Dagu Dagu Dagu
I got married at age nineteen to another nineteen year old. You could reasonably characterize him as my high school sweetheart.
We met at age sixteen and married just over three years later. I had been molested until shortly before I turned fourteen, more HORRIFICALLY traumatized at age fourteen when my rapist had more say in who I dated than I did and I had not yet started therapy when I met him.
Some years after I married him, I dreamed that our love was rooted in this gaping wound in the landscape of my life and poisoned by it and that's why we couldn't sort our problems.
A man I know nothing about named Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Reddit sub forums that had nothing to do with him are being derailed by that occurrence for being associated with the PLACE this ugly incident occurred.
Some of them are at risk of finally having regular conversation break out and thereby watching their forum die on the vine, poisoned by having the conversation perpetually rooted in this incident.
Therapy was valuable, but I quit in large part for the above reason: I was at a point where spending an hour or more every week digging around in the dirt of my past was just keeping alive an identity as a victim. It was keeping me stuck. It was keeping me miserable.
I said the following today:
You might try to focus the mega thread on things like campus security and grief support groups to try to direct attention towards constructive forward progress. And talk about "Why this campus? What's wrong with our security that they thought doing this here made sense and what can we do to improve security?"People get angry and can't let it go when they feel threatened. Improving their ability to stay safe in practical terms is the best way to help people move on and stop screaming and crying publicly and being unwilling to let go of the negative emotions.Let people express their negative feelings etc. Don't let wallowing in negativity become what your sub is about.
A lot of people will want to talk about it and need to talk about it. Denying them any opportunity to talk will tend to be problematic. Trying to make the discussion constructive will be challenging.
In order to put this in the past, they will also need to actively give people something else to talk about and it won't be easy.
Other people seem to think "ice breakers" are completely vacuous, pointless, empty, meaningless fluffy questions that magically lubricate the conversation and get people talking.
Having spent time as the highest ranked woman on an overwhelmingly male forum, I think of breaking the ice as being more like those giant badass ships of the same name.
Breaking the ice will require you to be strong and calm and say something meaty and meaningful, not fluffy pointless nonsense. You need to seek out something to post that will be worth paying attention to, something constructive and not just bitching and moaning some more, something disinclined to let people wallow in the negativity and refuse to move on.
Sock darning
My mother darned socks by hand. It's a fascinating process to watch a talented individual with nothing but a needle and thread cast the initial threads across the edges of a giant hole and steadily fill it in until the hole is gone.
It's intimidating at first but as you keep at it, the new threads begin to interweave and the hole shrinks. Eventually, it disappears entirely.
Primacy and Recency
Primacy is the first thing you see. This incident is a problem in part because you click into the sub and everything at the top is about this ugly incident.
They need to find ways to downplay that without making people feel like they aren't giving this important matter the attention and respect it deserves.
Recency is the last big memorable thing sticking in our minds.
Connie Francis was brutally raped in 1974. She has been a huge star in the 50s and 60s but didn't really work for about fifteen years after the assault. For a long time, she was remembered by people as "that famous person that got raped" because it's the LAST thing anyone ever heard about her.
This is why it's critical people be given other things to focus on. Otherwise it becomes "that forum that used to exist until that ugly incident happened."
I saw something once, perhaps on Sixty Minutes, about cell phones arriving in Africa. Someone whose English wasn't great talked about how phones arrived and people would call their cousin in the next village over or whatever and share news.
The local word for that was dagu and it was a practice that preceded cell phones. But phones made it easier and he said something like "Dagu Dagu Dagu all day long."
I think it's a word for what we would call the grapevine. It's an informal means to share constructive information, like an informal news network not immune to gossip but gossip isn't really the point.
My mother never took to cell phones, but she had a 25 foot long phone cord so she could talk nonstop while cooking and puttering around the house. Like people in Africa, my mother's talking was very constructive and purposeful, something not everyone does.
The art of conversation is dying and the things people say to each on Reddit frequently aren't what I think of as real conversation.
I'm not good at keeping up with the memes and popular information and in jokes. I'm not good at keeping my comments within the Overton Window. I will probably never be popular.
But Dagu Dagu Dagu all day long should be the goal. Not fluffy nonsense screaming "We're scared to have a meaningful conversation about anything!" and not wallowing in the negativity outside events mired you in while giving yourself a negative identity.