I think what you're trying to say is that the lack of racial diversity is unfortunate, but people are reading it as "unfortunate we have all these white people."
Probably just change the wording to that effect, or maybe something about how having such a large majority of a community from a single race can cause people from other races/ethnicities to feel left out, etc.
I like how you stated that big platforms like Reddit encourage toxic behavior such as performative antagonism and biting sarcasm, and then someone immediately shows up to defend big platforms by using performative antagonism and biting sarcasm.
Reddit kind of pushed everyone into a single room, and in a single room only the loudest people get heard. Hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers just leaves most people shouting into the void, having no meaningful conversations, and rewarding performative antagonism and biting sarcasm.
This is so true. Not only the promotion of toxic behavior but also just the shouting into the void part.
I used to play EverQuest back in the day, and I frequented probably dozens of forums at the time. My guild had one, there was one that somebody set up for the server I played on, there were forums for all the different classes, unofficial pre-wiki forums (anyone remember AllahKhazam?), and of course the official forums on the EQ website.
Your comment just brought back a bunch of memories from those days. After using Reddit for so long, I had kind of forgotten what it was like back then. The biggest difference between then and now, I think, was how much more personal it was.
Of course, everyone on my guild forum knew each other because we all played together. But even on the server-wide forum that had a few thousand people, you saw a lot of the same names over and over again in different threads each day. It made it a lot easier to remember the person on the other side of the screen, rather than just a username. You'd actually get to know people, to an extent.
We celebrated birthdays and new jobs. We knew when someone had a death in the family. There were friendships, and even long-distance romances that happened in the game/forums. And drama, of course. There were always the loudmouths who liked to argue with everyone, but everyone else already knew that, so when the loudmouth tried to start something people would just say, "Oh shut up, So-and-so. No one wants to fight with you." Sometimes people would leave our guild to join one of the bigger guilds on the server, and it was legitimately heartbreaking.
It really felt like an honest-to-God community, rather than a bunch of anonymous commenters who happened to be talking about the same thing. Even in the smaller, more niche subreddits, I never got that feeling. Maybe that's on me for just habit-scrolling most of the time and not engaging. But I really do think that the sheer volume of people on a platform makes it difficult to form real communities.
I don't know if the federated structure will help to bring that back or not. But I agree that the "fractured" nature that some reddit refugees seem to worry about is likely more of a blessing in disguise.
Yeah, I was thinking the person you responded to was talking about the wording of this post and not the survey question itself.
After seeing some of the comments here, though, I think the wording of the post is probably for the best. Seems to have made people uncomfortable, and even though there are some shitty comments, there's hope that other people read it, felt uncomfortable, then started to think about why they would feel uncomfortable and what that says about their own biases.
Either way, you're doing a great job at building a community. Keep it up!