sohois
4d ago
themotte's current codebase is rdrama I believe. That Zorba opens by suggesting the current thing is a dead-end likely indicates there isn't room for more collaboration there
sohois
4d ago
I'll echo what arjin posted below and say that your answer seems to vacillate between technological features and sociological design. I'm sure ruqqus and bluesky all had features and ideas they thought differentiated them from their competitors, but it's one thing to say that and another to prove it.
Like with this example:
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?
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.
If the plan is to recruit only users that are open/smart/conscientious/whatever enough to post on the motte and give them more communities to post in, then fine, but at that point you've just reinvented rdrama with all the same user acquisiton issues.
sohois
4d ago
Would they work?
I'm going to sidestep most of the questions you have posed and just say no, they wouldn't work because attempts to replace reddit (or other established social media sites) never work. When moderators threw a fit a few years ago and some shut down their subreddits, no one moved to new options they tried. Ruqqus, voat are the only other ones I can even remember. A ton of people moved to bluesky from twitter, and now it's still slowly dying, trapped in an extremism cycle. And of course this place and rdrama both appear to have done little but stem the bleeding. Perhaps the stats show differently, but I don't feel like there's ever been any growth.
sohois
5d ago
The following
They were both largely wrong about what begat capitalism / AI; Marxism was very insistent on labor value theory, and LW used to be very focused on symbolic AI/GOFAI/FOOM
Unless AI takeoff has already occurred, I'm not sure why you're declaring them wrong about this.
Inevitably, all such movements end up being co-opted by those very same Molochian dynamics, while never having actually done anything to prevent the Event or improve the chances of the Event leading to abundance (Mao, Stalin vs frontier lab regulatory capture and degrowth ideological capture).
We appear to be in the foothills of AI safety deployment. Governments are just now starting to act on AI. The big companies have deployed some resources for regulatory capture, but I've yet to see anything come of it, and there are just as many influential figures dedicated to ensuring zero regulation (i.e. Marc Andreesen)
And yet neither Marxism nor AI safety has ever achieved anything that might facilitate a more favorable outcome for the Event, whether it truly is imminent or not, and mostly have just made everything worse
Again, the event which hasn't happened yet. If you're making the argument that early LW stuff influenced people to eventually found OpenAI/Anthropic, then fair enough, but this is also a world away from saying "AI safety has [n]ever achieved anything"
It's a fundamentally different position from Marxism, where we have a whole host of negative examples of communism in action.
That's nice. I kind of assumed aevann would have bullied you guys for not adding in the possibility of pet battles and shit awards
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