It sure would be nice to have a place where you could discuss ideas without it being an argument, or to offer helpful suggestions to people without them treating it like you insulted their intelligence.
100%
Arguments result in walking away, the relationship ends before hardly any information is exchanged. If either side wants an argument, it can be difficult to avoid. If both sides are seeking understanding, it becomes very easy to exchange a lot of information and for all to learn a great deal, even as they still disagree.
I would very much like to find (or create) forum(s) for discussions seeking understanding instead of arguments seeking to “win” wars or battles.
My own attempts have shown the potential audience is small to non existent, at least with the combinations of words I’ve tried.
The users on chatgpt.com are quite good at staying cordial and come off as if they want to seek a genuine understanding. Granted, its UI is a little different from the traditional forum, only occasionally seeing additional users reply but being mostly geared to one-on-one interaction. That said, most discussions on more traditional forums like this one end up branching off into one-on-one discussions anyway, so I am not sure that is a terribly meaningful difference at the end of the day.
> My own attempts have shown the potential audience is small to non existent
Said discussion community has quite possibly become the most popular place for online discussion, so I am not sure about that. Understandably bootstrapping such a service is hard, though. "If you build it, they will come" only happens in the movies.
"Be careful of what you wish for", though. While what you describe sounds nice in theory, it ends up feeling rather sterile when you don't have all the quirkiness of the so-called battles. That's what brings me back here, and deep down that is probably why you are here too.
I frequent here (and chatgpt.com) because it is the closest I have found to what I am looking for.
I have paid enough people to visit my attempts that I think I have a decent sense of how a large number of people will react to what I have tried.
My intuition is that my language to describe what I am looking for is insufficient to convey the idea to others (including the venerable responder at chatgpt.com).
But that means that the content will be tuned to what the author thinks will most likely produce a reaction. Some audiences respond well to insults, others not so much.