ZorbaTHut
15d ago
I don't agree with that.
And, like . . . okay I don't bring this up often, mostly because it's not often relevant. But I am one of those left-aligned people. It has been years since I voted for a Republican. My wife's the same way, both in terms of "left" and in terms of "interested in actual discussions".
I am not arguing whether there are people on the left who hate disagreement. We all know there are. But there's a lot of people on the left who are perfectly fine with it as well, and right now they just don't have a good place to live.
ZorbaTHut
15d ago
Assembling and maintaining a large team of like minded moderators to consistently enforce quality standards while trying to grow the community sounds like an enormous full time job.
I think part of the idea is that I wouldn't do this.
On one level, a lot of communities just don't need it; /r/funny doesn't need people to legislate political disputes, it needs people who say "no political infighting in the adorable kitten thread".
On another level, a lot of stuff can be crowdsourced better. This was always one of the slowdowns - the existing Janitor system was a very good attempt at better crowdsourcing, but it took a ton of work to write. Now I can throw a bot at it and get my ideas set up far faster.
I guess my answer is "yes, that is a legit concern, but it feels solvable to me in multiple ways".
ZorbaTHut
15d ago
It actually did have the functionality for that, although we ripped a lot of that out. But adding it back in would certainly be easier than making a new site!
ZorbaTHut
15d ago
You have no clue how many times I wish I could rate something "informative" on the rest of the Internet.
In a lot of ways, I really miss Slashdot. It was horrifically clunky and also way way ahead of its time. Its moderation was absolutely great, which was doubly impressive by being almost entirely crowdsourced.
ZorbaTHut
15d ago
Why not create a separate site for that purpose?
The idea is that I probably would create a separate site, but I would roll The Motte into that site as its new host.
And I'd design the site such that The Motte wouldn't be killed and might actually be improved; that's kind of the acid test, right? If The Motte can't thrive then it's not the site I want to make.
ZorbaTHut
15d ago
But expanding the community might open you up to publicity that could be easier to navigate if the Motte was e.g. a full-fledged 501(c)(3) with a board of directors and an explicit mission.
I've actually been wondering how long until people bring this up :) And . . . while it's tempting, I'm not sure this has the effect we want.
so okay this is going to be long sorry
A lot of people think the head of a company is the CEO. This is incorrect. The CEO is the current centralized leader. The head of a company is its shareholders; they are the ones who have the power to control where the company goes. There is no greater authority. They literally own the company, they control everything about it.
But practically, very few people want a company to vote on every single thing. They want someone in charge to make decisions unilaterally, and that's the CEO. (Dictatorships are very effective if you have a good dictator!)
And to make this even more complicated, very few people want to choose the CEO, nor do they want to have to watch the CEO's actions. They want someone trusted to do it for them. That ends up being the Board of Directors.
So, conceptually, the shareholders choose the board (usually with advice from the current board, but not necessarily), the board chooses and regulates the CEO, the CEO runs the company.
You can kinda model nonprofits in the same way. Nonprofits often have a CEO. Nonprofits often have a board. And nonprofits also, arguably, have shareholders.
The shareholders for a nonprofit are "the citizens of the country".
And this means things are already extra-complicated. As annoying as "choose the board" is, that's nothing compared to every citizen in the country being asked to choose the board for every single nonprofit in the country.
In practice, the government ends up being the middleman here. The citizens choose the government; the government chooses the board; the board chooses the CEO; the CEO makes the actual decisions. Which technically means that every nonprofit is being managed by the government.
You can probably see the issue I have here.
I don't want the government to have oversight over us. I don't want to be liable for each individual Presidency to decide they don't like our behavior. I also don't want to deal with a board. A non-profit's board is mandatory and must not be half-or-more members of the same family.
So as long as we're not a non-profit, it's me; I'm in charge. I'm the guy who decides what happens. Whereas if we were a non-profit, we would have to get a board of directors, and I would inevitably be a minority in it, and the government would have ultimate oversight over us, and I am just not a huge fan of that arrangement.
If people disagree, I am happy to entertain disagreement, though - tell me if you think this would work out!
ZorbaTHut
15d ago
Well, the dead-end thing isn't because of that, fwiw, but . . . also that, honestly, our relationship with them has always been a bit complicated.
(including some really excellent developers who helped us out a ton; I don't know if they still read this, but if they do, thank you again!)
ZorbaTHut
15d ago
I say this not as an insult to you but as a description of human nature: what would happen when someone dangled your price in front of you? What about 2x your price? 10x?
I think this depends a lot on what my price is at the time.
If someone came to me and offered me a hundred million bucks, yeah, I would sell this place. Maybe for ten million. Not for one million though.
If any of several things I'm working on work out, kick all those numbers up by an order of magnitude. And that includes this place. If this place is successful enough that I could sell it for ten million dollars, which is what Reddit was first sold for, I don't know if I would.
ZorbaTHut
15d ago
Probably the critical part to making a reddit offshoot is surprisingly similar to the alternative streaming platforms: Pay influencers/power users gobs of money to put content on your platform.
Worth noting that Reddit itself got its start with the developers just spamming the shit out of subreddits with content :)
ZorbaTHut
15d ago
So the conversation to expand the Motte might be
I guess it's worth noting that I'm not thinking about this in terms of "expanding the Motte". Like, yes, I would like that. But the goal is to build a larger spectrum of places that kinda work, not just "more political debate". There's some other subthread here where I mention a few possible starting points, and none of them are political, they are explicitly apolitical, and I do think that's the right approach; add some general-purpose stuff first and intentionally avoid the flamewar topics.
(those can remain here)
This has been a long tangent, but to sum it all up... To expand the Motte will inevitably lead to a righty-Motte and a lefty-Motte. A schism, so to speak, that has already happened. I do not believe that the death of lefty-Motte was a coincidence. Ring-fencing the topics of acceptable debate destroyed the entire purpose of the space. The magic (and the witches that casted them) was gone.
I guess it's also worth remembering that The Motte survived on Reddit, with probably more cross-political-side conversation than happens here. I think if we were able to return to Reddit we would probably see the same thing happen again. Yes, "the broader leftist intellectual sphere is intolerant", sure, but there are a lot of people who are left-aligned but still tolerant who would happily be part of a community with active disagreements.
From a pure monetary perspective, someone would say "there's a market there"; from a community-building perspective, I think what we can provide has a significant amount of demand. Not universal demand, absolutely not. But significant.
As soon as you create subforums out of the current Big Chum Bucket we have, this will happen. It is inevitable, and I don't think it can be solved with good moderation.
I do have some ideas for this, for what it's worth. I'm not completely convinced this is inevitable.
I agree it can't be solved with moderation, because moderation is a knife, and what this needs is a tide.
But I think it might be solvable.
ZorbaTHut
15d ago
I think it’d be cool to replace the Patreon with something that serves as a bucket for AI token cost for site improvements.
This is mostly a non-issue; Anthropic is currently getting $200/mo from me and I've never hit 100% usage (though I did admittedly hit that on Fable a few times). The bottleneck on coding isn't token count, it's my own attention.
(which is still a whole lot faster than doing it by hand was)
For a while I was a member of cumtown.org, which added sub sections. Nobody used them and that was a much more diverse forum.
Out of curiosity, was it subsections of the main section, or were they parallel sections?
I was also a member of Something Awful for quite a while, which had a ton of subforums, but there wasn't really "a main forum". I think having "a main forum" is a mistake; I'm not seeing The Motte as a parent to the others (except historically), but side-by-side with the others.
I think the ultimate problem is most people use mobile to browse these days and the web is always inferior to a native app. But Google and Apple have claimed the right to demand certain moderation and community management features to be allowed on the app stores.
I admit my feeling here is kinda "eh, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it".
But I also think we could easily block certain submottes or whatever; if you want those, come to the website directly, and if someone doesn't want to use a real web browser then maybe the places that would require them are better off :V
I honestly think that not looking at this in terms of a profit center is an advantage; we can do things that maybe hurt profit, but that's fine because I'm not trying to make money on it.
ZorbaTHut
16d ago
If this site is as bad as you say, making the switch would necessarily imply having the new platform ready first. On the other hand, you say that we have enough headroom, so maybe not?
Technically we can do it piecemeal; I'd start by moving non-HTML functionality over (like "upvotes/downvotes"). Some stuff can maybe even be done statistically; shift 1% of upvotes/downvotes to the new platform, look for problems, ramp it up.
Let me put it this way: generally your idea sounds good. The sociological specifics don't sound so important to me, and I'm trying to figure out if / how much I can help from the technical side.
I appreciate it!
I'm not totally sure there's much that can be done technically right now; I'm gonna have to sit down and hash out the fundamentals first, and that's going to be a very iterative process of trying things and seeing what I like. This is still extremely in the "mulling it over" stage, note.
ZorbaTHut
16d ago
Having control of the names might invite accusations of bias as to who you rename and who you don't; you could maybe just maintain control of a front-page directory of sorts, a dewey decimal system of forums, and de-list ones which drift too far from their stated purpose.
wouldn't be the first time
But yeah, this is kinda-sorta the idea.
You're going to get accused of being a witch-lover, and hard. Since the main communities who would make use of this at first are going to be those who cannot exist on reddit without falling foul of the global rules and the tranny jannies. You will be accused of providing a place for nazis to collaborate on terrorism.
Note that the initial wave won't be that, because I/we would be creating the communities manually and not opening it up to that.
Eventually, maybe, yeah.
Ability to change between forums-style strict chronological comment ordering with quotes, and reddit-style cascading comments section.
Yeah I'm totally fine with this.
I think there's a lot of room for allowing communities to self-customize to some level. There's absolutely some cost-benefit here - even if this does happen, don't expect it early - but, yeah.
And with federation this gets even easier; the sites have to be able to speak the same metadata language but nothing forces them to present that data in the same way.
Topic tags
Yeah. I think it's absolutely absurd that the only global topic tag is used variously for "will give you nightmares", "a spoiler for popular media", and "literally porn". Can these be three separate tags please?
The ability to replace or remove up/downvotes
This absolutely introduces some problems in terms of semi-automated moderation. I think these are solvable problems, but it is worth noting that keeping it to "up/down" does make a bunch of analysis easier.
Public moderation logs . . . Mods should not be able to hide this.
This gets a lot gnarlier when spam becomes a problem, because you really don't want spammers to have a nice detailed log of everyone removed for spamming and why. I like the general idea but there are some necessary compromises here. I also think this is one of those things where "private communities can hide the mod log" becomes quite justifiable; I also think that maybe tagging actions based on the specific user has some negative effects.
This is one of those "mmm, not convinced, but also I see where you're coming from" deals.
ZorbaTHut
16d ago
Why would we want to compete with Reddit in the first place? What does this space stand to gain from becoming a serious competitor to reddit?
I think if the world had a better link aggregator that was being actively used, it would be a better place.
I will note this isn't for the sake of the Motte, this is a side thing that happens to also work as a hypothetical platform for the Motte (and also kind of feeds off the fact that the Motte exists.)
ZorbaTHut
16d ago
What does it actually mean to have politics banned? I assume myself and the majority of motters do understand what people mean when they say they are "tired of politics in video games", but turning that tacit understanding into actionable rules is difficult, and as soon as you start adding in a wider range of people that's going to break down. Like you would inevitably get moderators that ban economic topics because of the crossover with politics, and users complaining about people bringing up e.g. Sony's decision to end disc suport because they consider it a political issue.
I think there's a lot of pretty reasonable behaviors mods could have that plausibly follow the spirit of this. I'm serious when I say:
"you have vast and flexible power as long as you can justify it following the purpose of the company, but the one thing you can't do is violate that purpose or work against the best interests of
the shareholdersthe Motte"
So if people object to how a community's being run, we look at it and talk to the mods. If they say "yes, here is how we are defining 'politics'", then we ask them to put that into a non-foundation rules, and if it seems like it's being vaguely evenly enforced, we shrug and say "looks like it's fine, you are welcome to start a competing community with a different definition". But if they say "yeah fuck that, we don't care" then they get booted; if they say "here is how we define it" and then obviously do not enforce it that way, they get booted.
I think my core answer here is that we allow for any definition that's reasonably defensible as being an implementation of the foundation.
A lot of legal systems work this way; the general concept of "a reasonable person" is woven deeply into the fabric of US law, and there's no formal guidance as to exactly what this means, which means there's a pretty big gray area where people debate over where exactly the line is drawn and the line is often drawn inconsistently. But this is also kinda OK because this means the obvious white cases and obvious black cases get judged properly, and nobody can "properly" judge every gray-area case consistently and perfectly because the very issue is a lack of objective definitions, so whatever, this gives results that are as good as possible and claims to accomplish no better than that.
That's what I'm going for here.
ZorbaTHut
16d ago
I appreciate this greatly, and thank you . . .
. . . but direct most of that to the mods, they've been putting in a lot more time than I have for several years. This place would not have survived without them.
I am happy to captain this ship, but it's the crew who deserve most of the credit right now.
ZorbaTHut
16d ago
What exactly are you aiming for - neutrality / culture war banned, or letting people self organize as long as they label themselves clearly? Either one has it's appeal, but your first post seems to be pointing to the latter, and the second the former.
The latter in the long term, the former in the short term, because . . .
I like the idea of adding sub-communities, but I don't know if we have enough people to fill in 7 zillion niches.
. . . of exactly this reason.
I see communities as something kind of kin to nuclear reactions. If you take a bunch of uranium and spread it out, you have a bunch of uranium on the ground. If you pack it up into a tight little ball you have an infinite energy generator. But in the case of communities, you need to spread it out a little to let it grow.
Walking this tightrope is inevitably the hard part; eventually, a site could get big enough to open up community creation to everyone. But it takes some work to get there.
Practically I think for a while we would be taking nominations, putting them up for vote, and tentatively adding them to see if they got enough traffic.
That makes it sound like the bigger concern is going to be technological, not sociological. Do you have a good idea of what you want to do better. How big of a scope we're talking about here (because at first glance it sounds pretty big)?
In terms of server-scaling, I'm going to be hilariously optimistic here and say "the target is eventually reddit-sized".
Buuut . . . it is worth noting that I have been involved in various levels of scalability for a long time. I'm not going to try to start with something Reddit-sized, but I do know roughly how to design the backend architecture so it can scale without horrendous amounts of pain.
(this site isn't it)
And I'm not putting in more than the bare minimum to start with, frankly, if we have an order-of-magnitude of headroom at any given moment we're probably fine.
(we probably do have that right now, honestly)
The thing I really mean by "do better" is the community management part of it.
ZorbaTHut
16d ago
I think the problem is that a lot of these sites just aren't good. They're trying to beat Reddit by being a worse Reddit but with a better set of people. In terms of community engineering, what is it that Ruqqus or Voat or Bluesky did? I would answer "nothing"; they're just reproducing the existing site and hoping they get the right set of people.
I think community engineering is very strong, but most people either aren't trying it, or are trying it in a hyperauthoritarian way, both of which are sorta doomed.
We are definitely not growing. At the same time, we aren't providing any opportunity for growth; "half as much traffic as we had on Reddit, consistently, without access to any other communities on this site" is a hell of an accomplishment. I admit I read Reddit more than I read this, entirely because all the other communities are on Reddit, but if there were opportunities to start getting them here instead, maybe that could work out?
What if we added our own /m/gaming, /m/technology, and /m/humor, all with politics strictly banned but largely open beyond that, for example?
ZorbaTHut
16d ago
I'm afraid I've been talking on Reddit.
It's goddamn annoying.
I don't know if anyone here is still discussing stuff on Reddit regularly, but Reddit has rolled out a new improved block feature, where someone blocks you and then you can't see them and they can't see you. Of course inevitably this is being used regularly to get the last word in a discussion; that's why our Block feature is specifically designed to make that impossible. But this is happening in straight-up debate subreddits, with some communities slowly polarizing into two parallel communities that can't see each other or talk to each other, talking past each other with everyone else caught in the middle.
Fuckin' sucks.
Let's talk about something else.
One of the very-long-term plans for the Motte that's always kinda been banging around in the back of my mind is trying to expand this community into a serious Reddit competitor. Part of this means opening up community creation in much the same way Reddit has; instead of the mods needing to make every subcommunity, let the community do it. I have a few pages of notes on code architecture and more notes on how to handle site-wide policy and Sketchy Communities.
This has historically been implausible because it's a ton of coding. For . . . reasons I'm not going to describe in detail right now . . . the codebase The Motte currently runs on is a dead-end; by using it, we're in a kind of shaky position, but nobody cares enough about us to shake us, so I've just let it ride. For anything that looks vaguely like "try to become larger" it needs to be nuked and paved, and in the process rewritten to suck less butt (I have opinions on code architecture.) On the other hand . . . AI exists, right? It's really good. A lot of the difficulty of writing something like The Motte is not in the kind of deep architecture decisions that AI is bad at, it's just a shitload of really boring code that AI is great at.
I wrote a video player because there were like three features I wanted. That wasn't even Fable, that was Opus 4.7. Every week, "rewrite the Motte codebase, but less crappy" becomes more viable, and the hardest problems shift away from money and engineering, and towards community management.
Whoops, I ended up talking about the same thing.
Who could have seen that coming.
There's a few problems Reddit has that I feel are kind of knotted up in each other. Be warned, this is going to be long; I don't have time to make it shorter.
Reddit plays these cutesy games with "subreddit ownership" that I've always kinda hated. The mods control a subreddit, completely and unassailably . . . unless the subreddit does something Reddit doesn't like, in which case they replace the owners. But that doesn't mean Reddit condones the subreddits! No, the subreddits are owned by the moderators! It's the moderators to blame if anything bad happens there! Please ignore the points where Reddit interferes. Reddit doesn't interfere because that would make Reddit responsible. That never happens. Except on this subreddit over here, where we have to interfere, but it has never happened before and will never happen again, oh look another one, let's interfere here also.
It's fundamentally dishonest. They're playing both sides of a difficult decision and trying to get the credit for both. Thankfully most people aren't buying into this, but they're still doing it.
This is exacerbated by Reddit's namespacing woes. Subreddits are defined entirely by their subreddit name, which means if you happened to squat on a name, that name is now yours. Sometimes this is funny (hello /r/trees and /r/marijuanaenthusiasts) and sometimes it's actually kind of crappy (/r/worldpolitics, nsfw). (Which admittedly then loops back around into "funny", as per /r/anime_titties, which is surprisingly safe for work.) And then sometimes it's toxic; can you name a community that got taken over by people who seem to exemplify the worst of that community? Or who seem to actively hate the thing it's ostensibly about? If you can't, then I envy you, because you clearly don't use Reddit very often, which is a good decision.
The problem is that Reddit doesn't have the ability to rename subreddits. They never have. So if there's a group doing something questionable - let's say /r/YourIngroup has been taken over by your outgroup, substitute the metasyntactic variables as appropriate - the only levers they can pull are "replace mods", "ban subreddit entirely", or "ignore".
What if "rename" were possible?
What if subreddits had a unique internal ID, but the front-page label was replaceable? So in a world where /r/politics is taken over by your outgroup, an event which I'm sure nobody here has previously considered, it could just be renamed to /r/PoltiicsYourOutgroup and a new neutral politics subreddit formed?
"This subreddit is yours. You can do what you want with it. But the names are ours. Your subreddit has been moved; your subscribers moved along with it; we welcome your success; we just don't welcome your success under that label."
In a hypothetical world where we had this site, what if we were a bit more formal with ownership?
You can just make a submotte and nobody stops you. But at some point the mod interface starts pestering you to make an important decision: is this a community submotte, or a privately-owned submotte? If it's a community submotte, you relinquish ultimate ownership to The Motte; we'll help you define a purpose for the community and then enforce that purpose, in much the same way as corporate ownership works (tl;dr: "you have vast and flexible power as long as you can justify it following the purpose of the company, but the one thing you can't do is violate that purpose or work against the best interests of the shareholders the Motte").
Don't want to be ultimately liable to us? Choose Privately Owned; you can pay a reasonable monthly fee and we are happy to keep hosting it. You have full power over it. It's yours! But if you do something that we don't want to host at all, we'll give you a reasonable short warning to export the data and host it yourself, and then kick you off.
I think this sort of relies on federation. Make The Motte a protocol (maybe see if we can twist the Fediverse protocol into working for us, or give up on that and just make our own), provide the sourcecode, and now moving your site off The Motte is easy.
The big problem with the Fediverse is that they treat federation transitively. If you federate the worst community imaginable - which I think we can all agree are the Wet Sock Appreciators, curse those people - then the core Fediverse nodes won't federate you. But we don't have to do that. We can refuse to federate with the Wet Sock Appreciators if we think they're truly unredeemable, but if someone else wants to be a node that federates with both us and them, alright, have at it, we'll allow it.
So if you make a privately-owned Wet Sock Appreciator submotte, and we decide to kick you off (as is obviously deserved for members of such a heinous group), (1) you can just host it elsewhere, (2) your users can just use something capable of seeing it.
I don't think there can be such a thing as truly objective judgement when it comes to something like community dynamics. There's a reason we have the Wildcard Rule, and we don't use it often, but we do use it.
But there are ways to make this better.
One of the best things I did when making The Motte was to write the Foundation. It was meant as the overall north star for the community, so if I had to ask why I was doing this, or if I had to make a hard decision, I could check the Foundation and see if that made it easier. That's why we're here, for the record - when it came down to "move or censor yourselves", I looked at the Foundation and realized that moving was a good chance of death, but self-censorship was death. Maybe The Motte would be a thing that existed, but the Foundation would no longer apply.
I've changed the Foundation once. It used to say "subreddit". When we moved, I changed it to "community". Besides that, it's gone completely unchanged.
So maybe we do the same thing. Maybe we require that communities make a Foundation; basically a community Constitution, similar to the Company Purpose I alluded to earlier. It is what the community is judged on, it is what the moderators are judged on. And if the moderators start violating a community's Foundation, the moderators are removed.
I think it's easy to read this and think "oh gosh zorba is gonna replace everything overnight, everything is going to be destroyed". Nah. That's not happening.
But I've had this box in my brain labeled "Motte plans" for a very long time. That box is full of interlocked gears, and up until lately it was just deadlocked. Now it's feeling like some of the deadlocks are starting to lift, and the gears are slowly turning, and maybe it's time to revisit the box.
This isn't happening today, and this isn't happening tomorrow, and if it happens, it will be very gradual, and with the preservation of this community in the forefront. And let's be honest it's probably not happening at all.
But the word "probably" is doing nonzero work in that sentence.
Do these ideas help?
Would they work?
Would people put up with it?
Do these concepts help enough?
What am I missing?
I have no idea.
Feedback requested.
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
Hopefully fixed, at least for the moderate future; this ended up being a bunch of performance fixes and tweaks. Things are looking at lot better sitewise now.
At least until a bot finds a new URL that's really slow :V
I honestly don't know how to distinguish the two.
Almost certainly, though. I've never seen a community that wasn't, at least numerically, "dominated" by lurkers.
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
Honestly if anything it's better at fixing these problems than I was :V Webdev has never been my speciality.
As near as I can tell, the basic issue we're running into is that load is increasing, heavily thanks to bot scraping, and that's resulting in various things that weren't problems becoming problems. The earlier one turned out to be a massive leak in our Currently Online Users reporting; this wasn't a big deal when we had maybe a few thousand users, but as soon as we started having tons of "users" (including IPs as users!) it blew up and become a gargantuan perf issue.
I'm honestly curious if rDrama ever ran into that same problem.
Anyway, the latest one was kind of sitting around passively; we did a redesign to improve performance, but it turns out we missed a bunch of stuff, and thankfully Claude knows these tools better than I do and can put in automated warnings for various performance thing. So that should cut a few hundred SQL queries on big pages.
Coupled to that was a nasty bug that would kill threads faster than they should be killed, which itself would cause server crashes, and that was a lot of boom.
The biggest problem is that I never had a good way to instrument this and figure out what was going on perf-wise, and now I have . . . some tools for this . . . so hopefully it's just a matter of squashing issues as they show up.
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
I'm kind of surprised nobody here has Claude Opus access, and modern Opus is a lot better than Sonnet 4.0, so I went ahead and hucked it at Claude Opus 4.6. For the record, my setup was:
- I prepended "here's an AI test, go solve it" to this post, then copypasted the whole thing in
- I chose Extended Thinking and Research, which is the mode where it will cheerfully scan literally a thousand webpages if it thinks it's a good idea
Unfortunately, for some reason, Claude Opus doesn't let you share advanced-research discussions, so I can't link the full "discussion". But it didn't ask for any extra info, just hopped into it.
(One note: it tends to be limited per query, so asking for two albums at once is going to do about half as much work for each. I dunno if that would produce different results though.)
It took about twenty minutes, scanned 711 sources, and produced this full report, which goes into detail on methodology and sources. The tl;dr:
Both The Turtles' "Grim Reaper of Love" and the Henry Paul Band's Feel the Heat lack unambiguous release dates in readily available sources. Applying the hierarchical methodology systematically, the best-supported release date for "Grim Reaper of Love" is Monday, May 16, 1966, and for Feel the Heat is approximately Monday, July 21, 1980 — though both dates require significant inferential work across multiple source levels.
So, it ended up with the same GRoL result as GPT 5.2 Agent.
It did find the Wikipedia page and decided it was wrong, and it wasn't able to read the ARSA database. I don't think it's possible for the web version to apply a username/password, but I could probably have gotten that working with a local login; in the end, it fell back to the Billboard. Didn't manage to find the radio chart, but that's the ARSA access issue.
For FtH, it queried the copyright office, but got access-denied errors. I'm guessing this is specifically anti-AI-bot stuff :V
This does feel like a lot of the sources you want to rely on are specifically blocking Claude. I'm slightly tempted to set up local tools that pretend to be not-Claude, or give it access to a web browser and tell it to go wild; that might be more effective.
ZorbaTHut
7mo ago
Yup.
I'm not sure if it would have even sent a message to the server - it's plausible that the button action doesn't get hooked up unless you actually hit the "shadowban" button, a lot of stuff works that way - but even if it did, the server would respond "hey wait, you're not an admin! you can't do that, denied".
For obvious reasons, we don't let logged-out users, or logged-in users without the admin flag, shadowban people :)
You're welcome. I hope I can keep doing that for a very long time :)
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