Deleted threads

[Julianek]

While i see where you are coming from, we did try this in the past for a few months with the [COFFEE] threads, thinking that people should be able to discuss anything, not necessarily related to personal finance and so on.

Sadly, the result was a failure. You can dig deeper into the reasons here, but i will quote myself on these threads:

@Julianek

The point is that:

• those coffee threads are among the most active on the forum
• as such, they are always appearing on the top of all discussions
• the coffee threads are not simply “any” topics, they are topics that are controversial enough that they evolve into huge queues from an initial off-topic post.
• The topics and tones in these discussions are often off-putting. I try to use a simple litmus-test: “Based on these discussions alone, would I like to get a beer with these guys?” Most of the time the answer is flatly no. Next useful question is “If I was a newcomer and based on these discussions, would i like to spend a big chunk of my time participating on this forum?” => I don’t think the answer is very flattering.
• Some people will say: “if you don’t like the discussion, don’t participate to the thread”. But that’s forgetting that after some point, people won’t filter mentally “oh this is a useful thread, and this one is a sh*tty thread”. They just stop participating to the forum.
• As a result, valuable inputs become rarer and rarer, as @anon21880037 initial post rightly mentioned. This was my opinion until now, that i kept for myself. But it looks like many people have the same opinion.
• I have met several persons off-line who told me “Yeah I know this forum, but i have never participated because the atmosphere is not really nice there…” → So not only are valueable members not participating anymore, but new members are not willing to join either. We are self-selecting for the kind of people that like to participate in these coffee threads…

I don’t consider those coffee threads a success. I am reviewing the options but it is likely that I will close those threads and update the moderation policy. If people still absolutely want non-financial discussions, we can still create a discord channel as @Bojack suggested.

Now if you have a better suggestion I am all ears. Again, i used to think that people should be free-ish and talk about anything. But i haven’t seen any satisfying result so far.