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 -
How much of old stuff is worth reading? Do we want to be reminded of coivd and lockdowns again or Russia takes which aged poorly? I want to move on.
I think there's a surprising amount of useful information, even beyond the QCs. ((Indeed, one of my complaints about the QC roundup is how mediocre a QC can be and still get awarded, while some very good posts in the same time frame either weren't nominated or didn't pass the cut, and I'm not just or even mostly talking about my own posts.))
I think there are benefits to making continuing an older interaction difficult, given what happens to fora without rules against necroing, but I'm very much against the Eternal Now.
And, on the flip side, I do think it's useful to notice when people are very confident but wrong, myself included. It's good to not have it be easily visible, but it's also helpful to notice when someone makes a big crux of their argument about a generalized position they've violated in the past, or base their knowledge on personal experience or 'friends' that they would require them to be The Most Interesting Person In The World.
I'm curious what this means beyond "I have different taste from the person putting together the QC list." I'm sometimes side-eyeing some QCs, but that's just a difference of opinion isn't it?
To some extent, it does mean that.
But I've also had one of my own posts QC'd which I'd requested to be removed from the QC lineup, and there's other pieces like this that were QC'd but basically a news link with a bit of context. I've also got mixed feelings at best about this one.
It's not that they aren't insight porn; it's that whether QCs are about 'posts that are good for the community', 'posts that present unusual perspectives or expertise or viewpoints', good effort-posts, or just 'things we want more', regardless of the merits of them as standalone posts, they weren't that.
Now, I'm not filtering QCs, nor would anyone want me to be, nor am I writing a surfeit of outstanding posts that need to be elevated instead. I've reported a few QC submissions, but not many. It's probable not possible to consistently get the best results on whatever metric, no implemented system can be perfect, and the actual project is still worthwhile.
But it's also worthwhile to keep in mind its limitations.
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