Debate.org has finally shut down after years of being neglected. It was quite literally unusable as a debate platform for the last 3 years at least, but at one point I would've argued it was the best debate platform on the internet. I was going to create a pro/con debate here and ask whether people thought DDO or CD was better, but since DDO is dead and everyone here obviously uses CD, that level of selection-bias would make a pro/con debate pointless.
Instead, I think it would be better to make this an open forum for people who have any experience on DDO to give their experience and conclude for themselves what the overall impact of DDO was.
I'll go first...
I've been on this website since 2008, and was quite active when I first started -- although I've clearly been mostly dormant these last 14 years. I joined DDO in after they raided our website in the great Debate Wars of 2012. I joined specifically to debate someone on that platform that CD was the better platform. That debate never happened, but after using the site for a few "practice debates" I was hooked. It had advantages over CD, namely:
1. 2 person debates with set rounds and a defined winner and loser
2. The ability to judge other debates (with words, not just upvotes)
3. A very active forum covering a wide breadth of topics
I greatly preferred this over the CD method where debates went on indefinitely until one party got tired of clicking "show replies" over and over again to see the entire argument thread. I also liked having a more objective measure of my win/loss debate record than an "accuracy score", which to this day I still don't know exactly wtf that means.
Not that my time on DDO was always great. In fact even before the site became a broken mess, it always had issues like:
1. Spam
2. Scammers
3. Drama
The first two points were simply a result of the site's profiles (needlessly) asking people to list their incomes on their profile. Most people didn't, but enough people did that the site became a target for spam, which even at its peak was something the DDO filters had trouble dealing with.
The drama was a bigger deal. To those of you who have only used this site, this might sound strange, as CD is relatively far less "personal" than DDO was, but DDO saw all kinds of scandals and drama ranging from romantic relationships between members with rough endings, cheating on debates, constant political battles between people vying for the DDO presidency (yes, really. It was a real thing and actually taken quite seriously back in the day), and even suicide.
That last one hurt especially, both personally and to the site in general. It lead into an exodus of many long-time members of the site who already had little reason to stay and never ended up coming back.
I suppose that was the double-edged sword of DDO. You formed real friendships on the site, but real friends means real drama.
As a CD member since the site began (the only active member who's been here longer than me is Joe), I can tell you that this site hasn't changed in any meaningful capacity at all since it started, and although I can tell it isn't nearly as active as it once was, the fact remains that this site is still alive, while DDO is gone. It's hard argue that CD isn't the superior platform when it survived and more or less maintained itself while DDO hasn't been a viable platform since Obama was in office. Nonetheless, I feel like I "grew up" on DDO in a way that wasn't and isn't possible on CD. I both made and burned friendships that went beyond the site itself, and spent countless hours studying my debates -- not just the topics themselves, but meta strategies on how to debate better in a controlled format.
I think despite the bitter end DDO came to, DDO was alive in a way CD never was. In the end, I think DDO was the better site.
I don't know if anyone will read this, or if they'd even have experience with DDO given how long it's been "dead" for, but I felt compelled to write something about it. I could go on and on about the pros and cons of DDO, as I have about 10 years worth of memories on there to draw on, but I think this post has already dragged on long enough.
If you happened to have been a regular on DDO, just know I probably still think about you, specifically, from time to time. HMU if you want to reminisce about the "good ol days" like a couple of codgers.
Anyway, that's it. Go away now.
