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We clearly are not on Reddit, so some ships have sailed.
Aren't those who decide not to speak the truth out of social desirability the exact people you don't want in a place that aims to.. find the truth? Because that's what reading the room in our example is.
What can you/anyone even do about that?
Some ships sail all the time. As long as the important ones are still around, we're good.
Every mod action (or lack thereof) is a small shift towards community tone. And community tone is a [positive-feedback machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_feedback), so even slight changes in input can cause massive changes.
I really think we should stop talking in metaphors and get to the meat.
What kind of people do you really want to bring over to the motte? What do you even mean by "diverse" people? What are you going to do about all the failure modes that you couldn't fix in Reddit no here in a much worse environment?
It is jarring that you insist on getting people who can read the room when you more or less have a community of people who chose not to do that intentionally. Is the Motte what you want it to be?
I think you are dodging the problem again.
The primary reason ideological outliers of the motte don't survive here is not because they get ridiculed but because they are outnumbered. People will REALLY have to moderate their tone to not make a dogpile seem hostile.
And as Illforte pointed out, a lack of diversity of topics is a much more pressing issue than a diversity of politics. I get tired of certain talking points that I agree with because I saw them 1000 times. One easy way to tackle this is to simply just allow in a large number of users from targetted communities via some sort of consistent pipeline.
I really don't think you should be complacent about traffic and new user recruiting. Remember the housing market before 2008? Good visible metrics != Good invisible fundamentals.
I mean a variety of opinions on stuff. "Diversity" can't be measured person-by-person, it has to be measured community-wise. If the community becomes a monoculture, that's a failure case.
Try to fix 'em! We have more tools available here and there's stuff we can do that was never possible on Reddit; in addition, we're not fighting a hostile admin team. We're certainly not guaranteed success, but we were guaranteed failure over there.
True. It's a hard problem to solve. Let me know if you come up with something good; I haven't yet. I'm not convinced this is the problem, though, because there's a lot of discussion that doesn't end in a dogpile.
Yeah, and I'd like to do that . . . but community choice is crucial here, because we'd want to focus on communities containing people that don't contribute to the monoculture. And the proposed solution here seems like it'd do the opposite.
In the end, we have many issues to deal with and limited time with which to deal with them. New user recruiting is important but right now it's not my primary concern. I'll rotate back to it, hopefully not too late.
If you want to propose a better solution I'm all ears, but I've explained why I don't think this solution is a good one.
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