I am fully burned out with this site and its community. However, I want to be sure I'm not quitting it in a hurry where later I get the 'itch' I used to get.
I think I'm becoming more 'normal' actually. I am finding that on-and-off forum style debate is more my jam now. I also think what I've always thought, that having a system where the judges are themselves regular debaters leads to corruption. The corruption actually is that those that either debate less or are willing to lose more get to black-ball the more win-rate focused debaters to cower around many topics and feel a strong need to appease this group. Simultaneously, there ends up a significant negative motive to vote as a frequent debater because you can lie all you want but grudges and voting absolutely goes on. One of the most shameless grudge voters I've ever seen in all my history of this changing community is Sir Lancelot. The guy blatantly grudge votes to the point it's transparent revenge and nonsense reasoning used. He in fact dedicates to reward those that vote for him and punish those that vote against him and only cowers around those either in positions of power (mods, he even did it to me the second I gained power of any kind) or who vote regularly and don't debate much or care about losing debates (since he has less of an effective way to punish them for it).
This is however better understood by me to be something that cannot be fixed inside this 1v1 small-community model. It is an inevitable corruption, an inherent feature of it. You cannot fix it, you cannot tame it, you cannot change it.
If you can, then call me a pessimist about it getting fixed.
After you see what I have seen over the years in this type of community, you get an aversion to competitive debate. You feel less passion for it, it becomes a chore you have to do and post by the time the timer hits 0.
This is probably the hugest reason why barely any females engage with this community anymore especially the competitive side of it. Women tend to be more aware of what they feel than men do, so they quickly realise that this leaves them less happy and doesn't even pay off with anything worth showing off to other via achievements etc.
There is a serious problem also with the fact that actual neonazism is growing in this community, with the only thing holding it back the aversion people have to do that. Based on the site rules as they are and who runs it, the Neonazis if they wanted could fully push out their hate speech that gets this blacklisted and investigated by European nation authorities among others internationally from US.
