This is where you sound really strange and out of touch, how is individual, insular threads which are only going to be posted in by people with a bias for the thread topic by design (either a positive or a negative bias) better for avoiding hugboxes or making dissent to bitch people out of regular thread posting? Maybe people were going antsy or menhera about companies having bad strings of happenings (chief example here is Hololive), but how is the solution even more isolation into dedicated stomping grounds? wouldnt that caused wierd retarded circlejerks instead? instead of two or three users calling a dissident post retarded and maybe one or two agreeing with it, now it would just get dogpiled by an entire thread or have to be snidely posted in others to avoid said retarded dogpile.
With individual threads, multiple parallel lines of discussion are enabled simultaneously. People can discuss the positive aspects of Nijisanji in the Nijisanji thread and the negative aspects in the L thread. People who do not want to focus on the entirely negative things have their own space to post, and so do those with the opposite motive. This has been done on the Farms as well, after people proved they couldn't get along with each other.
It has been my experience both as an observer to forum altercations and someone who has had to deal with them as an administrator that it is a rarity for users to request arbitration in potential conflicts of this nature. Usually an argument or dispute goes on for multiple pages until other users get fed up and report it, or one side or the other feels they need to invoke moderator support to make the opposition go away.
Alternatively, there is an attitude that requesting staff assistance is somehow 'losing the fight' or 'admitting defeat', so users actively avoid bringing them into a situation. Very often, users are willing to admit there's a problem and even lament in private that nobody is stepping in, but do not want to be see as the 'tattletales' who actually invoked a superior authority. This is especially true on a forum like this, where I advocate so strongly for free speech and open discourse; staff action is innately deemed 'censorship'.
As a result of all this, various topics are simply not brought up after a while, because different users have differing levels of tolerance for opposing viewpoints. People like
@MerelyTourist are completely immune to opposing viewpoints. You can call him a femboy a million times and he'll always come back for more. On the other hand, users who genuinely want a good discourse and are willing to engage in a mutually productive discussion can be filtered just by random people doing a drive-by post that results in half a page of sperging, leaving them totally sour to the idea of trying again.
Allow me to talk a bit about my past. As you may know, I used to be an active TTRPG player. My first exposure to the rainbow retard brigade came when a community I used to use a lot was infiltrated by them and they began taking over. What really 'radicalized' me against their agenda was their total inability to tolerate any kind of dissent or contrarian opinions, even when said opinions weren't expressed in their presence. In particular there was one, entirely optional section of the community that was mostly used to discuss real-world events. The conversations were nuanced and fairly light-hearted, until these people started reporting them.
This section was maybe 5% of the overall traffic in the community, and fewer than 20% of the members even used it. Viewing it was optional, to the point you wouldn't even know it existed unless you went through a particular set of channels. But to the RRB, this place was a source of dreadful, dark poison that needed to be eradicated at any cost. They made it their mission to go there and carefully document every single 'problematic' post or other detail they thought needed to go, and then used it to bully the community leaders into breaking up that section. It was the death of the community, and an event that was instrumental in formulating my dedication to free speech.
Why do I bring this up, exactly? It's because it has informed my attitude towards segmented communities ever since. I do not agree with the idea that everyone has the right to criticize and judge what happens in another section of the community
unless it is directly affecting their own section in some way. Although the particular incident that inspired this attitude involved progressives, I have seen it happen in communities of every spectrum. The pattern is always the same; members of one section purposefully hate-read or critically analyse another section of the community which they have every option to ignore, and allow their discontent to grow until they are willing to disrupt other areas of the community in an attempt to get their targets removed, censored or otherwise disciplined. I would go so far as to say that I have never directly witnessed a sub-section of a community accused of being a hugbox actively be responsible for the decay of the surrounding larger community,
except via the actions of other users who decided never to let those accusations die.
My own stance, meanwhile, is simple; if people aren't trying to force you to engage with them, leave them alone. Exceptions are only potentially valid when it involves deliberate gayops, in which case self-defence is justifiable. Maybe they
will become a hugbox that tolerates zero criticism of the thing they love,
but why do you have to care? I'm not trying to claim that there is never, ever a case where a hugbox ought to be broken up or otherwise disrupted, but cases are exceedingly rare. Such cases should be handled by the staff, who have the power to lay down decisions that cannot be questioned by users. Users are never more than equals; they can just be ignored and dismissed. No matter how determined or dedicated one user is to dissuade another user from a course of behaviour, they are never more than one press of the
Ignore button away from being rendered irrelevant.
Again, why did you develop the idea that people are much more aggressive in the main thread and that somehow separating people into little threads is a decent choice? good info is still be upvoted, even people who dislike vtubers for xyz reasons respect the passions people had from them for the most part. Hell, check your reactions to your Lennox/Silvy feature. You have that understandable bias like many do about creators and you effortposted to showcase someone fucking with her and many agreed how fucked up it was, it was entirely something that you have a bias towards,people discussed it and agreed with you because of how its presented and documented. It was entirely in the main thread and it was discussed for its time, it was threadmarked so people can see it when summarizing the pages and come back if they wish. Id honestly even go as far as to call it a very good quality of yours, under all the discord faggotry, you're pretty quick to call out fuckery like this. And your previous writeups on Tora Karu were also pretty good. Same with your little spiel about how /vt/ is a shithole of crab bucketry and gay ops.
I appreciate the support. I do try and make things informative and useful. I think people have been more receptive to my information recently, which is nice to observe. I've tried my best to confine things to objective facts and not subjective commentary on things I can't dig deeper into.
