to expand...
i totally agree.
legalizeall said:
To me, having things like heroin, meth, benzo etc in such a misc named category as other drugs is beyond me. What do you think of when you hear the phrase other drugs? To me, it sounds like some drug that very few have heard of thats not popular or little is known about it. Nope. Thats where heroin and meth are located.
Click to expand...
again, bluelight.org has evolved organically and, in the early days was focused pretty much 100% on mdma harm reduction. it's natural that mdma will have a higher profile in the forum mix for historical reasons. from there, it's natural that the term "other drugs" will have a meaning in that context (i.e. drugs other than mdma). if you steadfastly refuse to view the issue in the context of bluelight's real-world evolution, you'll continue to struggle with this.
legalizeall said:
So just save yourself the trouble cause its a waste of your time even tho you have sound reasoning
Click to expand...
that's one approach. i'd invite anybody with an opinion here to continue to state it. particular thanks to atara for a well-considered, well-reasoned post.

alasdair
 
Wow, i appreciate and somewhat flattered by the attention you gave my post. I said those things because ive seen this brought up many times and the responses I have seen dont really make sense to me. For example, im a polydrug person and it doesnt confuse me and its not difficult for me to naviagte from one forum to another based on my question or interest. If i got a interest on one, i find the right forum and vice versa. It takes more time for me to sift thru the endless topics that dont interest me in one forum. And the whats not broken dont fix i dont buy because of all the people voicing for specific forums there must be something thats a little broken.

And actually its one thing that kept me from coming back here because i was confused over it. I thought no way would they lump such big topics as heroin and meth in a forum named other drugs but i couldnt find forums under those names so i just fuck it. Im not gonna spend a bunch of time looking for something that should be fairly easy to find. Call me a dumbass or not, its just what i experienced.

If anything, just change the name at least. How miscellaneous does the name Other Drugs sound. Sounds like topics that dont really have a home so were just gonna put them all in this one so at least there somewhere. Make a list of all the drugs covered in that one forum and tell me those shouldnt be split up a least a little bit.

That is just my opinion, doesnt mean im right or wrong. THis happened to be the first time i said this to someone that its a waste of time and i think most people would agree if they saw one topic brought up many times to no avail, that maybe its not totally out of line to bring it to that persons attention to not get worked up over it. I didnt mean to offend you but i was just trying to help another person so his panties dont get in twist like people have said to me here

I started a thread and i believe your the one that moved it to a larger thread and mine was closed. You moved it or someone else did to this one http://www.bluelight.org/vb/threads/679795-Lack-of-dedicated-focus-forum-for-stimulants-and-opiates.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top