I'm skeptical of "post quality" as a metric, because individual posts are rarely important. This is what separates the imageboard format from social media or reddit, on those sites you have an "OP" which is the primary content, and then a comment section which is secondary. On imageboards, the op only sets the stage for discussion, and it's the discussion which is the primary content. It's "discussion quality" which determines the quality of an imageboard, interactions between posts rather than the content of each individual post.
Imageboards are inherently social spaces wherein a community gathers, so the best way to improve the quality of an imageboard is to improve the quality of it's community. People don't want to shit where they eat, if everyone feels like they're having compelling discussions together, they'll continue to engage in high quality posting. This can't be done by just telling people to try harder to be a community, it's enabled by fostering that community. The sushistream is a good example of this, people coming together to participate in an event as a community rather than all of us asynchronously typing into a text box thinking about our own post quality disconnected from each other. No one who just spent time watching something together and chatting with fellow rolls is going to come back to the site afterwards and turn around and demean or rudepost at those same people they just hung out with. Or at least it makes it less likely. Watch-alongs, a minecraft server, a MUD, a zine, these kinds of community projects help strengthen people's connections with each-other and by extension with the site, which is why so many small boards end up doing this kind of stuff.
The danger is that these external events push people off the board, when they become a viable alternative to on-site posting. This is why the main discussion needs to always stay on the site. If people feel a stronger sense of community in a discord or IRC, they have no reason to post on the site any more. This is why I'm personally skeptical that having a discord server is a good idea, I think it's possible that forcing people to do their socializing on the site itself, even if that means a more lenient stance towards name and trip-friends, might be a good thing. Community projects should be limited in scope and have a clear purpose and end-goal, they should not serve as a replacement for the site itself. I'm not on discord so I have no idea if sushi's discord in part
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