Debate of the week- https://www.debateart.com/debates/4056-the-majority-of-people-should-be-vegan-or-vegetarian
thread of the week- https://www.debateart.com/forum/topics/8733-second-presdiential-election-just-as-sloppy-and-illegitimate-as-the-first-one?page=1&post_number=1
Current Progress and Updates
The rough start is behind us, and I appreciate you folks hanging in there while things got sorted out. Here is a few things I have been working on this week.
1. Asked Ragnar to unban a controversial member, he humored me by doing so. This is a strong sign the mods will be willing to work with me in the future as well., and I appreciate their effort to do so.
2. assigned Austin to a project involving altering the current ELO system. As soon as he personally writes out the math he wants to use, followed up by the pseudo code that will make implementing the change easy, we will be writing a meep to see if the community wants to use the new ELO system and if so, do they want to alter it any to make everyone, reasonably happy. feel free to message austin to learn more about his proposal.
3. Worked with Ramshutu to develop a zoomed out overarching plan to increase site traffic, to be shared possibly next week.
4. Assigned RM to be a neutral 3rd party to award the $25 gift card to a member who voted for me, and $50 to one person from the total pool of voters, as soon as he draws those names out of the hat, me or him will announce it publicly.
5. Began Hashing out the 3 phase plan, the site will be working on for the next year.
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The 3 Phase Plan (you guys will need to suggest a name or we stick with this name)
There is a lot of site members who seem interested in doing the 3 following things.
1. Grow the site's user base
2. monetize the site so that Mike doesn't abandon us. (PTSD from DDO, I guess)
3. Make the site welcoming to a more diverse range of opinions.
I personally have bigger plans than this, and want to invite every one of you to join me, but if your plans are merely to grow the site in a positive way, that's great and your needs will be met as well.
As far as growing the user base, and having a more diverse range of opinions are concerned, I will help you there. I see monetizing the site as Mike's problem, not ours. However I do have a plan that will immediately get him $500 a month towards the site if he is interested, and it doesn't involve ads.
This will be expanded on later, but if anybody wants to help accomplish both 1 and 3 above, they can start by engaging in a bit of epistemological humility and refusing to engage with both trolls and low brow material.
Purpose of Debate
Just a few months ago, if you asked me the purpose of debate, I would have told you that it was just to win, a competitive outlet. Sure that's a part of it, but I think it can be so much bigger. We are aiming too low here. You all have the opportunity and privilege to change the world if you come along on this journey with me.
There are other communities currently changing the world, and that can be us as well. It will be us. Read this article https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/05/palestinian-israeli-clubhouse-conversation.html
It's about a bunch of Israeli and Palestinians citizens coming together just to talk, and bridge their differences. The chats help them see each other as humans and victims as well. These people and over 100,000 have been in that room are making real impacts by pressuring their respective governments for peace.
We can do something like that on this site. we can create a more peaceful understanding world. A safer world. Everyone here right now, can look back and smile a year from now, knowing the world was a better place, because they joined an obscure debate site.
This is why freedom of speech here is so important. If you get a lot of threads from white males questioning the lived experiences of African Americans, the correct response is not to ban them for hate speech. The correct response is to reach out to members of the black community to come in here and interact with those people. Right now we have a bunch of males on the site debating abortion. I don't know about you guys, but I think women need to be a part of that debate, particularly if they have been in some tough situations where they felt the need to get an abortion.
If you want a more understanding world, than we have to open ourselves up to having a wider array of people and ideals to engage with.
I don't want more people here just for the sake of having more people here. I want more types of people. I would love to see a fat acceptance person, debating somebody like David Goggins, or a Russian soldier debating a Ukranian citizen or any number of people who can learn a lot from each other. I invite you all to join me in this fight for the future of mankind.
The Plan
Anyone who wants is free to contribute to this plan, and right now I am only going to give a brief overview and the details will come out slowly over the next few months. The plans will belong in a living document, that changes constantly, but the general framework is written in stone.
The plan consists of 3 phases. Phase one is preparing the site for the influx of people through voluntary shifts in culture, moderation and systems and should last 60-90 days . Phase two is the process of bringing new members to the site. Phase two is slit up into two stages. Stage one is to bring serious debaters on the site and populate it with other interested people. Stage two is of this phase will involve bringing together disparate groups of people, simultaneously to balance each other out. This phase will last 10-11 months. Phase three is about putting systems in place so the site does the above things on autopilot.
Phase one
This is the main focus for the following two months, and I could really use some help in accomplishing these goals. Here is the focus on phase 3 most of which is to make sure the uptick in traffic doesn't overwhelm the site and destroy it.
1. Create a meep for a complete overhaul of moderation policies to ensure that the mods are not overwhelmed by too much work if we randomly get 200 new members tomorrow.
2. creating systems for the moderators so they can do more work in the exact same amount of time or less time than they do currently while handling a much larger work flow,
3. Overhaul the election process. We never want to go that long without a winner again, so remove the ability of mods to vote unless as a tie breaker. I suspect this would have made the process of determining a winner, both faster and easier. Make it so accounts must be 3 months old to vote to avoid gaming of the system. remove limitations that prevent candidates from making their case, which in and of itself excites people and increases engagement and retention of members who typically fly under the radar.
4. Discourage the practice of mods justifying decisions and also the sites culture of transparency, which leads to unnecessary disputes and time wasting activities of explaining things too much. You have the mod logs as to what decisions were made, you don't need to know anything else.
5. reduce the power of the presidency to begin at the end of my term. We don't need presidents having access to private mod chats, they can ask the reasonings behind decisions in separate PMs.
6. After all the meeps needed to accomplish phase one are completed than we have a final meep to eliminate the meep process. It's stupid time wasting process and has harmed the site. these things like transparency and mob rule sound good on paper, but it is harming the site, and I will push back.
7. Create a Dart university to train interested members in the culture of the site, such as critical thinking skills, debating skills, fallacies etc.
Phase 2
This is just a brief overview. as the time approaches we will go into more details, but I am still smoothing out the edges of this with Ramshutu and I believe Mr.Chris is okay with me including him in the process, we will also be pulling things from Airmax's prior plan.
essentially stage 1 of this process will involve the following things.
1. Targeting small influencers on tiktok. youtube, twitch etc. who enjoy debating people to come onto the site and make it happen, drawing in all of their followers. Ramshutu suggested globeymcglobeface as a potential target for example and many others. There are hundreds of influencers like that who are willing to debate
2. lots of e-mails to school debaters, coaches aficionados etc. as well as snail mail, cold calls etc,
And many other things involving social media, journalists etc, that are still being fleshed out. I am also trying to organize this in a way where it can be done with minimal work on my part, because this has to be sustainable. Ramshutu has already began work on Twitter and other social media platforms and though we aren't ready for this completely yet, you may see some early indications of what is to come shortly. I have talked to Lancelot and he has a large social media following he is going to pitch to soon as well.
stage 2
This stage of phase two is going to be the part that brings us world peace. This is when we really start going hard after a wide variety, and diversity of opinions and doing so with paid ads, provocative ads that piss the respective sides off enough to draw them here to debate each other. I will have to take one of the hundred ideals in my head and use it to devise a way to recoup the ad money though.
Phase 3
This is the stage where we do what is known as our exit plan. This requires creating systems that feed this funnel of people and is run on autopilot.
Final Notes
Anyway, this is the shell of the living plan which is mostly on handwritten notes, that I will be transferring to a document when I get time. My only concerns are overwhelming the site, before it's ready for the cultural and systems shift needed for handling the influx of people.
Currently I am looking hard for people that can help me flesh out the rest of the phase one portion of the plan which must be completely done by April 1st. You guys have a good week, I am mainly going to just be stopping in on Sundays to give you these updates, and I look forward to working with some of you on phase one.
