Basically, I think a good way to encourage members of the site to read more political theory would be to put some kind of marker on their profile or next to their name that shows how much and what kinds of political theory they have read. I also hope this would have the secondary effect of allowing lurkers who see disagreements to get a better feel of which side has a stronger basis for their position.
Maybe something simple like marking which accounts participate in the weekly reading series, and make it a riff on challenge coins or something.
Edit: I should specify that it would be awarded to people that are participating in discussion groups and such as a way to signify who is involved in the education side of the community.
Edit 2: Fuck It, I have been convinced that this is a bad idea. Instead how about a weekly what are you reading thread?
This still doesn't address the question of who is the arbiter of what is or is not theory, or who decides when you've read or understood the theory.
A better system would probably be having a thread where people write some free-text responses to a couple of open-ended questions about theory, but that still creates more problems than it solves - who wants to spend an afternoon writing essays about their current understanding of theory that would only exist to serve as something to get dragged out and nitpicked over when some nerd is having some angry nerd moment and wants to trap you in a Well Aksually.
Credentialism is a fuck, just don't be a g*mer who needs to unlock achievements and judge people based on their comments
I put this in the edit, but what would you think about giving it to active members in theory discussions, and reading series posts? Less credentialism, more about engagement and good faith discussion.
Idk, I'd worry that might create some kind of clout-chasing, cliquiness, or hierarchy. I think it'd be better to just let the individual posts stand on their own and highlight the good ones (like in c/effort) — especially since occasionally we'll see great posters have the occasional bad take.
And if the theory you've read is relevant to the comment you're making, you're probably going to reference it, no? (Eg "... this is like what Lenin discussed in Imperialism, ...")
Maybe having a stickied "theory tracker" thread where people can opt-in to making and updating a post that just lists some of what they've read and are willing to discuss further? I still don't really see what value it would add though — virtually all the bad-faith discussion here comes from wreckers, and you could just as easily create a bad-faith post where you lie about all the theory you read in order to prop up your bad-faith comments.
I guess what I'm getting at is that I think that this is attempting to invent a problem to solve rather than solving a problem that actually exists? I don't usually find myself wondering what theory the people I'm discussing things here have actually read — it's usually pretty easy to tell who's pulling things out of their ass vs who's done some reading and synthesis.
Very possible I'm misunderstanding the point though. I think keeping a cumulative list of people who've participated in the on-Hexbear reading group discussions isn't a bad idea if the comrades that organize the reading groups don't mind the work of maintaining that list from thread to thread, if that's more along the lines of what you're suggesting?
I think this is closer to the point I was getting at. Just figured it might be useful to know who is involved in the educational side of the community, and maybe give them something special to draw people in. Probably prohibitively difficult to do, but the original post was just a random idea I thought might be interesting to discuss.