Just going to expand on what you asked me to expand on, although I appreciate the insight on the rest.
This community very naturally is in an insider/outsider space...it's a niche community built off a niche subreddit built around a niche community. As we try to link the former niche with the latter niche in the absence of the subreddit itself, there's definitely plenty of things that are lost in translation. We already have a big problem of (jokingly or not) people looking at account age, asking how long they were on the subreddit, etc, etc. I think it's a dumb problem in leftist spaces generally, folks trying to "out intellectual" each other (how much THEORY have you read BRO), but that's amplified by the nature of this particular community being leftist, online, and branched off of a no longer existing community. Creating a measure for people, in good faith or not, to hold over newer members is going to exacerbate that problem. Imagine you're a new member who is pretty lib but maybe you've been a to a DSA meeting once, and someone hits you with a :PIGPOOPBALLS: , and you have no idea what they're on about, and you think they're doing some bad faith thing, and you say as much. Someone being a dick about you "not getting the meme" is already likely to dissuade a new member, but someone being a dick with a blue checkmark of "I've been here for 9 months, am a Verified Pre-Subreddit Ban User with over 10,000 posts" means that new member is just never going to come back. It's similarly aligned to why I can't go anywhere and see my "karma" or anyone else's...creating a kind of space around points, badges, tags, whatever...just leads to people farming for those things and using those things as a cudgel more often than people using them in good faith. Sure, for every bad Verified Poster or whatever there will be plenty of good ones, but as we all know 1 bad actor can easily harm an entire community if they want to, and 1 bad actor with power can do so tenfold. I also generally think that any tool that leads to sidewide cliques is bad for new members, and more power users is definitely something that can lead to more cliques. I don't think it really helps the old members either...as power posters leave (or are banned because they abused their power poster privilege, which is going to be a whole new kind of fun mod activity) , they need to be replaced, and its new members with new bits that are going to replace them.
Hopefully that all makes sense. Again I really think you all are doing this (and other stuff) in the best interest in the community, I'm just worried that this community is in a fragile state and riskier things like this could be the catalyst to really pushing it off the cliff. I think there are better options.
Just going to expand on what you asked me to expand on, although I appreciate the insight on the rest.
This community very naturally is in an insider/outsider space...it's a niche community built off a niche subreddit built around a niche community. As we try to link the former niche with the latter niche in the absence of the subreddit itself, there's definitely plenty of things that are lost in translation. We already have a big problem of (jokingly or not) people looking at account age, asking how long they were on the subreddit, etc, etc. I think it's a dumb problem in leftist spaces generally, folks trying to "out intellectual" each other (how much THEORY have you read BRO), but that's amplified by the nature of this particular community being leftist, online, and branched off of a no longer existing community. Creating a measure for people, in good faith or not, to hold over newer members is going to exacerbate that problem. Imagine you're a new member who is pretty lib but maybe you've been a to a DSA meeting once, and someone hits you with a :PIGPOOPBALLS: , and you have no idea what they're on about, and you think they're doing some bad faith thing, and you say as much. Someone being a dick about you "not getting the meme" is already likely to dissuade a new member, but someone being a dick with a blue checkmark of "I've been here for 9 months, am a Verified Pre-Subreddit Ban User with over 10,000 posts" means that new member is just never going to come back. It's similarly aligned to why I can't go anywhere and see my "karma" or anyone else's...creating a kind of space around points, badges, tags, whatever...just leads to people farming for those things and using those things as a cudgel more often than people using them in good faith. Sure, for every bad Verified Poster or whatever there will be plenty of good ones, but as we all know 1 bad actor can easily harm an entire community if they want to, and 1 bad actor with power can do so tenfold. I also generally think that any tool that leads to sidewide cliques is bad for new members, and more power users is definitely something that can lead to more cliques. I don't think it really helps the old members either...as power posters leave (or are banned because they abused their power poster privilege, which is going to be a whole new kind of fun mod activity) , they need to be replaced, and its new members with new bits that are going to replace them.
Hopefully that all makes sense. Again I really think you all are doing this (and other stuff) in the best interest in the community, I'm just worried that this community is in a fragile state and riskier things like this could be the catalyst to really pushing it off the cliff. I think there are better options.
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Sure thing! Never really expected a response, just wanted to voice my opinion. Thanks for giving me (and others!) the space to do so