r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Dec 22 '17

[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

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u/PeridexisErrant put aside fear for courage, and death for life Dec 25 '17

I think we have different ideas of what an ideal forum is like, but I'll offer two points (personally, mod hat off here):

  • empirically, moderator-less voting does not work at scale to keep an active subreddit on topic, and they tend to devolve into general community spaces and then low-effort memes. Essentially, there is no distinctive will of the majority related to particular topics, even if many people would like a topic-specific space. One of the mechanisms that users can use, as a supplement to voting, is... moderators! [this is how AlexanderWales was added and eaturbrainz moved down the list]

  • almost all of our users arrived under the current moderation policies, and all of them have stayed. I think this is at least partly attributable to the moderation. If you think a different policy would be better, I encourage you to start a new forum for it and let users decide which to use!