The vast majority of liberals who ever comment posts on lemmygrad and hexbear are of the insufferable variety while the ones who are willing to have actual conversations are a very silent faction that we see verry rarely. I think we should find a way to encourage the latter to engage more with us while keeping out the smuglords.
Of course, keeping out smuglords all the while making sure that as much good faith peoples see us could prove difficult and would demand to have a strict management to make it possible given the current conditions off the lemmyverse but I think it would be worth it.
One way I think we could go about it could be to make a pined megathread every week/month depending on what is the most convenient that would be meant specifically for curious liberals to come talk to us. It should have strict healthy debate rules to keep smuglords out and curb excesses from those of us who tend to be too harsh toward even good faith lib, the subjects doesn't need to be strictly political, in fact I believe that more casual conversation and memes should be encouraged to break with the more serious talk from time to time, we should also encourage varying conversation topics with more economics and political theory as our conversation with liberals tend to center around history and actuality and barely touch on other topics, which I think is kind of a shame.
Of course that's just an idea I'm throwing out there and I would like everyone to give opinions and ideas below.
Edit: By "good faith peoples" I was mostly thinking of the apolitical peoples, the ones who aren't really invested in politics, I worded that a bit badly.
I'd be down with trying out a megathread for respectful discourse (meaning hostility wouldn't be tolerated from anyone), although always having three pinned threads might be a bit excessive
That would be awesome to have something like that because random comment sections can be really chaotic.
I would encourage a thread that is framed as educational, rather than framed as "debate" or "discourse." Along the lines of, "You have a question you've been wanting to ask, ask it and those with more understanding will try to answer and walk you through the reasoning/sources/etc." If it's framed as debate or discourse, my concern would be that liberals would just use it as a platform to debate what shouldn't be platformed in the first place. Hope that makes sense. Seems like kind of a fine line to walk. It's important to get through to people, but also, some people could just view it as an intellectual challenge instead of serious stakes and muddy the waters.
yes, the thread would be intended for learning, and we may have to require citations for political assertions
@ExotiqueMatter@lemmygrad.ml @nephs@lemmygrad.ml @amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml @m5rki5n@lemmygrad.ml: I've made a new thread (and accompanying community) for this, currently pinned to Local
should we promote the thread on lemmy.ml?
feel free to do so on relevant posts
What's the new community?
/c/socialism101@lemmygrad.ml
๐
I'll be checking regularly if someone posted a question in it.
We could add to one of the megathreads that a [honest question] tag or something could be used for that, without creating a whole new pinned thread.