Problems:
1 - The AT is too combative. Restricting the stickers was an attempt to stop people attacking each other too personally. I know that one of the reasons is the number of stupid reports it generated, but was it also that the viciousness was toxic to the culture of the site? If that's what you're saying then I agree. The culture of this site is that you take your Ls, you call each other spastic retard niggers, and move on with no offence taken. But a lot of the newer posters can't cope with that, and sperg out whenever anyone disagrees with them. This risks spilling over into the rest of the site.
2 - The partisan nature of the site only really goes one way. My understanding is that you want a balance of political opinions on the site. The problem arises that KF is one of the few sites where all political views can be expressed, with big tech, the media and a large cadre of politicians actively trying to remove rightist discourse (from moderate to extreme) from the internet. This causes an imbalance in the site's intake as other sites fall to leftist censorship and cause waves of right-wingers, from reasonable to not reasonable, to sign up in huge numbers. Even as someone who counts themselves as right-of-centre, I am disgusted that I have to post alongside neo-nazis and wignats just to be able to express my own tepid softcore libertarian opinions.
This results in the overall userbase of the site shifting rightwards, with AT the most affected. As I'm sure you know, SomethingAwful had a political containment forum for hardcore leftists, but their politics leaked out and eventually took over the site, leading to its downfall. And this was before leftists really started deliberately infiltrating online communities, it was several years before Gamergate, there was just an influx of Tumblr users who registered to read a let's play of weeb game Dangan Ronpa (which at the time had no English translation) and very slowly took the site over. I'm concerned that a mirror-flipped version of this is happening here. As it is, there's no thread that's safe from some autist abseiling in and screaming about the Jews. That makes this site a chore to read at times, and if I was a left-winger I would find it even more obnoxious.
Worse, it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy that this site really does turn into the "Neo Nazi Hate Site" that mainstream journos claim that it is. This would attract more speds, and make the site's chances of survival worse.
3 - Fedposting. This gives the site all the wrong kinds of attention.
Analysis:
There's a fine line to be struck in the mainstream of the site between allowing reasonable discussion that may involve politics (a vast number of our cows are cows because of their many dumb political takes) and allowing off-topic political sperging that derail threads. I know the moai is supposed to help with this, but speds don't care about negrates. Just as opening the Beauty Parlour was designed to encourage more women to use the site, I suspect that the opening of the Ethan Ralph and Nick Fuentes subforums were designed to encourage those who had different politics to them to use the site.
So the objectives of any changes would be:
1 - Achieve a more balanced set of political outlooks amongst the site's userbase
2 - Get users of AT to integrate into the culture of the site and not poison it. By the "culture of the site" I mean specifically:
a) Foul-mouthed but respectful debate and discussion
b) Having a thick skin and not taking things personally
c) Only talking about politics when it's relevant to the topic at hand
d) Hiding your powerlevel
e) Having fun and making jokes, not getting MATI
3 - Get users of AT to post more on the main part of the site
4 - Cut down on fedposting
5 - Do the above without banning or censoring any political viewpoint in order to maintain the site's free speech principles
Solutions:
1 - The first and most obvious thing to do is this:
- Prevent all new accounts from viewing or posting in AT for a period of time after registration. I'm taking about something like 3-6 months. This stops the influxes of retards every time there's a mass shooting or another site goes down. The speds do not have the attention span to wait that long, and it means new posters get introduced to the culture of the main part of the site first and most likely assimilate to it before posting in AT.
- You could go further. Link AT posting privileges to reaction scores on on-topic boards only. If enough people negrate you, no more AT for you. Or you have to get good-boy points from discussing cows well to be trusted in the Thunderdome.
2 - Discourage bad posting and politisperging, both on the main site and on AT. Some ideas:
- SA used to have a subforum called Helldump where bad posters would get called out, sometimes even doxed. The decline of SA started not long after it was closed. It was closed because people were using to settle scores with each other than to identify bad posters. This can be prevented by only allowing mods to post or requiring a mod's permission to post. I know we have Halal threads already, but we need to have a "bad poster showcase" that doesn't seek to make full Halal Cow threads on people but just calls out shitty posting. And only users with the majority of their posts on the main part of the site and/or good reaction scores can post in it. Think of it like a public pillory. The worst AT posters have thin skins, so this will hit them when it hurts. They either do better or leave. Either way it's a win for the site, and sets an example of what we don't want.
- One of the main purposes of the react stickers is to make it clear when someone's post is shitty without having the thread derailed by callout posts. It gently nudges posters to conform more with the culture of the site. However, AT, and A&N in particular, are isolated from the rest of the site both culturally and in terms of the people who post there. So the stickers in A&N do encourage conformity - but to a toxic culture that we don't want. Their presence is counterproductive. So remove ALL stickers from A&N. People can still discuss politics all they want, express any opinion they want, but the dopamine hit of the stickers, and the circlejerking they encourage, is gone.
3 - With the above in mind, we can then actually think about setting posting rules for AT:
- Lol calm down. This is Kiwifarms. We are here to laugh. We do not like rageposting. If you flip out, expect to be laughed at. Keep doing it and the moderators will give you something to really get mad at.
- Post with a thick skin. On this site we call each other the most vile slurs imaginable, because we find it funny and it's cathartic. It's very rarely personal. If you start reporting posts for being mean to you, or engage in slapfights with other posters over multiple posts, we will laugh at you and mock you. And if you take any of your grudges to other threads, we will ban you.
- People are allowed to disagree with you. Kiwifarms has no political affiliation. If you tell another poster they can't post on the site or cannot express an opinion because they have the "wrong" political views, there is a good chance it will shortly be you who cannot post on this site.
- Don't fedpost. Kiwifarms is not the Wild West. We are on clearweb and we can only be there because we comply with the law of the USA, and the protections that doing that provides to us. If you imperil that by saying or doing things that are illegal in the USA then you are an enemy of the site because you endanger its very existence. You will be dealt with accordingly.
That is what I would do if I was in charge. I'm not necessarily asking to be in charge, I'm not convinced I want to be a moderator again (I have been a mod/admin elsewhere) but that's my autism applied to this issue for what it's worth.
