>>39426you can derive my whole idea from two theories: first, that alt-boards poperly managed could grow the site as a whole by drawing in people who're left-wing but don't have politics as a primary hobby, and secondly by drawing in people of varied politics who don't have a board, or who's board/site is dying.
second, that the problem with alt boards is that nobody is personally responsible for their success or failure, so they're just a kind-of-irrelevant adjunct to /leftypol/. why would a mod try to promote /games/ to someone vaguely lefty who wants a less shit /v/ when they could promote /leftypol/? how much time does a full-time sitewide mod have to promote /leftypol/ anyway? and, if they do it in an embarrassing way, how do you distance the site as a whole from one person's mistaken actions? all resolvable questions if the board is semi-independent: i would promote my board because it is mine and because if the board fails to thrive it will be taken away, how i do so is left to me (perhaps i outsource modding to my mods and promote myself, perhaps i outsource promoting and mostly mod myself…), and if i fuck up the site admins can point entirely at me, or in the worst cases, topple me.
no money should be involved - letting people buy their own dead boards would just clog up the site. which boards were allowed should still be a matter of rational consideration: does this board idea make sense? does this person seem like they're half-sane and, more importantly, do they have a plan to make it work?
if we try the idea and it fails, well, at least we'd learn something, maybe something applicable to another stab at novel variations on imageboard governance. at the moment all we're learning is that a site with a low influx of new users gets slower and more boring over time, and that merely creating your own /g/, /v/, /a/, /mu/, /i/ and /k/ with blackjack and hookers doesn't do much to excite anyone.