It gives me peace of mind, knowing that there is a place where people try to talk and think reasonably. Because the rest of the internet doesn’t seem like that, especially recently with all the bots and madness.
It’s not like all people don’t care about reasonable debate, but more like the ones who do, they have no idea how to achieve it. So many bad memes out there. We are all used to social networks that maximize engagement (and thereby waste everyone’s time), if we tried to do it differently, most of us wouldn’t even know where to start. And it’s not just about software—you need to get the software and the initial community right. Without good initial community it’s hopeless. But the community needs the software to protect itself against spam and similar. (For example, Astral Codex Ten has a mostly good community, but no mechanism to get rid of the ones who refuse to follow the local norms, until Scott removes them manually—but that’s often too late, and it’s trivial for them to just create another account.)
It gives me peace of mind, knowing that there is a place where people try to talk and think reasonably. Because the rest of the internet doesn’t seem like that, especially recently with all the bots and madness.
It’s not like all people don’t care about reasonable debate, but more like the ones who do, they have no idea how to achieve it. So many bad memes out there. We are all used to social networks that maximize engagement (and thereby waste everyone’s time), if we tried to do it differently, most of us wouldn’t even know where to start. And it’s not just about software—you need to get the software and the initial community right. Without good initial community it’s hopeless. But the community needs the software to protect itself against spam and similar. (For example, Astral Codex Ten has a mostly good community, but no mechanism to get rid of the ones who refuse to follow the local norms, until Scott removes them manually—but that’s often too late, and it’s trivial for them to just create another account.)