So the move has been made. Potential shut down by Reddit has been avoided. Huzzah!
But people are still worrying about where new members are going to come from. And things are still being organized in the same terrible way as /r/ssc when they were trying to quarantine the culture war from the rest of the sub. And sprinkles around you have a few small threads for other weekly topics or talking about the new site.
A dedicated site deserves a nu start. Rather than purposely making quality writing harder to find, it should be highlighted. (I know the quality contributions roundup exists, but it certainly isn't exhaustive.) Seriously, have you ever gone back and tried to read an old weekly culture war thread with its thousands, potentially tens of thousands of comments? It is an unnecessary slog if you are looking for something and don't have a link. And sometimes you 'continue reading' and go back only to find that you've lost your place. It just makes you say, "I blue myself."
I do have some suggestions on some of the changes I'd like to see more that there is a dedicated website. First, I'd like to see a webpage highlighting quality contributions and other content from the forum. Something that I can easily link a friend to rather than a nested comment in response to some insane person ranting "There's a man inside me!" Or whatever.
Secondly, I think some editorial prompts for content for the sure would be good. Adversarial collaborations and whatever else. Just easier ways to find good writing from the site.
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Notes -
It's not very honest to make me the bad guy here by focusing on meta level ideas about abstract interaction of opinions. In practice, when a Guy comes in with guns blazing and, brandishing his great and novel Beliefs, revives some discussion about, say, Trump supporters being covert Nazis, or people interested in genetics of intelligence being deeply dishonest fascists who need fraudulent science to justify an apartheid state – it... just doesn't matter how eloquent and polite and effortful he is. Because we know how it goes, I do, at least: no amount of good faith argument will achieve anything more than the guy disappearing without conceding a single point; were he honest and as intelligent as the quality of writing indicates, he'd have found all that before anyway. So there'll be some tired snarky response or not even that, he'll leave and/or get baited into a bannable offense, and you'll shake your head about evaporation of dissent.
But I think it's normal that such «dissent» evaporates. If we need new people, we need new people, from similarly niche but different intellectual traditions, people who can take the heat... the light, if you prefer, and keep defending and counterattacking and creating sparks.
I really don't care for a spar with Impassionata, even when she doesn't overstep the bounds of polite discourse. I know how it goes with her. You do too, which is why she had been banned on the sub. But when a newbie comes in with Impassionata-style attitude, is it really our fault that he finds the reception cold?
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