Just to be clear here, Helm peddled for years the Social Justice doctrine verbatim on the official Pixelation Forum.
Social Justice is by far the most murderous ideology in the history of humankind. I don't care what "good" it pretends to fight for.
One of its defining qualities is authoritarian change of society by threat of punishment.
Social Justice holds the all time high score record of mass murder.
It was by far the worst that ever happened to humanity. ever.
While there seem to be very heightened sensibilities on other forms of bigotry,
no people here that considered themselves liberal and good, saw an issue with that.
Precisely because there is no vivid and varied debate on politics from different perspectives.
So to prove your new direction away from politics and extremism, you reinstate mod powers of this guy,
and his crowning ceremony is the purge of large parts of whatever remains of the active community.
Alongside a new slew of moderator replacements that I assume are not exactly varied in their outlook on life.
If that were the case, the other ones wouldn't have to leave, and the new ones wouldn't join.
Obviously an infringement of libertarian core principles is going on,
such that most of all they cannot stay in good conscious to their believes.
Whether it is having more balanced politics or no politics,
none of it can be achieved with a decidedly biased staff of administration.
Not long ago, any critique at all leveled at Social Justice would have been considered Far Right.
Basically, anything that is not Far Left was marked Far Right, bigoted, etc.
We have seen the violence and bannings on our universities in recent years,
the suppression of any debate that isn't in total favour of Social Justice.
Definition on these offenses are anything but crystal clear,
which means the attempt of making them a guideline will be no more clear.
Serious debates of any merit can't be just "clean" and "controlled".
It is bound to have plenty off-shot trails, sometimes strange, sometimes uncomfortable.
and from a little community chaos and banter, interesting things can arise
You don't just go around and remove, you actively argue your point of view.
While of course there are limits to everything,
if there is one thing that Social Justice has proven most,
is that its sense of limit is excruciatingly bad.
Now, I have never been on discord, don't know exactly what's going on.
But from many other similar occurrences across society in recent times,
this restructuring appears top-down, from a small circle of enlightened missionaries,
presumably knowing what's best for the community, and what it should look like,
assuming infallible judgment, although proven plenty fallibly.
And going by this:
Bigotry was never fostered or encouraged. On the contrary, conflicting opinions were welcomed and the debates (while heated) were often enlightening because of it.
The lack of bigotry was actually a highlight of the "politics" channel.
Some silly banter on occasion aside, even without having seen it, I don't find it hard to believe this true overall.
It goes in line with many other false accusations and developments going on in recent times.
There is something to be said about maintaining the focus of an art site on art, not politics.
It certainly was not part of this public forum these days, and I personally didn't even know it happened.
The problem we have in universities now a days is certainly that it is too political in subjects it shouldn't.
But the difference is that this biased politics is forced on the students from top down,
it's not varied debates coming from the students themselves, it's one-sided doctrines given down by the teaching curriculum.
You don't just go around and shut down the people themselves when they feel the need to talk with each other.
And certainly processing issues of life from various angles, some less pleasant than others, is part of art.
But the War on People under the guise of "for the people", by a small elitist circle of administrators, has always been the hallmark of Social Justice.
Which brings us to the next problem, you say you realize that the forum model is out-dated,
But a major core reason for why is exactly its less strict mode of conversation. People can just speak their mind.
The more open models of social media are precisely more popular because they are less moderated/steered/controlled.
Yet you actually believe that you will revivify your community with more strict definitions on what people can talk about?
This is most of all what brought down both Pixeljoint and Pixelation. No matter what technology you migrate to, if this is your solution, there is no hope for you.
You might call any other place of brimming life too offending, your problem is most of all that you are too boring. You believe yourself virtuous maybe. But too boring.
There is very few people interested in that. You can hold your head high on that all you want. It doesn't change your problem. It doesn't even mean you're good and deserve better.
There just isn't anything interesting happening anymore here. shuffling around the administration and a fancy "new" atmosphere won't change that.
It's the regular people that do interesting things. a lot of questionable things for sure, but that's where life comes from.
And from all that brimming chaos and struggle comes interesting insight and advanced activity.
It develops bottum up, from the chaos of free thoughts interacting fearlessly.
If you want to turn this place into a Sanatorium, a sort of perfect care taking facility, that's supposed to "protect" the "children"...
well, guess what, not even children care about that anymore. They are busy having fun shit posting everywhere else.
That's what you really are competing with. It's not just your definition of Pixel Art that hurts you, it's your entire definition of "fun" and "life".
When you read back ancient threads on the PixelJoint forum, the atmosphere couldn't be more different than today. That's what killed it.
So does this mean we should all turn into trash talking shitheads? Maybe not.
But that you actually take so much issue with how things are _now_, that you need to "restructure" it into something even more clean,
honestly tells me you are a balls sucking twerk shit fuckhead idiot moron! with an attitude problem!
That and that any measure of meritocracy for advanced activity is replaced by political screenings.