Posted by Dinah on January 7, 2006, at 15:44:14
In reply to Can we take an informal poll? » wildcard, posted by Dinah on January 7, 2006, at 15:16:41
If most people see this as the root of the problem, then I'm willing to throw my voice in favor of splitting Social, for what it's worth.
But personally, it's not really in keeping with my view of Social. I think I see Social as sort of the community center of Babble. Where there can be people talking about loneliness and people celebrating victories and people having fun and people discussing problems. I sort of hated to see Grief split off, because that's part of what a community is. When you have a loss you bring it to your community, where you recieve support for your loss.
I don't see the benefit of splitting off any of the specialty boards unless they manage to attract a subcommunity of people with an interest in or special knowledge of a given topic, so that archives are searchable or knowledge can be more easily shared.
So that if Grief, for example, had evolved into a board where Grief was an active topic with a group of people seeking to explore the grieving process it makes sense. But if grief is just somewhere you're redirected to if a family member or friend dies and you seek to share it with your community, then it's just isolating. And for what purpose? To protect the community from the sadness of loss?
The exception being potentially divisive topics like Politics or Religion, where separating them allows people with very different viewpoints to maintain community and kinship overall.
poster:Dinah
thread:596210
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20051205/msgs/596277.html