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I don't know if anyone else of you like to read /r/supremecourt, but if you do, does it feel at all like it's drifting leftwards? They do their best to be fair.
The Culture War adjacent threads always get spammed with people that probably saw the story in their feeds. But the moderation is great at swatting them down for fighting the culture war instead of commenting on the legal issues.
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It has held thus far; maybe it will continue to hold; who can predict? But half the time when I go there, I still have that sinking feeling that they're one little break in modship away from cracking, resulting in there being approximately zero usable spaces left on the internet for rational legal discussion.
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Never been there until now, but I will confidently predict yes, it is drifting leftwards. They all drift leftwards. "Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left."
That place looks like it's still in the realm of nice, active forum. How long it stays that way depends on how active and interested its mods are in maintaining that. My case study was not a drift. It was a cascade. A different kind of engagement, and a lot of it, just kind of moved in and took up shop.
That's not as likely for moderated forums with more specialized topic discussions, which I assume that place is. So it has that going for it. Unfortunately, it is inherently political, and there are few, if any, quality political discussion forums that value viewpoint diversity of any real size. It has that going against it. Mods and culture can fight the tides of Median Redditor, but the effort required to succeed for awhile longer is proportional to its size and growth.
I predict you have around the 40k subscriber mark until the quality drop starts to be really noticeable, then not long after that the consensus gets more intense, boring partisanship becomes uninteresting to the people that make the place (presumably) interesting, so many valuable content creators users depart, and then dregs take over. I think a really dedicated team of jannies, or very well defined ruleset, can extend the life beyond by 10's of thousands of subscribers. Let me know how it turns out and enjoy it while it lasts!
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