I've only just discovered this site and am absolutely in love with it. However, I'd like to know what you guys think are its high and low points.
So far I can't think of any cons. The community seems friendly and supportive, discussion is always intelligent and fun, and I feel like this is the most productive way to waste time. (Yes, I am a user of the Oxford comma, bite me.) What are your thoughts?
Pros: the design is such that the scaling issues that crippled Reddit are inapplicable. The discovery is deep and multidimensional. The lack of negative reinforcement and minimal positive reinforcement curtails excessive gloryhounding. The nature of interaction builds extraordinarily strong community bonds. Cons: The community bonds also allow outsized personalities to dominate content and silence dissent (yo!). There is no viable discovery or taxonomy topology. The intensely personal nature of discussion increases the stakes so that people become less likely to participate if they feel inadequate, down or otherwise not "up to snuff." The low churn and deeply personal nature curtails rapid growth and keeps the site below the critical mass necessary for self-sufficiency. There is no viable revenue model to cover the site's modest expenses, thus we are all hostage to the beneficence of the site's founders (and donations) to keep the site online. Welcome.
Pro: I'm on here. Con: I'm on here. All kidding aside, I love the user control approach to moderation on here. It's one of the better moderation approaches I've seen during my time on the internet. Similarly, because it's a smaller community, you can really get to know people on here in ways that aren't possible on sites like Reddit unless you stick to smaller subreddits.
Welcome! A con: because the community is small, and the site is dependent on users applying their own moderation abilities to their feed, trolls are quite visiable when they first start out. The same can also be true for spam. Another con: because the site is dependent on users applying their own moderation abilities to their feed, people who are assertive of their views but have opinions that are radically different from the rest of the community need to be thick skinned enough to brush off getting muted/blocked by people who dissagree with them. The flip side of the metal is that the attributes that cause those cons are also why I keep coming back.
The smaller community also increases the signal-to-shitpost content. Once a website hits a certain size the low effort threads and posts start to gain traction and force the good people and good posts to the fringes. Hope you are doing better, man.
If you click on the "People" link at the top of the page, you go to a list of the active core of the site. What I did when I started way back then was look at all the badged content and run through the comments that others felt the community as a whole needs to look at.
Sometimes I want to just bomb the fuck out of Global to fix that. I figure it wouldn't be appreciated though, so I just post stuff I either A) really want to talk about myself or B) see what other people have to say on something even though I don't have anything myself to add.
That's the shit we do appreciate. Well that, and necrocomments in old threads. so I just post stuff I either A) really want to talk about myself or B) see what other people have to say on something even though I don't have anything myself to add.