The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Well, the core issue is that there are a lot of questions about what exactly "the feature" is. We don't have any support for non-admin moderators, for example, so do we want to implement that? Suddenly the work is like three times harder. Or do we want the existing admins to take the load of entire new communities? I don't want to do that. Who gets to make new communities? Who gets to edit community pages (which right now are just hardcoded .html)? If someone is a moderator of multiple communities, do they get to see shared usernotes? Can someone be banned from one community and not another?
If you did the work of reintroducing the feature then, hmm, I'd have to run it past the mods, let me know if you're seriously thinking of doing this, but yeah I think we'd probably figure out a way to get it going. But I think "the feature" is going to prove to be a lot of work.
Yeah, I already figured there'd be questions like that we'd need to answer, and there might be a lot more work involved than just reverting a commit. I can't promise I'll get it done in a timely fashion, but I'd like to take a stab at it at least, so yeah I'm serious about it.
Join the Dev discord if you haven't already. That's where development discussion mostly happens, and that's also where the people who took it out originally hang out. I think the first step here is to just come up with a list of stuff that would have to get done.
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It would have to be pretty seriously restricted, if it existed at all, I think. Having one megathread in which most things are happening helps with engagement, and separating things out would dilute attention and decrease activity, at least under my current mental model.
If you allowed this at all, I think you'd need to restrict the ability to do so pretty heavily, and it would have to be kept to being fairly separate domains (the modding a game example is probably a good example of something disparate enough not to cause things to fall apart). To keep the community functioning the way it has been, you'd also want to try to make sure that what's currently going on (or rather, an idealized version of what's currently going on) would remain the central thing, with the others more fun side things—the Sunday, Wednesday, Friday etc. weekly kilothreads are probably a good example of that happening currently. That leads me to the question, how do you think subreddit-equivalents would work versus a megathread?
This is definitely true . . .
. . . if you assume that users are kept constant. It may be that splitting things up actually attracts more users because people can join communities that are better-suited for them. This is the transition that Reddit made, several times, with great success.
Are we at that point? No idea, which is why if I do this I want to ensure that I have ways to undo it and good metrics on what's going on. But it's at least something I'd be willing to try.
That's a good point. The attracting users might have to be done carefully—users won't stick to one community, and if culture war things are our core thing, we'd hope the new users wouldn't make that too much worse…
Really depends on what sorts of users it might attract.
I would honestly be happy if this whole site somehow changed so that culture war things weren't the core thing. I'd be happy if the general concept of Tolerate Disagreement was the core thing, and Tolerate Disagreement About The Culture War was merely a niche.
Hard to get there from here, of course.
(I'd be less happy if doing this required completely eliminating Tolerate Disagreement About The Culture War, I probably wouldn't take that tradeoff.)
Fair enough.
I think politics-y topics are unusually likely to be ones where people don't tolerate disagreement, though, and so politics would be a large part of the hardly-anywhere-else-will-tolerate-disagreement-on-this-topic niche?
(I'm also not even that sure that we're that great at tolerating disagreement, though surely much better than the internet average.)
I think that's generally true, but pretty much everything is politics-adjacent now and then. That doesn't mean everything needs to be all politics all the time though. Certainly Reddit has a problem where the moment anything becomes political, it turns into Hivemind Central.
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It helps with engagement for things that go into the thread (culture war), but it sucks the oxygen out for everything else. Having non culture-war subs would probably help engagement, because people would have other reasons to come here.
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