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I think the problem is that a lot of these sites just aren't good. They're trying to beat Reddit by being a worse Reddit but with a better set of people. In terms of community engineering, what is it that Ruqqus or Voat or Bluesky did? I would answer "nothing"; they're just reproducing the existing site and hoping they get the right set of people.
I think community engineering is very strong, but most people either aren't trying it, or are trying it in a hyperauthoritarian way, both of which are sorta doomed.
We are definitely not growing. At the same time, we aren't providing any opportunity for growth; "half as much traffic as we had on Reddit, consistently, without access to any other communities on this site" is a hell of an accomplishment. I admit I read Reddit more than I read this, entirely because all the other communities are on Reddit, but if there were opportunities to start getting them here instead, maybe that could work out?
What if we added our own /m/gaming, /m/technology, and /m/humor, all with politics strictly banned but largely open beyond that, for example?
I'll echo what arjin posted below and say that your answer seems to vacillate between technological features and sociological design. I'm sure ruqqus and bluesky all had features and ideas they thought differentiated them from their competitors, but it's one thing to say that and another to prove it.
Like with this example:
What does it actually mean to have politics banned? I assume myself and the majority of motters do understand what people mean when they say they are "tired of politics in video games", but turning that tacit understanding into actionable rules is difficult, and as soon as you start adding in a wider range of people that's going to break down. Like you would inevitably get moderators that ban economic topics because of the crossover with politics, and users complaining about people bringing up e.g. Sony's decision to end disc suport because they consider it a political issue.
If the plan is to recruit only users that are open/smart/conscientious/whatever enough to post on the motte and give them more communities to post in, then fine, but at that point you've just reinvented rdrama with all the same user acquisiton issues.
I think there's a lot of pretty reasonable behaviors mods could have that plausibly follow the spirit of this. I'm serious when I say:
So if people object to how a community's being run, we look at it and talk to the mods. If they say "yes, here is how we are defining 'politics'", then we ask them to put that into a non-foundation rules, and if it seems like it's being vaguely evenly enforced, we shrug and say "looks like it's fine, you are welcome to start a competing community with a different definition". But if they say "yeah fuck that, we don't care" then they get booted; if they say "here is how we define it" and then obviously do not enforce it that way, they get booted.
I think my core answer here is that we allow for any definition that's reasonably defensible as being an implementation of the foundation.
A lot of legal systems work this way; the general concept of "a reasonable person" is woven deeply into the fabric of US law, and there's no formal guidance as to exactly what this means, which means there's a pretty big gray area where people debate over where exactly the line is drawn and the line is often drawn inconsistently. But this is also kinda OK because this means the obvious white cases and obvious black cases get judged properly, and nobody can "properly" judge every gray-area case consistently and perfectly because the very issue is a lack of objective definitions, so whatever, this gives results that are as good as possible and claims to accomplish no better than that.
That's what I'm going for here.
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What exactly are you aiming for - neutrality / culture war banned, or letting people self organize as long as they label themselves clearly? Either one has it's appeal, but your first post seems to be pointing to the latter, and the second the former.
I like the idea of adding sub-communities, but I don't know if we have enough people to fill in 7 zillion niches.
That makes it sound like the bigger concern is going to be technological, not sociological. Do you have a good idea of what you want to do better. How big of a scope we're talking about here (because at first glance it sounds pretty big)?
The latter in the long term, the former in the short term, because . . .
. . . of exactly this reason.
I see communities as something kind of kin to nuclear reactions. If you take a bunch of uranium and spread it out, you have a bunch of uranium on the ground. If you pack it up into a tight little ball you have an infinite energy generator. But in the case of communities, you need to spread it out a little to let it grow.
Walking this tightrope is inevitably the hard part; eventually, a site could get big enough to open up community creation to everyone. But it takes some work to get there.
Practically I think for a while we would be taking nominations, putting them up for vote, and tentatively adding them to see if they got enough traffic.
In terms of server-scaling, I'm going to be hilariously optimistic here and say "the target is eventually reddit-sized".
Buuut . . . it is worth noting that I have been involved in various levels of scalability for a long time. I'm not going to try to start with something Reddit-sized, but I do know roughly how to design the backend architecture so it can scale without horrendous amounts of pain.
(this site isn't it)
And I'm not putting in more than the bare minimum to start with, frankly, if we have an order-of-magnitude of headroom at any given moment we're probably fine.
(we probably do have that right now, honestly)
The thing I really mean by "do better" is the community management part of it.
I was thinking more in terms of work that needs to be done. If this site is as bad as you say, making the switch would necessarily imply having the new platform ready first. On the other hand, you say that we have enough headroom, so maybe not?
Let me put it this way: generally your idea sounds good. The sociological specifics don't sound so important to me, and I'm trying to figure out if / how much I can help from the technical side.
Technically we can do it piecemeal; I'd start by moving non-HTML functionality over (like "upvotes/downvotes"). Some stuff can maybe even be done statistically; shift 1% of upvotes/downvotes to the new platform, look for problems, ramp it up.
I appreciate it!
I'm not totally sure there's much that can be done technically right now; I'm gonna have to sit down and hash out the fundamentals first, and that's going to be a very iterative process of trying things and seeing what I like. This is still extremely in the "mulling it over" stage, note.
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