Bringing people together, 2017–2022
Where thiscame from.
For years I tried to get the left and the right to talk to each other. I ran two big online communities on the same software, and I posted on both of them myself.
Two rooms
agnostic.com was a community for agnostics, atheists and freethinkers. slug.com was a free-speech discussion community. Different people, mostly different politics, the same code underneath. I often put the same question to both.
“I tried to get left and right to talk to each other, and I even created humanist.com to lay out the core elements of how to be good.”
Andrew Conru, 2026
agnostic.com
209,000
accounts, about 6 million questions, answers and comments since June 2017.
A community for agnostics, atheists and freethinkers.
slug.com
146,000
accounts, about 1.2 million questions, answers and comments, February 2019 to October 2024.
A free-speech discussion community.
Me
9,451
questions, answers and comments under my own name, June 2017 to November 2022, a fair share of them site housekeeping.
Counts from the two sites’ own database, checked October 2026. Accounts are registrations, not daily users.
What I believed
My belief was simple: if people could just talk openly, things would get better.
What I learned
It didn’t work, at least not the way I hoped. Most people weren’t there to listen to facts or to debate. They came with ideological commitments, and the conversation bent around them.
I call it a learning experience. It was also a failure.
That’s what I saw running the sites. It wasn’t a controlled study, and I wasn’t a neutral host.
What came out of it
The principles on humanist.com came out of those years: reduce suffering, see the person behind the label, and break the cycle, starting with yourself. I wrote them down in the 2018 essays; the eight principles are the short version.
Then, art
So I turned to art. It brings people together in a different way: you stand in front of the same painting, and nobody has to win the argument. That work continues through the Conru Art Foundation.
Timeline
- June 2017First posts on agnostic.com.
- Oct–Nov 2018Eight essays on humanist.com: how to be good without a team.
- Feb 2019slug.com opens on the same software. I post on both.
- Jan 4, 2021The same question, minutes apart, to both rooms: “What do you expect to be achieved by this week’s pro-Trump DC rally?”
- Feb 2021My last question on agnostic.com.
- Nov 2022My last question on slug.com.
- SinceArt, through the Conru Art Foundation.