naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
3d ago
I’m 42. It wasn’t always like this.
William Baumol (yes, that Baumol) coined the term "pink collar" in 1967. The category referred to teaching, nursing, secretarial and social work--the kind of work disproportionately done by women. You might not have noticed it 30 years ago (and certainly you would have seen less obesity and fewer tattoos) but the basic dynamic has been in place for decades at least.
I would suggest that these people are not so much miserable as they are irritated by the presence of patients. In most medical practice today, the patient is not the one paying the (lion's share of the) bill. And if you are not the one paying the bill, you are not the customer. A really good day for most medical office workers is one in which a large number of cancellations or no-shows allows them to spend the day scrolling their phone (or, a touch less cynically, getting a lot of insurance billing paperwork done because there are no humans distracting them with questions or, worse, complaints). They get paid the same either way.
And the office workers you're talking about were probably not attracted to "this field" so much as to a flexible-hours, prestige-adjacent job with air conditioning and low physical demand. Ideal conditions for parents of young children, of course, but also not a terrible compromise position for childless individuals who would prefer to not be working at all but aren't in a financial position to actually take that route.
Nice to see you outside the Morlock tunnels!
I think one reason we get so much interest in being expanded to a "reddit alternative" is specifically because people want to have a discussion website that isn't hopelessly overrun by ads, AI, and low-effort engagement. The closest thing I'm aware of is StackExchange, but the focus there seems to be clear answers on particular topics rather than discussion (and also for some reason the whole design of that space just seems cluttered to me). Also they are apparently mostly existing to reap profits from AI now? I'm not a coder, y'all probably know more about this than I do.
Anyway my point is that one thing to seriously consider from the outset is organizational structure. Where the data is hosted and who controls it is something that will always matter. Right now the site is functionally a sole proprietorship run on an open codebase (to the best of my understanding) and I think everyone is basically fine with that--as the saying goes, Julius Caesar was a much beloved tyrant. 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.
Another thing to seriously consider, on my view, is images. Maybe don't host/display them? Ever, or beyond avatars or something? Many of us can remember the rise and... slump?... of Imgur, which basically came into existence because reddit did such a terrible job handling that sort of thing, but then realized it had a business interest in not sending the bulk of its low-effort engagement off to a different website. If the goal of the Motte is not specifically profit, then someone finding a way to profit from hosting images for the Motte does not represent a threat (the way it did to reddit), but rather an opportunity.
I also think that the CW thread was a great innovation as a pressure valve for the old SSC sub and it would be good to have genuinely non-political subs that could say "hey, here's a link to the irradiated zone if you want to peddle that shit." Defining the CW and clearly cordoning CW communities (but for real, not in the "we just ban rightoids/leftoid causes" way) would be a vast improvement.
But broadly speaking, I am in favor of the site developing in this direction.
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