Once again, Livejournal restores my faith in humanity
I could not believe the response to my call for a community of people interested in intelligent conversation. Apparently I'm not the only one who misses it.
So far, I've decided to start a community--because the responses were too many in number to keep replying to different ones in different communities. Also, I'm going to allow members to take a poll on this journal to choose a name, since "tremendousseasons" is too long and I was out of ideas. (Some of the fantastic names suggested thus far are "streamofwords," "grand_discourse," and "meandering_minds".)
At this point, it looks as if posts will work like this:
1) Any member at any time may post a new topic or discussion. It is up to that member whether they want one other member to respond, leading to a two-way discussion, or many members to respond, leading to a group discussion. If the original poster does not specify his/her preferences, that poster should expect numerous responses. For the purpose of simplicity, "limited" posts will be those open to one other member, while "open" posts will be open to any and all members.
2) Anything goes except vicious personal attacks--no name-calling, stereotyping, or trolling.
3) If a post is open, anyone may reply and take that discussion in any direction that they wish. Anyone may then reply to that reply, and so on and so forth.
A member of another community mentioned possible problems with LJ format. I had foreseen this--I'm aware that comments are indented each time someone replies. At the discretion of the group's individual members, a poster may wish to create a new post with the subject: "Reply: " instead of commenting, as eventually the comment area will be very narrow and more or less useless. Otherwise, there's the possibility of a sister Yahoo! group to handle ongoing discussions.
I hope we (the members of the community) will be able through this experiment to do the following things:
1) Improve our skills in conversation, debating, and seeing an issue from all sides.
2) Make friends who share our interests or otherwise intrigue us.
3) Create something as a group of which we may all be proud.
Who knows--there's always that tiny possibility that we could solve world hunger or realize something integral to human nature. That's the best-case scenario.
There's also a possibility that this group could become like so many others, used by hundreds of people for the first month or two, dwindling to a few main posters after that, and eventually dying out. If this should occur, I'd like to thank everyone in advance for joining in this common cause.
Peace.
So far, I've decided to start a community--because the responses were too many in number to keep replying to different ones in different communities. Also, I'm going to allow members to take a poll on this journal to choose a name, since "tremendousseasons" is too long and I was out of ideas. (Some of the fantastic names suggested thus far are "streamofwords," "grand_discourse," and "meandering_minds".)
At this point, it looks as if posts will work like this:
1) Any member at any time may post a new topic or discussion. It is up to that member whether they want one other member to respond, leading to a two-way discussion, or many members to respond, leading to a group discussion. If the original poster does not specify his/her preferences, that poster should expect numerous responses. For the purpose of simplicity, "limited" posts will be those open to one other member, while "open" posts will be open to any and all members.
2) Anything goes except vicious personal attacks--no name-calling, stereotyping, or trolling.
3) If a post is open, anyone may reply and take that discussion in any direction that they wish. Anyone may then reply to that reply, and so on and so forth.
A member of another community mentioned possible problems with LJ format. I had foreseen this--I'm aware that comments are indented each time someone replies. At the discretion of the group's individual members, a poster may wish to create a new post with the subject: "Reply: " instead of commenting, as eventually the comment area will be very narrow and more or less useless. Otherwise, there's the possibility of a sister Yahoo! group to handle ongoing discussions.
I hope we (the members of the community) will be able through this experiment to do the following things:
1) Improve our skills in conversation, debating, and seeing an issue from all sides.
2) Make friends who share our interests or otherwise intrigue us.
3) Create something as a group of which we may all be proud.
Who knows--there's always that tiny possibility that we could solve world hunger or realize something integral to human nature. That's the best-case scenario.
There's also a possibility that this group could become like so many others, used by hundreds of people for the first month or two, dwindling to a few main posters after that, and eventually dying out. If this should occur, I'd like to thank everyone in advance for joining in this common cause.
Peace.