[xg15]

This seems great for discussing whether your local neighborhood should have a roundabout or rather use traffic lights, but I don't see how a network of purposely separated and local discussion boards would be useful for discussing larger-scale or even national or international issues.

(If the answer is "it wasn't meant to do that", in the article, it was touted as an alternative to traditional social media which do have that role, so the question does stand)

[beezle]

State wide issues such as property taxes, river control, Act 250 do come up for discussion. National issues generally don't as most people do not want to have their real names and towns attached to overty team red/blue political positions/rants.

[dan-robertson]

I think lots of people don’t really go on social media for the latter reason, it’s just that such content tends to be high engagement and so the big sites end up prioritising it in people’s feeds.

[xg15]

Yeah, good point. And the low-drama local discussions are one of the areas where Facebook is still most useful, so it makes sense to build a separate service which can provide for this even better. The problem is, I think there is a real need to discuss larger-scale issues, especially in a time like this. So I think the best medium for this might not yet be found.

[TeMPOraL]

> I think there is a real need to discuss larger-scale issues, especially in a time like this.

Is there, though? How many of those issues are a consequence of expecting everyone to have an opinion on larger-scale issues, creating infrastructure that allows everyone to voice those opinions, and then having the ad industry cancer metastasize and grow a great, ugly, self-sustaining tumor over it?

Right now, we're surely doing too much shallow talking with too much emotions pent up in it. We need to find a different way to discuss this, one that doesn't degenerate to drive-by engagement.