Just posted a question/discussion on Reddit about EV tarrifs. Was up for several hours, generated a great discussion and then it was removed by a mod. They reckoned it shouldn’t be there, despite loads of super-helpful comments that were relevant to the community. The mod directed me to another sub. I posted in there and it was auto removed in minutes. Then my account was banned. Platform is fucked.
That is the problem when any forum/community gets “large” - to make it possible to find anything in the noise they have to be extremely strict about a narrow topic and killing anything not in that narrow topic. This in turn makes the mods look like jerks. Don’t read the above as saying the mods are not jerks, or defending them. Often they are jerks even when they don’t have to be.
What we need is a way to select everyone into smaller groups of random people who know something but don’t overlap. I sometimes want a couple doctors to discuss some deep issue near me, but 1000 would be too many. I sometimes want to talk fishing with a few people. There are millions of other topics someone can get in depth in and my life is better when I hear a few of those conversations - but all million is overwhelming. I don’t know how to do this though - there are too many “anti-vaxer” types in the world that sound like they know something about a topic when you don’t know anything about it: but they are worse than nothing.
I have the feeling that this is where we are (and have been) regarding politics and national borders with the current population levels. Local politics has slowly, over the course of centuries, been losing to national/federal politics. I feel like democracy works best when it’s in the sweet spot for not being too big (where good ideas are easily drown out) and not being too small (not being able to effectualize good ideas on a scale that matters).
I sometimes think the world would be better served if we went back to a nation-state size that promoted regional powers instead of global superpowers. I don’t know it would necessarily always be better because eras of recent history where there is no clear dominant regional power, you tend to get more wars. :/
Speaking to the USA, national politics became more important as the federal government became the means for funding social programs. People forget that the quality of life varied significantly between different states. You also saw a reevaluation of the limits of political morality, was it moral to let people in your country be politically oppressed.