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I'm still of the opinion the board needs opened up, even with the policy discussions taken in hand.
I don't think that's a very controversial viewpoint. However, there is a step from "the board needs to be opened up" to "the board can now be opened up".
Without fresh admissions, the board will continue to stagnate and eventually be closed down.
Agreed.
The board is currently dead because, and ONLY because of the sorry state of admissions.
Not completely true - see below, but true enough for broad agreement.
The high quality of discourse which Barbelith prides itself on (and which could apparently be under threat should the doors open) is really only a phantom at this point in time, because there IS no discourse currently.
Absolutely.
Opening up the board could only improve the level and quality of discussion, because doing so would ensure there was actually discussion going on. If it's of a lower quality than days of yore, it's still better than sitting in a circle and staring at one another.
This is mistaken on a couple of levels, I think - first, that any discussion is better, and of higher quality, than no discussion. It also assumes that nobody is talking to each other at all - in fact, I think one thing that has chopped the legs off the discussion is that other social mechanisms have evolved, with the advantage of living code - so, people are playing Travian, chatting on LiveJournal, doing whatever people do on Facebook on Facebook, and so on. People are talking, but elsewhere.
I'm not convinced doing so has to mark the passing of the old guard either, that the two necessarily go hand in hand seems like a bit of an odd notion.
And one that was never expressed. What I did say is that the old guard would probably withdraw from a dedicated Comics forum with vestigial other fora, and that this might be for the best - for both parties, really.
If anything, the old guard are leaving slowly but surely because there's nothing going on and nothing that they're putting in seems to be coming back out.
Well, we don't really need an "if anything" here - people have fairly regularly expressed their reasons for leaving or cutting back their involvement, either privately or publicly. From which I can broadly conclude that people have left for a number of reasons - inertia, other business, perceived failure to tolerate/combat various -isms to an acceptable level, me. But es, some people, new and old, are leaving or just not posting because there's not a lot of point, or expectation of getting replies.
There's no growth or vitality to the place, the whole board's in stasis, meaning that the people who are putting in the most amount of effort to shape the voice of the community have no voice to shape. The only way to fix that is by having new people and new opinions adding to the mix and being tempered by the old. Even if it raises the blood-pressure from time to time.
Well, the best way to fix there not being many posts is to increase the number of posts, and the easiest way to do that is to add more people - although note that most people who have joined Barbelith during the last functional iteration of the joining process did not actually post. So, not the only way, but the way most likely to increase traffic, I agree.
Also, the old guard are not the only ones who keep the tone of the place in check. I think it does a bit of a disservice to all the intelligent, more recent posters who've made their way in here, to say that the board would automatically collapse in the absence of the forerunners.
Which I don't think anyone has said, but we've gone over that a fair few times now.
Tom let me in the back door around three years ago now, before even the current admissions process, and it was seen that the closure was only temporary. The situation has hardly changed at all in three whole years. Barbelith really needs to stop this idea that the wolves are at the gate, baying to get in and it has to keep itself shut off unless it gets ripped to pieces.
Which, again, nobody has expressed, to my knowledge. I don't know where you're getting that, to be honest. Barbelith membership was closed to deal with heavy trolling ages back - the issue for quite some time has not been fortification, but the lack of technology refresh to restore user functionality.
The place is never going to have the perfect functionality where everybody gets to feel entirely comfortable all the time, but that's just the way it is. It's life. You take some knocks and you grow up, or you stay in bed, get fat, lazy and die.
If anyone out there is proposing that the board be closed because it does not have the perfect functionality, I'd like to meet them. Again, this has not been said. We're trying to create any functionality. Without functionality, the board pretty much ipso facto does not function. If you believe that everything about the board that is worthwhile can be separated from the set of code that defines www.barbelith.com, which I think is absolutely true, then you might want to start a new board without those functional hindrances. That is really the best possible move - the only problem being that one might hit diminishing returns.
However, all of this is already being discussed in the Policy thread on admissions. And I am, I realise, only exacerbating things by spending time here rather than concentrating on what to do next to get people onto Barbelith again, which is where I should be focusing my attention. So, that's my bad. |
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