Seems like doing that would solve most problems here.
Actually having user growth is important
Yeah, but chances are most people poking their heads in right now go “what the fuuuuuuuck is any of this” and close the window.
Constant, incessant, infighting doesn’t really bode well for growth.
yeah sure, right now it may be like that. Once the wreckers are dealt with and things settle down again it’ll be fine. There’s struggle sessions all the time here and we still grew to 12k members. And its not like other websites don’t have similar problems, we just have our arguments over content policy in the open.
Yep, if I’m not mistaken one of the reasons behind making this place was having it act as a left pipeline. If the site was to be made invite-only growth would basically stop, so it’s not something that can be done on a whim
What about invite only, but open signups on Fridays or something like that? Then new users can join if they browsed and liked it during the week AND it will make moderation efforts significantly easier. (Plus it would allow for the bulk of moderation to happen on the weekend when people have time to do that).
An account cooldown would be similar, but doesn’t have the advantage of loading the heavy moderation work onto the weekend when people have more time.
Would completely cripple the ability of the site to act as a pipeline.
And almost none of its growth comes from “recommend to a friend” style of new user acquisition. Almost all of it comes from random memes being posted with watermarks or random links being posted with “go here for communist shit” descriptions.
Invite only would cripple the site and send it into perpetual decline as user churn would outstrip user growth.
Would completely cripple the ability of the site to act as a pipeline.
The pipeline also doesn’t work so well when people can get banned for upvoting the wrong thing or phrasing something in a questionable way.
A pipeline inherently demands some degree of tolerance for deviation from ideological purity.
Yeah, no. That would be the case if the mods were absolute tyrants, but they’ve proven time and again that those kinds of bans are justified/are more than willing to lift bans to people banned by mistake. Also, I wouldn’t consider banning transphobic content “ideological purity” at all, that just comes off as bad faith
The mods aren’t tyrants. They’re certainly doing their best under difficult circumstances, but an outsider coming in during a purge is not going to have a good impression of the place.
Lifting bans is good but most people who go out of their way to advocate for their accounts to be unbanned are already invested. I imagine the half way curious people who get banned just move on.
Maybe ideological purity is not the best phrasing. I meant that if you want this place to be a pipeline you can’t expect everyone to have perfect takes on everything all the time.
Most people out there are still by-and-large ignorant about trans issues, and lots of things done out of ignorance can be transphobic.
For this reason, a quarantine for new accounts would be a better solution IMO
A better solution imo would be to prevent interaction (upvote, comment, posts), partially or entirely, for a specific amount of time, like a week. Another similar solution would be to prevent or limit interaction unless the user makes a kind of “introduction” post on a dedicated community, this kind of filter works well for small spaces and probably not as well for this, so i’m more in favour of a default “cooldown” for new accounts.
Actually, new idea. What if we had some invite only or otherwise restricted communities alongside the open ones? Ones where maybe you can see what is posted there but you can’t actually post there or comment or upbear. That way you can have some spaces be very safe but have the rest of the place be more accessible for newcomers.
Pretty sure it would do the opposite. The brigades are gonna get toned down eventually, but if the user base doesn’t start growing again, there’s gonna be a massive struggle session every time x leaves for whatever reason, it will get nasty, and then more people will say “fuck this shit I’m out too” and this will continue until there is 10 blokes here.
I would guess that site is dead in the water in terms of growth
