The mini forum sounds like a good idea to me. In some of the debates it seems like people are just looking for an excuse to chat, rather than actually having a debate. A regular forum could be a good release valve for that.

Look at sites like idebate.org.

It is a lot more complicated to use than CD. This is where CD finds it's niche. It's easily accessible, easy to use, and easy to keep track of. The actual debates are easier to understand too, than the forum-like debates found there...

Then look at the topics.

Nothing is out of place. They are all, pretty much, good debates.

I believe that it's just about who is there, and the system they have set up isn't bad... but it gets in the way. Also, just because there are questions coming up that suck doesn't mean that the site is no good. It means that it's BETA and there are many ways to fix that problem... the voting of debates it one way that we could get all of this shit off out of the way.

If there were a voting system set up for the debate topics, all of these people posting shit debates would realize that they have to compete with good debate topics, and I'm sure this would lead to a higher quality front page, and more people in on more important topics, AND would help draw new people in while the look/feel and functionality and organization of the site would keep them here.

I'm sure most of us here that actually give a shit about the site and debating, would choose CD over the other's if the site were more streamlined, feature-full and... most importantly, if the users were more critical (in this case, if the users were allowed to be more critical).

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Honestly, I don't mind some of the "shitty" debates, and I know

a lot of people who get somewhat involved with them, I don't think that the "shitty" debates are the problem, but the promotion of these debates or the way that they get focused on the site needs to be changed. Just implement a voting system and see how it turns out.

That's not a good way to look at the situation, especially if you're running a site like this.

Create Debate is trying to come out of Beta, and I think at least that CD has a pretty solid demographic.

You provide a function for people to use, and it works well but then you find people, and a lot of them that seem pretty independent, all using one function to do many things. Debates are being used as personal advice. This is a function that came from the demographic.

Now look at what the demographic doesn't need. Do people talk about great finds on ebay? Do people start debates on the maintenance of Wikipedia? Do people want private messages via CD? No, you don't see evidence of any of this because everyone knows where to find ebay, wikipedia, and myspace or their email accounts.

The point is that you can easily find evidence of many people using a single function to do many things that can be sorted into it's own function. This would be a good thing for the primary function of the site, to weed out these other popular functions and separate them. You don't want to drive away your users because there is a site that does something better. If it was really better, they'd use it already.

It's not like this forum idea is completely absurd and will eventually kill create debate, so why not? The demographic that is here to debate needs a new function, if it's not going to kill the site, purify the two functions and both functions will prosper in their own ways.

I just got an idea that would work with the forums. After looking through some of the "Debates" I realized that there are a lot there that aren't really "Debates", but more like advice.

If we had a forum then we could have advice threads that might eliminate these from showing up as debates.

;^)

You know there are a lot of philosophy IRC rooms that shoot topics out at the people in them and they'll debate until it turns into a troll party where everyone's just attacking everyone else.

Perhaps someone could set up an IRC room for CD? I would but I don't have anything that could act as a server... anyone else?

I think this is what the townhall's based on, and idk if that's still around, but I never see people there, or I never did... maybe just make that more accessable. I think that was a java based IRC thing on the page, so you wouldn't even have to have your browser open if that's the case. Just grab a varient of X-Chat and enter the channel.

The only issue with that is having a real-time joe cavalry...

A lot of this would be solved by allowing people to vote on debates. The issue of quality debates would be taken care of if it was used right. This works fine on digg, and I think it would be essentially the same operation. Even if it's not an "intellegent" debate subject, if people like it they'll vote it and it'll be on the front page. People could still go argue in debates that aren't that important or likable to others and it won't make it to the front page. This makes me think that it won't actually detract from the usefulness of CD's frontpage, only bring things up that are argeeable. So in short there's no real downside, only an up. I might be missing something, so correct me if I'm wrong.

I still would like to see a philosophy category, but that's just me. Even 99chan had a philosophy category and all of the *chans are imageboards. I think there's more to debate about in philosophy than there is to post pictures on, and 99chan's philosophy board was always pretty active.

(99chan is sort of down right now or I'd link)