Ricochet send me a discount member offer to rejoin them last night. Since the email had a “noreply” return address, I thought I’d publicly respond here. Since they clearly do not want any response other than “sure, I’ll rejoin”. (Those still on R> are welcome to link this post.)
Note for newcomers to Scanalyst: The founder and many early members of Scanalyst met through the early days of Ricochet, and were later made to feel unwelcome there.
Quotes from their email’s sale pitch with my thoughts interleaved, fisking-style:
Hey, Phil. We miss you at Ricochet. We hope you’ll come back and rejoin the conversation. Here’s a discount code for 60% off the first year of an annual Coolidge membership:
Meh. Price was never an issue.
As a member, you can write posts (including on the Main Feed), read and make comments, participate in groups, and listen to all of Ricochet’s podcasts.
The parenthesized part is effectively a fiction for the material I’d most want to post. Because Ricochet curates its main feed quite rigorously to not offend anyone, particularly the now-discredited parts of the Republican party. (I’m looking at you, Bulwark, and you, National Review.)
Most of Ricochet’s podcasts are entirely free–no membership required. I listen to a few that they produce, but not any that are Ricochet personalities.
You’ll also be invited to special members-only events. And, of course, there are the meetups across the country.
Meetups were the only part of Ricochet that I enjoyed. Unfortunately, they were few and far between, except where I organized them myself. Ricochet rarely led the way. Ricochet is simply too small to serve as a way to meet like-minded conservatives. It cannot compete with TPUSA and other healthy conservative organizations.
In the last few weeks alone, Ricochet has hosted fascinating discussions about the Calendar Riots of 1752, about the economics of government grocery stores, about whether AI is “stupid or evil,” about the historical differences between television and film, about the recent floods in Texas, and more. And that’s before we get to the freewheeling madness that is “the PIT.” Is there any social-media site America that offers such a diverse set of conversations?
Yes, on X. Actually, I would say X is far more diverse, as the topics are not curated by staff with center-left inclinations. IMNSHO.
Best of all, unlike X, Facebook, and other social-media sites, Ricochet is fully moderated.
I would say toxically moderated. I suspect Ricochet’s current policy of only showing the beginning of main feed topic comment threads was implemented (it wasn’t limited when I left in 2023) to hide the results of the uneven moderation.
Think of Ricochet as an online bar: Come in, have a drink, hang out, say whatever you want to. We don’t do viewpoint discrimination here: We really don’t care if you like or hate that politician everyone’s talking about, if your views are traditionally “conservative,” or if you’re in the majority or minority on the hot-button issue of the day.
Oh, please. That simply wasn’t my experience at all.
But if you badger, bully, or berate the other drinkers, you’ll be kicked out.
The path to that consequence appeared to me to be very uneven, with favorites (right-thinkers) getting away much more than the black sheep (wrong-thinkers). As long as the same staff is in place, I don’t believe it would have changed.
Ricochet is a civil place, for civil people. That’s our main rule—and we’re sticking to it.
There’s a strong stench in that claim. If you replace “civil” with “right-thinking” (not to be confused with “right-wing-thinking”), it would be most accurate.
In the footer of the pitch email, there’s an offer to unsubscribe, with a plea not to, as there will only be two more appeals.
I’m curious what those future pitches will say. I’m not that optimistic that Ricochet will become a favored place in the future, but I’ll report on it when the next pitch shows up.