Biologist wants to increase doe harvest in region 3 units

[Forkyfinder]

Depends on which VPN is being used. Some are not as "confidential" as others. I laugh when I hear/see VPN commercials and know a lot of people spending money on it.

As to the highlighted part, I guess you can draw from that what you want. Who "makes the most noise," which I assume you equate to making the most posts, fluctuates daily, weekly, monthly. Most often when I get complaints about posts, on all sides, it's when something doesn't provide confirmation bias. I never get moderation reports when someone agrees.

A few points for all, not just you, that your comment got me thinking about. It's related to using VPNs, which is about anonymity, which allows for certain human behaviors that guide why/how we interact the way we do.

The point of this forum is not to be an echo chamber. It is to provide a place for people to think, to absorb information, and as a place for folks to come together and advocate for public land hunting. To force all of us to go outside our comfort zones of ideas and perspectives. I hope everyone who participates or lurks ends up having their mind pushed to new places it otherwise would not been, if not for what they learned on this forum.

I've spent most of the last year studying group think, why we rationalize our biases even in the face of obvious facts to the contrary, the need for confirmation among humans, tribalism, and a host of other ideas around human behavior. It has helped me immensely, in every platform we have and in all of my advocacy work.

I've come to understand that tribalism is part of our genetic code. Simplistically, the people who survived over early periods of our evolution were those who formed groups/clans/tribes. It was a better way to advance, rather than be a soloist who got killed by the tribes who wanted the fire making tools the soloist had. Eventually, those inclined to form tribes or communities prospered and that is part of our innate genetically coded behavior today. One of the features of tribalism is group think, which includes a lot of need for confirmation bias and virtue signaling to reaffirm our relationship with the tribe. We're all guilty of it. And social media has tapped into that tribalism in ways we can all see.

Knowing that tribalism in part of our default need for comfort, my challenge here is to provide a platform that forces us to think as individuals. I've identified changes to this platform that are known to reduce tribalism and echo chambers.

1) Get rid of virtue signaling options. We will be getting rid of the "like/dislike" buttons. I tried these buttons when we converted to this new platform. I have assessed it to be a net negative in terms of getting people articulate their own thoughts. It's mentally lazy and just adds to tribalism. It's easy to hit the like button and virtue signal with "Yeah, what he said!"

Expect that to be gone soon.

2) Get rid of User Names and require using your real name. This one is harder. We've done an export of how many users are employing VPNs for supposed privacy. It's a crazy percentage. Given that percentage, it seems very unlikely people would comply with the requirement to have their real name available.

So, for right now, I'm not going to require such, rather encourage such. I reserve the right to change my mind on that one.

Why would I want that? Because all of the data/studies point to the differences in how people interact when anonymous versus how they interact with the same people, on the same topic, if they know it is another person. If I want people to exchange ideas, sometimes make themselves uncomfortable by considering viewpoints outside their bias, that happens more when it is real people talking to real people, not a bunch of user names and avatars being unaccountable for what they've said.

I get that social media allows those anonymous profiles. IG allows people to make their profiles private. As much as Hunt Talk is a social media platform, I'm not here to grow it to the biggest platform possible. I keep it here for the purposes it is designed for - make more/better advocates for the resources essential to hunting. Since my purpose is different than other social media platforms, I need to think about different rules, guidelines, and ways to create that outcome on Hunt Talk that are different than other popular social media.

This is a long dissertation that probably deserves its own thread. All of the items above are incorporated in the moderation we employ. As are some other things I've learned about communities, communication, our human tendencies and needs for comfort and belonging. If you would have told me that studies of human behavior would be this appealing, I would have laughed. Yet, Hunt Talk is a very good testing sample for me to compare those studies to what occurs here.

Good changes, thanks @Big Fin

The humor threads will be less fun - but i hope the changes solicit new ideas and input from lurkers or new users.