I feel like one of the most fundamental problems of open-access (including online) communities is the asymmetry of policymaking discussions.

If you have made a well-considered but unintuitive policy decision, and you have already done all the work of reasoning through the implications, an influx of new people will forever keep trying to recycle discussions that you've already had and are already tired of.

But the people newly coming in have never had this discussion before, and are not familiar with the rationale! And even if they are willing to 'take the culture as it is' and learn it gradually over time, it's very difficult to know what is expected of you without having access to the background.

And so you end up with the same discussions and arguments being rehashed over and over again, eventually burning out the people doing the policymaking and causing the whole thing to fall apart.

And so far, I have not seen any credible mitigations for this problem, because "read the manual before doing anything" is an unreasonable ask and so is "you will just have to accept that those are the rules", in the general case.

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tangent, religion 

... is this literally the reason that the Bible, Quran, etc. exist?

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