Cadende

Before people get too bent out of shape, obviously this sort of experience is built on a foundation of privilege and social connections that most people don't have. In a modern western society you'd have a much harder time doing this as a less privileged person, and frankly governments and businesses do their best to make it impossible and illegal.

But I see these sorts of articles occasionally, and I've talked to one or two people who live sort of like this IRL, and I do still feel like there's some interesting things to discuss about people that live like this and if some lessons from it can be applied to more people or society more broadly.

This caught my eye:

“I actually feel more secure than I did when I was earning money,” she says, “because all through human history, true security has always come from living in community and I have time now to build that ‘social currency’. To help people out, care for sick friends or their children, help in their gardens. That’s one of the big benefits of living without money.”

I think there's an element of truth to that. This type of model isn't a substitute for ending capitalism by other means and providing things like housing and healthcare and such for all, but I do think a society that makes room for more people to live productive and fulfilling lives at the margins would be a better society in some way that I'm having trouble articulating. (And a society where everyone has secure housing and healthcare and such as a right, would be one where more people are secure enough to be a benefactor to others)

There have been a lot of requests for new comms lately and not even a discussion of actually implementing any of them that I've seen. That isn't really fun or welcoming to new people. It makes the site feel static and unevolving.

Yes, we already have a fair number of comms and a pretty small userbase, but the default setting is to browse All, so splitting up posting across more comms shouldn't reduce the pool of posts, and having more specific communities if anything should inspire more posting. Anything that has repeat issues with self-moderating can be locked or deleted, but I don't really see the issue with letting people go wild on this. The freedom to create your own little space, niche specialty community, or novelty gag community inspires a lot of creative posting in my experience and could bring in new users as well. We may not want to lifeboat any big subreddits, but letting people set up their own little spaces can't hurt too much, right?

Let new comms live and die by people's actual usage of them, rather than not letting any exist in the first place. If we have posts on this comm getting 15+ upbears, that is enough posters to get a small community going, no? let alone other posts getting 30-50 upbears, often with well known community members volunteering to moderate and still no response. And those are just the people posting and upbearing despite most of us knowing full well new comms basically never get approved. The current system just isn't working, IMO.

Admins, if there is something I'm missing here that makes this an intractable problem I'm open to hearing it. If that is the case, can we set objective criteria for creating a comm rather than defaulting to "admins ignored your post: denied"?

Everyone else: do you have any thoughts on this? I think it could work. Obviously if comms cause issues they can just be nuked. I'm fine with aggressive moderation, but as it stands now I think creativity is being stifled.