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...that I'm not interested in at all...
First, I just can't get into the mindset of someone who cares about votes beyond them being a metric of engagement, but more importantly, and I've been gesturing at the idea for a while, but I'm done with this entire "democratic" framework of analyzing anything. Any forum will have it's share of high-, mid-, and low-frequency posters, and a whole bunch of lurkers, why should the former be judged by the latter? Why should anyone care what people who don't bother to say anything think?
Aren't they on Reddit? For all the complaints about the bias of this place, they seem to have monopolized that site to an even greater extent.
Same answer as above. As long as we were all on the same site progressives could swing by and drop a comment or a vote, now that you have to register and check up on the place separately, a lot don't bother. The other side doesn't have many other places to go, so they disproportionately end up here.
Well maybe but that's sort of the point. If this is simply a right-wing reddit that doesn't say a great deal for it really.
It’s not.
The quality of discussion is higher than anywhere on reddit, and unlike reddit, the admins have no interest in censoring certain political viewpoints; leftists and rightists alike are welcome.
Let's be honest here - nobody is censored here, but it turns out, people don't like arguing 20-on-1 anywhere in society, regardless of ideology. Which is true of left-leaning spaces as well, for conservatives. But, well, those spaces don't do the whole "we're not censoring viewpoints" thing, they just say forthrightly, 'yeah, this is a place for people who agree on x, y, and z. Like it or leave.'
Are you claiming that any space that claims to operate on a neutral principle of free speech is fundamentally duplicitous because it's just going to end up coalescing around a consensus viewpoint anyway?
I don't think it's always duplicitous, but I think anybody who seriously thinks the reason why this place is more right-leaning is some belief that in a free and open debate with nobody limiting it, the right-leaning argument wins is kind of lying to themselves, when in reality, the way the right wins these supposedly open spaces is saying enough things that trigger basically the fight or flight part of people's minds.
I'm a nearing middle-aged white guy, so the silly to frankly, terrible things said in this forum brush off my back, but a lot of the current left are basically and I say this in descriptive way, The Other - single women, minorities, immigrants, non-straight people, etc. So yeah, I can see why many people if in a community where what they think is open racism/sexism/bigotry against them is accepted, they say bye, and leave that community. Some people will hang around and still fight, but the reality is, most black people in 1960's America didn't have to argue about whether they deserved to use the same bathrooms as white people, and likely would've left any group arguing that. Obviously, not zero, but most people aren't argumentative weirdos like we are.
So yeah, the general tilt of any community will eventually become more of that, one way or the other. Also, in many cases (this isn't true here), there's a silent majority that's not as extreme, but also are effected by the community. YT comments section are kind of a perfect example - in a lot of cases, they're utterly rancid, no matter the topic, even when a creator doesn't want that. Because somebody whose basic belief about a YT video is, "that was all right," isn't going to post.
Could it be that the (current) left is generally self-selected as a group of people that could be said to have 'thin-skin'?
If a single woman has some strength of character and she hears some kind of offensive speech, she's not going to immediately demand censorship by the government. Then that woman can go on and listen and research more right-wing arguments once past the shock of 'somebody disagrees with my teacher, the talking heads on TV, journalists, etc'. And she can become right-wing.
If she doesn't have character, then she can stay within the safe confines of the media-approved opinions, and she'll cowardly switch opinions every few months when the newest update of progressive beliefs comes in.
It's a fragile coalition as well, for example your Other includes TERFs and transpeople, or LGBT and muslims, or open borders supporters and Ukrainian nationalists...
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You aren't wrong that it's understandable why The Other, as you put it, mostly wouldn't want to participate here. But what solution do you propose? I think it's appropriate for boardgaming and RPG forums to have rules saying "no Holocaust deniers" or "You cannot say black people have low IQs," because even if there is some intelligent debate to be had there, it's so contentious and inflammatory that it would eclipse what everyone is ostensibly there for. The failure mode in those places is that the consensus opinion settles on not only "No Holocaust denial" but also "No opinions at all that would upset a leftist social justice activist."
And it's not that leftists are particularly censorious compared to rightists. It's just that almost all the hobby and public discourse spaces are dominated by leftists. Righties who are so fond of pointing out that leftists ban all wrongthink are kidding themselves if they think their side ever was, or would be, more tolerant of "free speech" by the other side. (Some are even open about this, and merely bemoan the fact that they happen to be - currently - on the losing side.)
So here, we allow all the disreputable and shady and inflammatory opinions that are too toxic for other places, and the inevitable side effect of that is that people who find those views too toxic are not going to stick around and engage with them.
Either you have actual free speech (which means putting up with ideologues full of hate for their outgroup, who will drive everyone in their outgroup off) or you don't, in which case you have a forum that basically allows only one point of view and will polarize against any form of ideological diversity.
Once you've reached "no Holocaust deniers" you've already set your feet on the slippery slope known as "viewpoint discrimination". The last conceivable step is "no politics except directly related to <hobby>", and that (and the previous one of "no politics at all") both depend on moderators not willing to agree with or fall for the whole "Your views are politics and mine are just common decency" thing.
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I don't think anyone in this thread has suggested that. That's certainly not what I was saying here.
This explanation assumes that leftist constituencies have a unique monopoly on being emotionally/materially invested in political issues, which is simply not true.
It's easy to find examples of anti-white/anti-male rhetoric in leftist spaces (I really did try my best to join the discussion on radfem blogs in the early '10s where most commenters thought that men were uniquely and irredeemably violent, that they were the cause of all social problems, that women should live apart from them and reduce the male population as much as possible, but I usually didn't last long before getting banned). Or just pick any hot button issue, unrestricted immigration from Central/South America, trans surgeries for kids, AA/DEI programs that explicitly take job offers and college admissions spots from whites and give them to non-whites... these are not abstract intellectual exercises, people perceive these things as very real and direct threats to their way of life. If rightists are still willing to entertain leftist viewpoints on these issues, then that does in fact indicate a higher baseline propensity among rightists to listen to and engage with opposing viewpoints. Blacks/women/immigrants are not the only ones who have ever felt "vulnerable".
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