Firstly split up debating from rap battling. I want to be the best of both and not accused of being the best debater because I'm the best rap battler. This also matters because you need to hide rap battles from public eye and make it an optional thing to see, it's rude and a bad image for the site. Once you get rid of them from public view, you can completely show off the debates. You need WAY BETTER moderation of the forums too, people are encouraging laissez-faire when you need strict as fuck moderating to happen to this site. There's too many toxic members allowed to provoke others to become toxic, it's a chain reaction.
Secondly, you need to give motive to do things. You make a Medium blog where there's no reward for typing a ton and where it's extremely vague what we should be writing about let alone the recognition we'd get for posting to a site that few even on this site are going to read. The rewards system of donating, writing and generally being active are next to none and I don't even mean financial reward, I am talking about recognition, glorifying etc. Currently this site is plagued with users who are so proud to have a 'real life' that they mock and drag down the users who want to do the best hard-work for a site they shouldn't feel ashamed for being passionate about. The most you've done is tell one of the bad users she deserved to be shivved, this is nothing and you need to become more active in moderating too, demote Bsh1 and make yourself head mod like most admins do for starters.
Thirdly, there needs to be a huge increase in live debating either over text or on voice, this is something missing on both DI, DDO and the entire Internet in general, edeb8 tried but their community was too tiny to pull it off. We need a proper community where we can debate vocally or live at least via IM text. You don't even need to host it, make a special 'live debate' section where people post the entire text of said conversations or whatever.
Lastly, you need to emphasise the importance of making catchy debates. This is something Wylted alluded to early on, you need a system where active debates (not by views alone but by actual responses, comments, votes etc) also counting views is a must. People are only motivated to make entertaining debates if they know or see obvious fame as a result. That's why this site has so many fewer debates than DDO even in its inactive, early days. This site has no way to encourage or motivate clickbait titles or mainstream debates. People feel it won't be seen and stay away from it leaving only specialists (MagicAintReal) or noobs who are only there for the hell of it (Type1 for instance) to make debates.
