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"Politics" and "Skeptics" has become a cesspool (to use a euphemism for clusterf**k) of one-sided politics advocacy. They both advertise themselves as educational. But, in truth, they seek to indoctrinate. I am not asking this question to prove what I said above.

I freely admit that this is my view and the community view may differ. But if I am right, the effect of what they are doing is poisoning goodwill in the truly educational communities.

And as all self-selecting groups these like-minded politically-aligned communities serve to increase the level of hostility and mutual dislike in the politically-neutral discussions: the technology, math and most scientific discussions.

Is there a way to start a process to delete the whole forum in order to preserve the goodwill at stackexchange at large?

I don't think simply leaving it to the moderators is enough. They are not trained enough to distinguish between group-think-motivated efforts masking as "procedure" from actual procedural violations. In other words, they can't keep it civil. And in the absence of civility, the most visited sites will fall apart due to hostility and mistrust.

  • If we only get to close one site by vote, let's not waste that opportunity on any site but Life Hacks, please. PS -1, in spirit, but I don't have downvote privileges yet. The correct solution to this is establishing policies as a community and then voting/flagging accordingly and explaining to users why that kind of content is not welcome, not simply deleting a site, although I realize that effective social oppression instead of accountability and teaching is the easy go-to strategy these days. – Jason C Apr 8 '17 at 0:51
  • You misinterpreted. My criticism is more meta than that. It is not about freedoms to express political opinions. It's about the general tactic of shutting down conversation rather than having it, and, in this case, by "conversation" I'm not talking about folks' political views, I'm referring to Politics site policies. See, the question you should be asking is: As a community, how do we feel about politically charged content here and what can we do about it? Even better, you could be proposing ways to deal with it. (cont'd) ... – Jason C Apr 8 '17 at 1:18
  • ... Instead, you're just asking if there's a way to shut the community down. Changing it is hard. Closing it is easy and avoids responsibility towards this site. Your question implicitly indicates an unfortunately common preference of essentially telling people to "shut up and go somewhere else" instead of taking accountability for the quality of this site and working to change it. That is not a good approach, IMO, and also it very much parallels common strategies in recent real life conversations as well (which is why I'm passionate about it, this site should be setting an example). – Jason C Apr 8 '17 at 1:24
  • I never claimed you didn't try them, nor did I claim you never tried a more reasonable approach. I claimed that this is not the right answer. Period. It's independent of what you've attempted to do in the past, and so I do not (and can not, obviously) make any assumptions or claims about your previous actions. They're irrelevant, this is still a bad approach. Try harder if you have to, give up if you can't, but don't shut it down. The site may fail, but it should fail organically. And shutting it down prevents others who may not be burnt out yet from making attempts. Not a good solution. – Jason C Apr 8 '17 at 1:27
  • (That said, for what it's worth, it does not actually appear that you've tried a more reasonable discussion approach -- starting or participating in discussions on meta can be extremely valuable tools to making changes). – Jason C Apr 8 '17 at 1:32
  • If a lot of your past meta discussions have been deleted by mods you can 1) petition to have them undeleted if you can make a good case, or 2) take it as a sign to try to improve your approach. There is plenty of good conversation on this meta that hasn't been deleted; you may be able to gain some insight by reflecting on the differences between those that remain and your deleted content. If you believe your discussion content was wrongly deleted, you are well within your rights to make a meta post making a case why that was so. – Jason C Apr 8 '17 at 1:35
  • E.g. work to draw attention to posts like politics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/136/…, which are well stated and indicate that at least some folks have the same ultimate goals as you. Consider new ideas, or even MSE suggestions (For example, what if SE gave sites the ability to add custom flag reasons to answers [I don't know if sites can do this]? What would you do with that feature and how could you use it? Maybe that isn't a great idea, who knows, but the point is: Start/keep thinking about things that can help.) – Jason C Apr 8 '17 at 1:40
  • It sounds like you're concerned about moderator behavior here, and that concern is manifesting itself indirectly in other ways. Do you think that starting a meta post explicitly stating your concerns and asking if the community shares them / if your concerns are well-founded could be a productive, more direct approach? If so, consider starting a discussion specifically about that. I think it would make a good meta topic. I mean, the points you're bringing up here, they're just now coming out in comments, and only by chance; but they could be a good basis for an explicit discussion. – Jason C Apr 8 '17 at 2:19
  • (Tip: For a better chance at a good reception, if you do make such a post, frame it in genuine concern for the longevity and success of this site, rather than in general displeasure; that is, take a half-full over a half-empty glass approach.) Anyways I don't have much more to say here. I think this site will either work out, or it won't, but whatever happens it will happen naturally. I hope it works out. There's a ton of great content here, and it's a heck of an improvement over, say, Facebook, or YouTube comments. Wouldn't want to see this outlet go away, even with its imperfections. – Jason C Apr 8 '17 at 2:23
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    Area51.StackExchange.com tends to deal with issues that have to do with staging and approval of individual Stack Exchanges. You might be able to find a better answer there. – Sam I am says Reinstate Monica Apr 8 '17 at 23:43
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    I am very surpized that SE has let us go on this long. Economics was not half this divisive but they didnt like the conflict of that site and shut it down. This site is dispicable and the worst part is it feels like the Mods have no desire to clean it up. – SoylentGray Apr 11 '17 at 22:03
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I can't recall SE needed removing sites due to flame wars or massive users' misbehavior.

Some Beta sites were removed due to inactivity, however. This process is up to the site owners, not even the Moderators of a particular site.

However yes, indeed, there are many posts that express biased opinions and bareword claims. What we do is we attempt to deal with posts, not with the users or with entire SE sub-sites.

Yes, we have many users who have political affiliations — say, pro-Hillary or pro-Trump; pro-Russia or pro-Western, and till today we managed to find some consensus which is based on facts and reasons, not emotions.

Also, those who actually do participate the StackExchange would strongly disagree that StackExchange is "forums".

So, I would suggest:

  1. If you see a post that violates the community standards — flag it. Don't worry if the Moderator (obviously) has some political affiliation; we deliberately chose people who have proven to be fair judges;
  2. Participate more. This will help you to "feel" the community standards.
  3. When you have time, go browse Meta.StackExchange. There are lots of great stuff there — not only about how the StackExchange community standards are nowadays, but also how they developed with time (mind the posts dated 2009-2010 or so).
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    Are you sure that @grovkin, Member for 13 days is sufficient time to come to that bold statement? – bytebuster Apr 7 '17 at 23:38
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    @grovkin, Your question is valid, and I've answered it in my answer. I expressed my doubt that anyone can come to belief that Mods are unfair while visiting the site for 13 days or less. – bytebuster Apr 8 '17 at 0:04
  • Relationships.SE was removed for... well, i can't even articulate the reasons but i never had any illusions that the site had a high chance of succeeding (though I was among those who put in a lot of effort to try to make it succeed). – user4012 Apr 9 '17 at 19:22
  • @bytebuster - not sure if OP meant that, but the way I read it is not "moderators are deliberately doing this" but "moderators can't do anything else". Skeptics mods as much as clearly admitted this to me before - they get tons of left wing flags compare to right wing flags, and they - as they should - act on flags. The underlying problem (aside from structural issue of the site topic being hard to be objectively true/false) is with community demographics - and HNQ floods that bring in hoards of left wingish minded visitors from SO don't exactly help. – user4012 Apr 9 '17 at 19:25
  • @bytebuster - ... there's also the issue of moderators' explicit biases, but at least on Skeptics, where I tried to pay detailed attention, I noticed at least a couple of moderators make a very deliberate and hard effort to be objective - I saw them fail occasionally, but they nearly always try extra hard. (not saying anything about this site, mostly because frankly I haven't bothered observing moderator actions here closely enough to have an opinion. I tend to trust Yannis from experience outside this site, in genral, though, until proven otherwise). – user4012 Apr 9 '17 at 19:29
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No. And certainly not based on unsubstantiated rants from users who joined the site fourteen days ago.

In addition, this site if not a "forum", so it seems you've misunderstood a bit how the site works. Please browse the help centre and some old meta questions to familiarise yourself with the site.

P.S. Protip: try avoid insulting people in the first sentence if you want to make a point. Especially since you're making statements such as:

they [the mods] can't keep it civil. And in the absence of civility, the most visited sites will fall apart due to hostility and mistrust.

Frankly, I find this a flabbergasting statement, since every post/comment I've seen you make has been incendiary and full of baseless accusations.

  • So you can be rude, while at the same time calling out the other people for being rude. Convenient reasoning. – user11249 Apr 8 '17 at 18:10
  • What I mean is that a post from a very new user which is filled with insults and doesn't even get basic terminology about the site right, isn't likely to be taken very seriously by the people who run this site (the Stack Exchange corporation). – user11249 Apr 8 '17 at 18:14
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    That's not at all what the language of your post suggests. This is a typical "just asking questions" – user11249 Apr 8 '17 at 18:19
  • TL;DR: "I'm going to make ad-hominem attack because I can't rebut the points being made". Flagging as NAA. – user4012 Apr 9 '17 at 19:21
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    What points @user4012? Because all I see are insults and incoherent rantings thinly disguised as a supposed "question". I don't see any coherent point being made; certainly not any that are backed up by any evidence or reasoning. – user11249 Apr 9 '17 at 19:46

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