Feedback and suggestions

Private and/or demographic-specific forums?

I'm sure this has been brought up many times before, but I was wondering about the viability of these.

Private forums have the obvious benefits, but default demographic-specific forums seem like they'd also be a useful idea. I know some users are overwhelmed by attention when they join, and having a safe space to be themselves and get used to the site might help with user retention. Examples might be women-only forums or feedee-only or POC-only forums, which could be easily be filtered to only be visible to users that identify as such.

Thoughts?
1 year

Private and/or demographic-specific forums?

I see why you might think that's a good idea, but it's terrible for so many reasons.

It will cause fracturing, already in a community that doesn't have a huge following. I also feel like it may facilitate gossip. Walls need to be broken down, not constructed.

There's also something very archaic and kind of backwards about splitting the community this way. It makes me think of the Men's Clubs and women-only organizations of yore. Or the days of Jim Crow; white v. colored. It goes against the very notion of inclusiveness. I don't wish to go back 60+ years.

It makes me wonder what Martin Luther King fought for. What those womens' rights activists fought for.

Overall, I think it would send the wrong message.

I also don't really see a lot of point in separating by role, since not only can someone have more than one role (feeder and feedee for example), but sometimes those of other roles may nevertheless have useful advice or something to add.

It also wouldn't ultimately solve any problems, and likely cause more of them.

Despite our best efforts, scammers and those who misrepresent themselves do occasionally slip through, and it's often not possible to take action immediately. Out of fairness, there needs to be evidence or failing that, multiple reports and this doesn't always present itself immediately. While a serious problem, there's no simple or easy solution so we just do the best we can to remove them, while attempting to be as fair as possible with an extremely low rate of false positives.

With this sort of thing, scammers and troublemakers will have even more of an incentive to misrepresent themselves than they already do. The problems of harassment will only continue on as much as they have.

That's just my two cents on this, so far.
1 year