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 don’t think the occasional open megathread would hurt but focusing too much effort on trying to reach liberals is a tactical mistake. There is a much broader mass of people out there who are not liberal, most of them are just apolitical or only very superficially political in one direction or the other, and these are the people who we should be trying to reach first, not groups that are already ideologically hardened, whether liberal or conservative. It is more difficult to break through already established barriers than to lay down foundations on empty or mostly empty land. In order to reach these people you need to emphasize shared material interests, and preferably do so outside of the kind of online milieu which tends to disproportionately attract already politicized individuals as is the case for this platform.
Not wrong, but a catch-all “disagree and and want a proper discussion” would solve the “liberal only” complaint. In my experience chuds are easier to convert, but a chud thread would be a miserable idea.
Either way, if it had a specific comm with ban happy mods it might not be a bad thing.
I completely agree on both counts.
Kinda catch 22 in a way, if we walk through the brambles and suffer countless stinging thorn we might win them over….might… and it fucking sucks
“liberal” here is an unmarked term that thereby refers to both a broad group and a specific subset of it, like how “man” can mean both “humans generally” and “males specifically”. Furthermore, most “apolitical” people are just casual liberals rather than dedicated ones, because we live in a neoliberal society.
I was mostly thinking of those peoples, my bad if that wasn’t clear.
Reaching out to these people is good, too, but I’m not sold that they’re easier/more worthwhile to bring around than more committed libs (let’s define that as regular Democratic Party voters):