My 2c.
Like that, PRSI is gone. I have to admit that for a while I was addicted to that forum. I like to think I made many virtual friends, and I like to think that most of us respected each other even if we vehemently disagreed. However, a few months ago I decided to pull myself out of PRSI completely and to pull myself from news media consumption. In general, my life vastly improved.
The truth is simple: I do not fit in current politics. For me, discussing about politics is looking at stats, history, policies, with little interest on who's doing what. I like conversations, I despise name calling, and I certainly don't like meme-politics so let alone twitter politics.
@avz mentioned Kissinger in one post in this thread; as my friends here know, I had Kissinger as my avatar for quite a few years. This is to say that I often think about what the former Secretary of State wrote in 2013 - that is, way before DJT was a candidate or the whole discussion about Twitter/Facebook alleged censorship - in his book World Order. There's a beautiful chapter which describes what we're living now, that is a political world that is in constant reaction to the feelings of social media and that allows for little or no introspection. In Dr. Kissinger's view, that would bring serious social issues that would trickle down to the entire political conversation making sensible, long-term public policy-making virtually impossible. For those interested, there's a beautiful interview that Dr. Kissinger did with Google's CEO Eric Schmidt on YouTube that touches on this subject among others (Schmidt mentions that the chapter should be mandatory reading, and I do agree).
This is just to say that online political conversations vastly deviated from how people talk about issues in real life, and that the growth of echo chambers on all sides (this include flat earthers...) is separating people more and more. In the past few months I had the opportunity to re-think how I see the world of politics, and in this I also had the opportunity to think about PRSI. I even proposed some hardcore rules for the forum which included lengthy posts, no memes, and such. The truth is that PRSI cannot be saved, and it's not PRSI's faults or the mods fault. Politics has become so divisive - and personal - that almost all argumentation is fruitless and ends up being meaningless regardless of how well intentioned some people in the conversations are. Politics should be as impersonal as humanely possible, public policy should not based on party-lines. All of this is exacerbated by mainstream news which is basically back to its yellow journalism days and looks for constant controversy (seriously we see Breaking News such as "Alyssa Milano slams Trump on Twitter" or "Jon Voight accuses Biden at CPAC"; I mean, really? That's news? And how about not using idiotic words like "slams", "destroys", etc?).
I think that PRSI had some raison d'etre before 2015, when social media was strong but people were still not used to talk too much politics on it (twitter is an exception) and anonymous forums were rare. In 2021 we have Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Whatsapp on top of 4chan and most importantly Reddit. If we want to talk politics we can find a subforum on Reddit in five seconds and be completely anonymous.
Macrumors is a tech forum and we should not lose sight of it. A complete separation between tech and politics will be impossible, but I understand why the owners want to limit political discussions as much as possible. I think that no PRSI is a good idea.
So, the lights are off. Now that the curtain has fallen, I'd like to thank all the PRSI friends and foes. It has been a pleasure to talk to you.