Many of us hail from /r/conspiracy due to dissatisfaction with some of the things over there, so what problems did/does /r/conspiracy suffer from which /v/conspiracy can learn from and deter?
What could moderators do to make this a more effective community hub for uncovering, organizing, sharing, and discussing information about conspiracies and secret agreements and all the related things that go into that?
What can non-moderators do to achieve the same goals?
Beyond the goals of sharing and discussing conspiracies and conspiracy theories, are there any other things that we would like to see on this subverse?
Are there any other questions we could ask ourselves and seek to answer with the aim of making the subverse and community excellent?
Is this too many questions for one post? :P
Please share your thoughts in the comments - even if you don't subscribe but have ideas or suggestions!
Edit: 14 days later and I'm now a moderator here. I'm stickying this post so anyone who missed it before can participate.
edit2: followup discussion here: [Meta] Brainstorming Thread #2: What could vconspiracy do to better itself? Take a look at this summary of ideas from the previous discussion, and share your thoughts!
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Mumberthrax ago
So here are some random thoughts off the top of my head, in no particular order.
Something that bothers me about /r/conspiracy is that it often has a very low signal to noise ratio. Quality content is buried while fluff and silly things gain prominence on the front page. Often this is blamed on vote manipulation, but sometimes I think it is just that the subreddit has such a poor reputation that people on /r/all downvote most things there regardless of what they were.
A lot of times the comments sections on /r/conspiracy are a mess. I particularly dislike the flame wars that people get into, attacking each other, accusing someone of being a shill, or mocking people for believing in x or y conspiracy theory prompting angry responses.
That podcast fiasco. The moderators making an "official" /r/conspiracy podcast with flytape wearing that silly mask, the silly video effects, rambling on about reddit meta-gossip, all without any community input. I think a podcast is fine, but there is a lack of interplay between the mods there and the community that is frustrating. I think if moderators are going to try official projects like that, there has to be community involvement at least to some degree, at least announcing it beforehand and seeking / listening to opinions.
I think the mods here might ought to promote commenting etiquette that reduces the harmful impact of trolls or other disruptive elements. /r/conspiracy has had a link to a copy of "the gentleperson's guide to forum spies", which is nice, but perhaps not the most comprehensive or directly applicable guide. Maybe we can find or compile superior or similar guides and include them as links in a prominent position on the sidebar.
Skepticism is really high up on my list of values. It's the reason I suspect many conspiracy theories have validity, because I am skeptical of the official narrative. I think sometimes we go so far against the status quo that we suspend skepticism for alternative theories/stories, which can be really dangerous with misinformation and even moreso with disinformation. I don't know exactly how, but I feel like we as a community should promote strong skepticism of all stories/theories - not to the point of outright dismissing things without investigation of course; keeping an open mind, weighing available evidence and following what leads are present, and determining if there is merit or not. edit: one tool useful for this might be the concept of the conspiracy theory rating scale.
persistence of information. Both reddit and voat suffer from a problem with this; the setup favors what is new and attention-grabbing, not necessarily what is useful or informative, and it favors reposts and redundancy rather than consolidation and organization to make information and discussions accessible. I'm not sure what strategies could be employed to fix this, but I think if anything were dreamt up which could alleviate this problem, it would go a long way toward making our subverse excellent.
Ok that's enough rambling for one comment. Going to take a break for a little bit. If I think of more ideas, I will share them.
Homo_ludens ago
Mods can alleviate part of the problem by showcasing certain discussions for a period of time (with a temporary sticky), creating recurring threads like 'This week in wonderland' or 'best discussion of this month', encouraging reviews of books or other resources and starting AMA's with experts etc. Or open source investigations like on the corbett report.
Mumberthrax ago
I think that's a very good idea. I wonder how we might go about selecting discussion topics.
I just had a discussion with the mods on /r/redditdayof about how they go about selecting their daily discussion topics. It's pretty interesting and there might be a way that it could be adapted to serve the purpose discussed here. On their subreddit they have a daily discussion topic, people post things related to the topic and for the items which is most highly upvoted, the poster gets to suggest a topic for future discussions and it's added to the queue. Perhaps we could have some sort of reward system for those who produce quality posts or discussions that they get to pick next week's discussion topic or something. That description alone isn't quite like what you've described, but maybe it could be a base which could be fleshed out some. In any case, the idea is pretty exciting to me.
If we could find a way to conduct full on open-source investigations (I'm not 100% sure how Corbett does it because i haven't yet purchased a subscription to access their forums), that would be pretty awesome. I don't know if github would be best for something like that, since it wouldn't be code. I know that colloquially open-source just means taking everybody's contributions and putting it together, but maybe tools like github or similar might be possibly used to streamline the process.
Homo_ludens ago
Sounds like a great idea! Also, you could post a sticky with this question: what topics would you like to discuss? Compiling a list based on answers and interest in the proposed topics as evidenced by votes.
I don't have a subscription to the corbett report yet either. But from browsing I gather that James proposes a topic and subscribers can post resources in the comments. Which can be done as well here. He than uses the resources to make an article or podcast.