Friend wrote: it's nigh-impossible to make them change.
No it's not. You lynch them. You call them out. You make their life HELL while they don't change, and they either change or leave. We did this for YEARS on this site, with relatively few VIs. Then we got some critical mass of VIs at some point that
banded together
, and now they defend each other with meta, and it's like a VI Masonry that you can't effectively kill. That. Needs. To. Stop.
meta does not change the odds. Sometimes the VI is scum, and needs to be lynched. Sometimes the VI is town, and scum will never NK them. So you're left with a bunch of VIs and scum at endgame... what do you THINK is going to happen?
So I've started just trying to figure out how to read them, and if I decide they're town, they're just another bandwagon vote. If they're scum, they get lynched.
Admirable, but it requires special effort on the part of you, not the VI. That's not an adaptive strategy.