To Be or Not to Be

Do we want this Uptrusting thing to succeed or to fail?

Maybe two or three years ago I got sick of the pervasive toxicity of social media.  As a specific example, I was a member of over a hundred Facebook groups about assorted topics.  In one for a racing game that recently came out, a user asked which car is fastest, but there isn't one answer to that.  It depends on if you mean fastest top speed or fastest in a race, for example, and anyone that really understands racing knows they're not the same thing.  What's fastest around paved roads isn't fastest offroad.  So I tried to dive deeper into his question, to which in return I had my intelligence criticized.  When I then tried explaining my reasoning, the ad hominem attacks needlessly continued.

I took a year off from social media and created a message board intended for civilized conversation.  Disagreement was cool, but being a jerk was not.  Unfortunately, social media nearly killed off message boards a long time ago.  Few remain.  Mine was stillborn.

A problem today, as always, has been getting your board started.  Activity draws new users and further activity.  The catch 22 is a new board, or whatever, doesn't have that yet.  How do you get there?

So this long-winded explanation brings me to my proposal.  We need to decide whether we want this Uptrusting.com to succeed or to fail.  I would imagine most of us that came here checking it out would want it to take off.  If that's the case, I feel we havecan important part to play in that.  We need to come together and engage, posting and contributing, so that there's activity to appeal to potential new members.  If they check in and see a ghost town, they're probably not coming back.

So, what do we want here?