There’s plenty of mutual benefit in critically discussing basically any topic with anyone if you don’t have a huge amount of prior experience.
The problem is basically just that I got enough discussion experience and there’s a lack of other people willing to discuss much. There isn’t enough of a halo of other people, at various stages of learning, around me, to make a community work well. I basically can’t even get replies to my CF articles. If anyone cares whether I post them or not, they haven’t admitted it in response to any CF articles here recently (ever at this forum? I forget. OK I looked and found one Related, I even got ghosted on this).
One flawed policy is to give each person one chance. Be charitable once. Switch to meta issues, like concerns about whether they’ll flake and what they have to offer, after they’ve done one bad/problematic thing, but don’t open with that stuff.
Pros include:
- Limits time/resource use on problem people.
- Enables somewhat of a helpful atmosphere for nubs.
- Has a chance to get a positive result if someone good showed up (but it’s unclearly if it’s necessary for someone actually particularly good – it seems more helpful to medium people).
Cons include:
- People don’t understand what chance they’re getting, or why, and misuse it.
- There are a lot of dumb, flakey people in the world. Talking to each of them once would be a lot of work.
- Having one negative example doesn’t actually work well to pivot people to discussing meta problems. (Having three or five or 20+ doesn’t work well either. Justin did 18 for Kate which didn’t work, and everyone involved knew he could have listed more. People just don’t want to pivot.)