Which is why the crux of my whole beef with the whole thing is not that they don’t “get it” but that they don’t seem to care about the userbase itself. That’s perfectly fine if they don’t “get it” and don’t care about forums. They care about spreading the ideas and getting more people to our philosophy, right? That’s essentially what the slogan at the top of every page on the site says. I would have to assume that’s essentially Rockwell’s entire purpose in founding the thing. What else is it for if not that?
And my whole point is, if that’s the purpose, why in the world would you not only neglect the “community” part of the online presence of the Institute to a point of sub-par functionality, but to a point of almost complete ignorance of feedback from the very community they’re trying to foster? (And of course, as I mentioned in the OP, when it’s not being ignored, it’s being censored.)
That’s what really bothers me. It’s as if the powers that be are just too busy to be bothered with the actual concerns of the community. So much so that actually responding to a request or a notice about issue with the site is just too much to ask, and they’ll get around to it if they feel like it, and if they don’t, meh.
I think this is a definite side effect of the people in charge largely not being interested in the online universe themselves. Sure they recognized the need for it, and the reach it could provide, which is why the Institute had a website even before most people were dial-up with AOL. Jeff Tucker talks about it all the time in his lectures and interviews about technology. And you can see how excited he gets about this kind of thing and the possibilities and potential of it all. He likes that it’s there, but he doesn’t really participate in it himself, so in that sense gotlucky is right, he was (or at least appeared to be) the main driving force behind all this kind of “developement”, but doesn’t really fully “get it” (as evidenced here and here).
And again, that’s fine. They don’t have to “get it”. I would just think that in the interest of spreading the ideas and expanding the LvMI community (and of course the larger Austro-libertarian community) they would be interested in listening to and responding to the userbase, instead of just operating from more of a centralized top-down manner of “whatever I think is best, is best, and I don’t really care what anyone else says. They’re wrong. I’m not going to bother myself with something that doesn’t really interest me.”
Like this response from David Veksler: A thread on the forum had been hijacked by a spammer, and when a request was made to fix it so that it was again visible and open to new posts on the forum, his response was:
I see it here: [URL]
But I don’t like Paulspam nor do I approve of people wasting money on politics, so I am not going to spend too much time worrying about it.
I think that pretty much sums up the attitude.