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Post by its fun but... on Mar 21, 2015 19:06:12 GMT -5
I am actually an avid reader of SJMR. Because its fun and entertaining. But as an avid reader I can tell you: they have no real information about the job market. No names. No juicy rumors. No nothing. Because no one with actual information is brave enough to post and risk getting caught. Because the posters at SJMR are sort of assholes and if they *think* they know who is posting the info, they will have no problems guessing and trying to out *you too.* There's no loyalty at SJMR! But they do have interesting gossipy discussions about information that is already pretty widely known. So when a departmetn poaches a senior faculty member--again, known if not already public info--you can count on SJMR to have lots of conversation about why they took the job, etc.
So no--it won't take over. Because they really don't have any breaking news. But it is a bit mroe fun when you're wasting time on line.
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Post by anony on Mar 22, 2015 7:20:45 GMT -5
I disagree. I find the job market wiki to be incredibly informative.
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Post by Shifting on Mar 22, 2015 14:50:19 GMT -5
A year ago it was mostly white dudes from a few specialty areas (economic soc, political, orgs), complaining about women and non-white scholars. Lately I've felt it shifting and I suspect that increased traffic to the site now means a wider swath of sociologists is using it.
Two things still seem to be true: The average user of SJMR is earlier in their program (1st, 2nd year) than SJMF (4th, 5th, 6th year); and, SJMR tends to disproportionately attract the folks from more elite departments -- more so than SJMF.
I come to SJMR for entertainment. I come to SJMF for serious job market talk. Oh, and to escape the inane, status-driven, and potentially offensive "monkey" talk.
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Post by Mostly agreed on Mar 23, 2015 17:47:17 GMT -5
A year ago it was mostly white dudes from a few specialty areas (economic soc, political, orgs), complaining about women and non-white scholars. Lately I've felt it shifting and I suspect that increased traffic to the site now means a wider swath of sociologists is using it. Two things still seem to be true: The average user of SJMR is earlier in their program (1st, 2nd year) than SJMF (4th, 5th, 6th year); and, SJMR tends to disproportionately attract the folks from more elite departments -- more so than SJMF. I come to SJMR for entertainment. I come to SJMF for serious job market talk. Oh, and to escape the inane, status-driven, and potentially offensive "monkey" talk. I agree with a lot of this, but basically everyone in our elite department uses SJMF for the real stuff. We only go over to SJMR to insult people. The real reason we don't see people self-identifying as part of "elite" departments over here is because the conversations don't call for it.
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Post by surprised on Mar 26, 2015 22:11:29 GMT -5
I find that there is a lot of very useful information on SJMR and very interesting discussions about professional development, research, and jobs. It does tend to be overrepresented by elite departments but the userbase is about 50% professors and 50% graduate students so it is a pretty good mix. I haven't come to SJMF in months. I'm actually surprised some people still come to this site.
I belong to a couple of elite departments and everybody is on SJMR (including the chairs). I personally think it is a good development for sociology because it is democratizing access to information. Job candidates now have real time information on job searches, etc.
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Post by no way on Mar 27, 2015 7:29:07 GMT -5
There is absolutely no way that SJMR is 50% profs and 50% grad students. It's more like 50% pre-ABD grad students and 50% ABD grad students. But it is entirely possible 50% of them claim to be profs, though.
I come to this site because it's a lot easier to get actual information. Even the professional boards give more accurate advice. There's some mind-blowingly bad advice over there, and much of the job market information over there is just copied from people reporting it over here.
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Post by sjmr on Mar 27, 2015 8:29:20 GMT -5
sjmr has already taken over. I don't have a horse in this "race", but there job market updates are more up-to-date. don't really care about who visits the site, as long as it provides the information I seek
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Post by their* on Mar 27, 2015 8:29:51 GMT -5
*their, lol
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Post by duh on Mar 29, 2015 1:54:13 GMT -5
It is absolutely unsurprising that a forum that is as status obsessed as SJMR has a bunch of people claiming to be professors at super elite departments. It is the same reason there is virtually no discussion of job market advice over there: the status obsession is such that admitting to not knowing something there is inviting endless mockery. Given viewership and post count measures that I can see, I'd say that readership of the two forums overlaps to a huge degree, with the difference that they come here to ask questions they'd be afraid to ask there.
But yes, SJMR has improved quite a bit. Or, perhaps to put it more accurately, it is a bit less racist and misogynist (though it is still a honeypot for trolls). Of course, the part that gets left unsaid is that the reason for the increased traffic and more popularity is that they have adopted like 90% of the moderation rules SJMF has and banned the majority of the people who got that forum going in the first place (or, in some cases, they left after inadvertently outing themselves and suddenly realizing that it is no fun being the target of anonymous people in the internet).
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Post by questions on Mar 29, 2015 17:31:05 GMT -5
I infrequently check this forum, as I am sort of on the market. I went on SJMR once and there was non-stop discussion of which minority/female scholars did not deserve their jobs, so I didn't go there again for a long time. Until I saw this this thread and decided to give it another chance. Which is when I found out that someone copied a thread I created here word for word. I am the person who started the "quasi academic spousal hire" thread here, and someone copied it there. I can't imagine the maturity level of someone who is so invested in which forum people use that they'd start doing that (actually, after reading their "edgy" discussions on race and gender, I can).
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Post by idk on Mar 30, 2015 11:38:58 GMT -5
SJMR is way more up to date on job market info this year. But that's a shame, because it really does seem to be dominated by a handful of trolly, entitled white guys. If I was just starting out in grad school and visited that site, I'd be like--holy sh*t if this is what sociology is then its not the career for me. But hopefully everyone who visits assumes that it really is just a small handful of jerks over there who are unrepresentative of the discipline as a whole.
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Post by Incredible on Mar 30, 2015 18:11:31 GMT -5
I infrequently check this forum, as I am sort of on the market. I went on SJMR once and there was non-stop discussion of which minority/female scholars did not deserve their jobs, so I didn't go there again for a long time. Until I saw this this thread and decided to give it another chance. Which is when I found out that someone copied a thread I created here word for word. I am the person who started the "quasi academic spousal hire" thread here, and someone copied it there. I can't imagine the maturity level of someone who is so invested in which forum people use that they'd start doing that (actually, after reading their "edgy" discussions on race and gender, I can). Wow.... I did see it there and figured you/the OP wanted to get more responses and so posted in both places. Someone copy-pasting seems so childish.. (I guess you can take it as one big "gooding" of your post). I frequent both forums (fora?) but only this one for serious job info. I will say that I have seen a noticeable change for the better over there over the last few months, though there is still astounding amount of misogyny and racism there. I also get the feeling (imposible to verify) that there is a lot of non-sociologists (economists? Political scientists?) posting there since some of the posts betray unfamiliarity with some very basic sociological insights.
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Post by Archivist on Mar 31, 2015 8:17:34 GMT -5
This note isn't directed at any specific previous comments, but I would prefer that we keep all "forum wars drama" to a minimum. In particular, I don't care for the focus on trolling. Most anonymous sites that deal with issues of race and gender attract a fair number of trolls. People have different levels of taste and tolerance for their presence in these discussions, and most of these sites then develop different norms of pushback/moderation acceptable to the larger community of users.
I encourage us, however, to not spend much time talking about the trolls, the ones found here or elsewhere, because they feed on that attention (both positive and negative). I certainly don't want to spend time here monitoring discussions about trolls from some other site.
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Post by Bayes on Apr 24, 2015 13:10:29 GMT -5
I infrequently check this forum, as I am sort of on the market. I went on SJMR once and there was non-stop discussion of which minority/female scholars did not deserve their jobs, so I didn't go there again for a long time. Until I saw this this thread and decided to give it another chance. Which is when I found out that someone copied a thread I created here word for word. I am the person who started the "quasi academic spousal hire" thread here, and someone copied it there. I can't imagine the maturity level of someone who is so invested in which forum people use that they'd start doing that (actually, after reading their "edgy" discussions on race and gender, I can). Wow.... I did see it there and figured you/the OP wanted to get more responses and so posted in both places. Someone copy-pasting seems so childish.. (I guess you can take it as one big "gooding" of your post). I frequent both forums (fora?) but only this one for serious job info. I will say that I have seen a noticeable change for the better over there over the last few months, though there is still astounding amount of misogyny and racism there. I also get the feeling (imposible to verify) that there is a lot of non-sociologists (economists? Political scientists?) posting there since some of the posts betray unfamiliarity with some very basic sociological insights. Just had one of my threads here copied and pasted there as well(on Bayesian statistics). I don't know if I should be flattered that someone thought enough of my topic to copy it word for word, or sad that there are people who are so invested in being able to mock anyone who works in gender or race that they will spend their time reading and copying stuff just to drive traffic to their threads mocking SWS or whatever.
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Post by So? on Apr 25, 2015 11:07:37 GMT -5
Wow.... I did see it there and figured you/the OP wanted to get more responses and so posted in both places. Someone copy-pasting seems so childish.. (I guess you can take it as one big "gooding" of your post). I frequent both forums (fora?) but only this one for serious job info. I will say that I have seen a noticeable change for the better over there over the last few months, though there is still astounding amount of misogyny and racism there. I also get the feeling (imposible to verify) that there is a lot of non-sociologists (economists? Political scientists?) posting there since some of the posts betray unfamiliarity with some very basic sociological insights. Just had one of my threads here copied and pasted there as well(on Bayesian statistics). I don't know if I should be flattered that someone thought enough of my topic to copy it word for word, or sad that there are people who are so invested in being able to mock anyone who works in gender or race that they will spend their time reading and copying stuff just to drive traffic to their threads mocking SWS or whatever. I'm actually glad that questions are reposted there since traffic is much higher and you often get good answers like in the case of your question. Very few people come to this site and I imagine it will continue to die out. I think other site has improved a lot but due to its popularity, it tends to attract people from outside of the discipline along with trolls, etc. Sociological elites are still over represented at other site but it's becoming more diverse as its userbase has expanded, which is a good thing.
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