On Saturday, 26 March 2016 at 19:52:18 UTC, QAston wrote:
A person who advocates for a more welcoming community and wishes for objective moderation introduces a divisive topic
You need to relax. The topic wasn't divisive. I haven't asked for moderation. I haven't argued in favour of objectivity. What is appropriate and not appropriate in an off-topic social thread like this is entirely cultural. I don't consider politics to be particularly contentious, and have never seen it been made an issue of, outside of very narrow US contexts, in my past _30_ years on the Internet. The overall problem with this mentality is that you aren't supposed to mention politics _in case_ someone gets offended, not because they actually do get offended. Which pretty much makes it very difficult to get a working democracy.
What _is_ a problem in these forums are the level of butt-hurt personal focus, not the occasional social thread. This community would be much better if there were more social threads, actually. A general forum is _usually_ a catch-all forum, so if you guys want to allow socialization, but don't want off-topic threads you probably should consider creating a separate social forum.
Of course, it seems like socialization is not a priority, but then you won't see the formation of strong bonds either (outside of IRC etc). Github doesn't really form strong ties. The basic idea that people will form strong teams based on code alone is not entirely well-founded.
