Kuu is conservative (don't let him hear you say that or you'll get a lecture though) but he's very rarely around.
You say political commentary here is shallow and yet you go ahead and say that after we've talked about this a thousand times...
Your handwringing about muh conservative propaganda just contributes to the shitfest that you complain so much about. There will never be "unity" in regards to political discourse. Never. And an elevation of the political discourse in present time is simply impossible for too many reasons. If anyone doesn't want to take shit then don't talk about fucking politics outside the politics forum. It's very simple.
The fact that this place is uncensored, while so many other places have been censored in the past few years, is the reason you might perceive an imbalance in viewpoints. But the fact that there's people with dissenting opinions here is a great thing, and were it to become one sided it would truly be its death knell.
run by leftist social-justice militants at the height of the social-justice wave, and the mods themselves joined in on bullying anyone who didn't have the correct political opinions (and of course sometimes banned people).
This is also an exaggeration and selective memory. The moderation team has never been single-minded nor politically aligned, and this is very easy to prove looking at the archives. To claim, as some have done, that the forum has ever been led essentially by progressives is a gross misrepresentation. Furthermore most of the people that got banned didn't get banned for politics but for engaging in rampant flamewars all over the forum, and for fuck's sake if we didn't give them a fuckton of leeway before they were banned. If anything the biggest issue we had is we didn't act sooner in too many cases.
I think it's a bloody cop out to blame people for leaving and not having 'smart-enough' people on the forum (and even that's untrue). Everybody seems to have a problem with certain people creating lots of threads. Obviously it's going to seem like people are tooting their own horn but that's not the case. You cannot blame me for playing metalcore in one room of a giant steel factory and then say that the steel mill's homeless population is tired of metalcore propaganda. Why don't you blast your own music, create your own threads?
This has always been my position. People should complain less, and act more. Want more "smart" threads? Make them. Don't like Y topic dominating and want more of X topic? Stop whining and make them. Don't want shit flinging? Don't engage in it.
I think in regards to OPs question of why this place isn't more populated, its twofold:
1. Forums are just dead in the age of social media. People want a quick fix, and there's plenty other places for that. This place's pace is far too slow for the vast majority of people, and most people don't even want to discuss other people's ideas at all anymore, only engage in some sort of masturbatory exercise or warfare masquerading as discourse. That is of course in large part a consequence of how politics have developed in the past decade.
2. MBTI as the "main" thing is just terrible. At the time the forum was founded it was a different world, a different internet. What was once an intriguing topic is now just a pathetic meme. If this place had something like a niche hobby, any other topic as its principal focus, then it would be instantly more attractive. What's there to gain about talking here about *speciality topic Z* if the population is just not big enough and nobody cares or knows anything about it, because there's nothing in common to the people here except some vague attachment to "INTP / MBTI"?
Having said that I don't think it's impossible to drive more people here. Just very hard.
