Someone had a good idea last week about making a kindness post.
Fundamentally, it is important to build communities and institutions through affirming actions and efforts. A forum devoted solely to bitching and complaining will never work, and could potentially toxify (though in our case I doubt it would be too bad because you all are capable of self-regulating).
That being said, I like the idea of making one post every week that is specifically devoted to, not simply good news, but good affirmations to each other.
Please post positive things in this particular thread. Also, feel free to ping other users with compliments, kindness, and affirmations.
Think of it as a morale building exercise!
I don't think I can properly explain why, but I don't like this idea. Your reasoning seems fine, it's just that part of the premise seems to be that we have no positive discussions or uplifting interactions - and I reject that. I've seen several threads where people ask for advice, for example, and those threads usually have great advice.
Making an official regular thing of it also just kind of reeks of daycare stuff to me.
But, yeah, I'd like to see some good news. If anyone knows any, I'm not sure why they'd abstain from sharing here.
I'd say that the reactionary nature of our sub drifts towards the negative; but I'd like to more specifically make sure we are building communal structures that function to foment community and build up individuation and a sense of value.
Opposition is a rallying point, but it requires an other. I would like to make sure we don't need an other to function, and that we can demonstrate and promote social value in our community without opposition.
Well, I still agree with your points, just not quite the conclusion. Simplest explanation I could give is that if I were coming here to seek out positive/uplifting engagement, I would refuse to do so in the thread designated for the purpose.
But hey, I'm just one guy here. Go ahead and go for it - if it gains traction, then that's good. If even 6 people can be enriched (not the ironic kind) by it, then I'd count it as successful.
I'll add some constructive criticism, at least. We get some /pol/ types here, and they often struggle to integrate. Now, I'm not gonna suggest making the process easier for them, but I want to point out that they had a sort of analog to this in the form of a "self improvement general". I think it's worthwhile to examine analogs, but I'll save you some time and explain. They needed it as a counterbalance; a lot of their discussions revolve around the degeneracy and failings of others (even if false, the perception is important here), so it creates a natural back-of-mind nagging "How can I better uphold my own values?". So they could go to those self improvement threads and discuss the answer to that question.
To translate to our community here...well, a lot of the discussion is basically reports of attacks and battles elsewhere. Like an army base coordinating data about what's going on in the front lines. Except we have no real chain of command and it's hard to get reliable data sources and we succumb to despair occasionally. There's a lot that could improve. Personally, I'd like to see gamers unironically rise up and become leaders themselves, so I'd push for a solution adjacent to that. Let's make our own press, internet, banks and then nations, haha. But those 3 problems (organization, accurate data, morale) are key, I think. The morale problem is the simplest to solve, even if it's a constant uphill struggle. Organization is a toss-up, but I hope to see some real discussions around the nature of operations and the viability of herding cats (dipping into both legal and ethical conflicts). Accurate data is gonna be a bitch, because that's practically the foundation of us being thrown in the pit - who knows, though, maybe we'll get lucky there.
That's about all I have on my mind about it. Though somewhat relatedly, I remember you telling me in the past that you were working on compiling some data for us, something along the lines of alt-tech stuff. Still working on that?