The off-topic tangent of the last two pages kind of reminds me of
this thread Dread posted a couple years back. (See, even then people were grumbling about the good old days pre-2004...
)
I'm trying to think of what I can say concerning the two departed posters previously alluded to without being inappropriate...from private interactions with them at the time, I agree with Dread that yes, the tenor of FYM was their main motive for leaving. Neither of them ever explicitly cited 'racist/homophobic/misogynistic' labelling to me as a reason why they felt fed up, though, and I got the impression their gripes were much broader-based than that...more a combination of A) wearying of the frequent snideness and condescending tone of certain (liberal) regulars, and B) basically what BonosSaint just mentioned--an increasing collective slide towards lazy dogmatism, responding to attempts to problematize the expected (liberal) talking points on an issue by implicitly or openly attributing dishonorable intentions to the person doing the problematizing. One characteristically focused more on A), the other characteristically more on B), but basically that seemed to be it. I don't think they were entirely blameless themselves of contributing to the FYM 'climate' they complained about, but then that's true of all of us to varying degrees. I would love to be able to say I saw some effective way to address those problems and did it but I can't-- B) is really a function of how hard people are willing to try and how much benefit of the doubt they're prepared to extend one another, and as for A), that has been addressed with said individuals multiple times, they know who they are, but for better and for worse there's a difference between that and actual ban-worthy behavior. If you look at the thread I linked to above, an assertion was made that the forum membership used to collectively self-police that sort of thing more and that that was another casualty of increasing polarization post-2004.
It is true that when you're talking about a social and political discussion forum, the smaller the share of the total group comprised by some particular ideological subset, the more it becomes a problem for the overall caliber of debate if no one in that subset is strongly and consistently motivated to debate constructively and at length. On the other hand, if you're not in the minority, lucky you, because there's almost always at least someone around to do the heavy lifting. I would also point out that the more effort you're putting into it, the more it stings when you get facile putdowns in response.
