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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 shareholdersthe 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.
I just saw a few other comments mention lobsters and hacker news, and I think that brings a very specific idea:
Bring one non-culture-war sub, focused tightly on tech and rationalist-adjacent topics. Compete directly with lobsters and HN, not with Reddit, and the problem shrinks immensely. But at the same time, it has the potential to greatly expand the breadth and reach of the community.
I think this has the potential to work because grey-tribe rationalist-adjacent has a huge overlap with HN, but on the other hand, that site is hard SF liberal tech bro coded. Would be great to have an alternative.
I like the idea of deliberately choosing and fostering new communities.
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This is basically my plan, yeah, though I wasn't thinking about such a tight coupling; I was considering stuff like "technology" or "gaming" or "aww", then gradually scaling out while intentionally aiming at broad subjects and niche subjects.
I will definitely be asking the community where to start if/when we get there, though.
Do you have an ETA in mind at all on this extension?
"At least months"; I would need to get out from under some stuff first, and then, you know
rewrite the entire damn site
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themotte.org. We need to bring in high-quality people to keep the site alive, without opening the floodgates to MOPs.lobste.rsinvite-tree approach to bringing users on-board, but it would have to be done in a way that doesn't cause a political monoculture like they have over there.More options
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I initially thought this sounds doomed, but thinking it a bit more, I'm not sure. Reddit feels like it has gone from being worse than it used to be but still the incumbent so what are you gonna do, to something that has very little resemblance to what it originally was. A thing like that doesn't really exist now, and it doesn't need to be immediately huge to get going, so maybe there is a chance.
Stuff I'm roughly thinking, how did the original Reddit get to be like that? Why did it go bad? What's different now? The internet circa 2005 still operated on some sort of naive emergent elitism just on account of normies mostly not being there. The optimistic story in my head is that there's still a cohort of the sort of people who populated early Reddit around, but they don't have the internet in general as their watering hole anymore, so if you somehow got a critical mass of them in one place that could actually kickstart things. The optimistic story for Reddit going bad was that the owners sold out and had to grow the site and throw the original values overboard, so a replacement could keep its soul longer by staying a boutique operation.
What's going on now, you have a lot more bad actors around, and AI is likely to make things even worse. I'm pretty sure something is lost from the idealism from 25 years ago when people figured they can solve the software crisis by writing more Lisp. So one angle is defense. You can expect hacking and entryists, and if you get big enough, lawfare. And then you want to get the sorts of people you do want contributing to learn about the site and join. The tricky thing is that you want some kind of elitism filter that gets you smart people writing quality content and keeps you from getting swamped with Reddit normies, but also doesn't get you into the Voat failure mode of pulling in mostly crazy people and bad actors. The Motte had a pretty solid niche during the 2010s culture war, which was pretty visible for a circa 2018 misfit grey tribe university freshman, but I'm not sure how much of a going concern it is today. I guess in 2008 there were still stronger remnants of the US religious right around and free software was more of a scrappy underdog than the infrastructure of the entire Web 2.0, and those were relevant things for the original Redditors. So what's the zeitgeist going to be for a 2028 misfit grey tribe university freshman and what will they be looking to escape from or stand against?
The big thing Motte has going for it is hands-on moderation by people who actually have an idea what the site is about and will engage with users pretty far. A big part of what happened to Reddit is that Reddit moderation absolutely isn't this, and at the size of the site cannot be it. So if you can grow, the question is how the moderation can keep up. I guess ideally you'd have subcommunities around the size of the Motte with their own moderators, and some kind of higher-level system. AI might actually help here, if you know what you're looking for when moderating, you could have AI crunch a large volume of comments and look for patterns and summaries, even when you can't read all the volume by yourself.
Thinking about how people manage their identities and what kind of visibility they can expect is obviously a bigger concern than people thought back in the day. Reddit has the blocking thing, but it also recently added a tag to turn profiles private so you can't read through people's comments. The feature is also around here, apparently inherited from rdrama, and a lot of people are ambivalent about it, since there's the perception that people who turn it on are more likely to be bad actors. I'm of the "assume anything you put on the internet will be there forever because chances are it will be" school here, but aren't really in touch with a lot of modern social media. The whole dark forest theory is another modern thing you probably want to think about when designing a brand new Reddit, and for extra fun we're looking at comments being possibly batch-deanonymizable with AI in the very near future for anyone who hasn't kept all their publicly visible writing pseudonymous.
That front page screenshot looks a lot like Hacker News today. It's also getting worse although still miles ahead of today's Reddit. Or https://lobste.rs, which is more tech and higher quality, but invite-only and strictly left leaning.
Heh, I was about to comment the same thing. Still, I wish there were more sorta-reddits out there, but there just aren't as far as I can tell.
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This is all above my paygrade and I have nothing useful to offer. So instead:
Thanks Zorba, for The Motte.
You're welcome :)
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I think there's a pretty big unquestioned assumption underlying this post, which is that it is desirable in the first place to expand the scope and popularity of whatever project you are engaged in. The greatest rebuttal to this is this classic essay. I have watched the lifecycle outlined in this essay play out in pretty much everything I have ever liked. If you like something, the absolute worst thing you can do for it is try to make it more popular. I can't think of anything that would be worse for The Motte than for it to become more relevant to normies.
This is exactly the thing that happened to Reddit - It didn't start off as the Wet Sock Appreciator hellhole that it is today. Its culture starting out was very much the techno-libertarianism that was pervasive throughout the internet of that era. The "moderators own the subreddit" dynamic was the attempt by the founders of the site, who like most people in tech at the time were very libertarian, to create a structure that would absolve them of responsibility for the content posted to the site, in the hopes of being able to plausibly preserve it as a place for free speech. The problem is that Reddit became popular, and popular web sites cost money to operate, and advertisers are skittish about associating their brand with "that website with an entire section devoted to jailbait photos." So /r/jailbait had to go. And then once that door opened, Reddit's content policy became, in effect, "we will delete anything that causes PR problems for Reddit," with predictable results when the Wet Sock Appreciators became sufficiently powerful as to be able to turn anything they disliked into a PR problem for anyone associated with it.
The other problem is that popular things attract entryists, and also, Reddit is located in San Francisco, which means as the company expands their hiring pool consists of people who live in San Francisco or are willing to move there. In retrospect it was inevitable that as Reddit expanded it would fall victim to the same long march through the institutions as every other powerful and influential organization.
The biggest and most important questions you need to ask and answer, if you seek to expand the scope of The Motte, are not technical, they are social. How do you intend to keep The Motte from suffering the same fate as Reddit, Wikipedia, Google, open source, academia, journalism, science fiction fandom, or any of the other countless formerly neutral and now totally ideologically captured institutions? The only example I can find of a reversal of this trend is Twitter, which required it to be forcibly taken over by a billionaire and most of its staff unceremoniously fired. Honorable mention to Coinbase and 37signals, who famously managed to deal with their respective entryism problems by paying them to go away. This is expensive and probably can't work for everything for that reason.
My vote is that The Motte stays fundamentally what it is rather than trying to expand its scope.
I don't buy this. Sure this might be part of the censorship of obscene topics, but it doesn't really have anything to do with their political activism. You have to remember that the original and still-CEO of Reddit is a deranged trump hater, went on a personal crusade to smear conservatives, and even went as far as editing other people's posts.
I don't think that's too inconsistent, I think the strain of techno-libertarianism that defined the internet of the '00s was adjacent enough to progressivism for most of those people to end up with rabid TDS in the late '10s to '20s. Seems like very very few of the old school techies did not fall into this... ESR, DHH, a few others. Notably, the people who run nearlyfreespeech.net, a web host who pride themselves on their willingness to host anything that is legal to host in the United States (a very '00s internet attitude), including literal swastika-wielding nazis, now have a blog full of various progressivisms that give me the feeling that the only reason they continue to have a permissive content policy is because they understand that changing it would utterly destroy the value of their service.
Total side note that has nothing to do with this but I used to moderate a subreddit (I know, boo, hiss) and one year, Reddit hosted some events for moderators to get together and meet various Reddit employees, and Spez showed up to the one that I went to. I'm not sure how wealthy he was at the time but going by current net worth he would be the wealthiest person, and only billionaire, I have ever been face to face with. I think this would have been before the scandal where he was hand-editing comments.
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Seconded. Normies ruin everything.
Rest in power.
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This is so fucking stupid, though twitter does almost the same thing in not allowing you to reply to posts by people who have blocked you or even view their timeline.
I think that blocking can be a useful feature for some users, trading some accuracy of your view of the community for some peace of mind. It is not a substitute for moderation though, because it scales very badly -- if you have N offenders and K offendees for a particular topic, then it will take N*K blocks to settle.
Sure, it sucks if someone were to make a scathing reply to a popular post you made and you were not even aware of it because you had previously blocked the replier. But that is your problem because you opted for a less accurate map of reality.
Filtering the perception of what others see is totally unacceptable. Filtering what others can interact with is acceptable in the context of moderation, provided it is done in the open. Nobody expects the facebook pages of PETA or Tasty Sausages to be havens of free speech. But for an open discussion board this would be utterly ridiculous. If the Motte worked so that you could not reply to anyone who felt you had previously offended them (or had strategically blocked you to make it harder for you to spread your ideas through replies), it would be pretty useless indeed.
The only steelman I can think of in this regard is in the context of non-public, whitelist only discussions. If I have a group "Serious Discussions" with four other people on Signal (or whatever), then obviously nothing is stopping the four of them to also form a group "Serious Discussions Without quiet_NaN". Not particularly nice, and certainly a good reason to find different friends, but also not necessarily evil, because I can reasonably be expected to anticipate the possibility of communications which I know nothing about happening. At least everyone who can read a given message has common knowledge about who can read (and reply to) that message. The latter is not the case with that Reddit/Twitter thing, because nobody can be expected to keep track of who is blocking whom currently.
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Having gotten that out of my system, I found the rest of your post interesting as well.
I very much like the "host your own option" idea. What is fundamentally wrong (IMO) with most social media platforms is that they are very much designed as walled gardens, which makes a lot of sense if the goal is to create shareholder value, but is actively unhelpful if you care about communities or freedom of speech.
One technical drawback is that an open system requires well-defined protocols and backwards compatibility. If discord wants to
push their next step of enshittification on an unsuspecting publicroll out a new feature, they can simply deploy their update on their servers and make the clients update. If you want to do the same with E-mail, that will involve industry meetings, and RFCs describing standards which Microsoft then ignores (or not, I stopped paying attention to them in the early 2000s).Another more specific thing is poster authentication. When the motte moved from reddit, it would have been very convenient to take a copy of the user database along, but that was very much not technically feasible. It would certainly be possible to create a protocol where all the information on how you id individual users was common knowledge, but the downside is that this would limit your userbase to the people who feel comfortable creating and using client-side certificates, which is approximately a null set in the space of all possible users. Relying on OAuth only moves the problem. Google will obviously be willing to authenticate users for well-regarded websites such as the motte, but once the Wet Sock Appreciators get kicked out and have to self-host, they may find that Google is unwilling to deal with them, so they could not take their userbase along. (Also, if I had a google account, I would want it nowhere near my quiet_NaN persona for reasons related to opsec.)
Edit: as far as namespaces are concerned, DNS seems to be the obvious solution. submottes get a real name as in xcpe76yl.sub.themotte.org. Because nobody wants to use that, people can set up CNAMEs (plus the bells and whistles to make it work with https), e.g. culturwar.themotte.org if they want to stay in the namespace you control, or wetsocknews.com if they anticipate that they might need to self-host. (This obviously makes auth a bit harder due to browser's cross site scripting policies, but seems solvable for per-hoster auth.)
While this is kind of true, there's also a lot of room for protocols with a well-defined core and constantly mutating fringes. Google, for example, is constantly trying out little HTML extensions, the bad ones of which die on the vine and the good ones eventually get subsumed into the standard. There's a linux desktop called KDE, running on a protocol called Wayland, and KDE is always adding its own little tests to it with the same result; most of them die unceremoniously and are removed, some of them get nicely polished and turn into official Wayland features.
I've got no problem with that here also. It looks like Lemmy is already using ActivityPub, and I think there are some questionable decisions in this but nothing that prevents us from implementing ActivityPub as core functionality and then layering our own stuff on top of that. Much of which will end up dying and being removed, some of which might become a de-facto or even a true standard eventually.
This feels honestly pretty solvable; remember, we can always host our own OAuth if we like! We can even use Google's OAuth and then provide a subsidiary of that.
"Export the database" is fraught in many complicated ways but they feel roughly solvable if you're willing to devote the
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I desperately want a free speech reddit, in other words 2008 reddit, back. I probably cried in 2020 when they started blocking reddits they didn't like (including the only space on the internet where I could say 'men in dresses in my spaces freaks me out actually' ) and we lost the last vestiges of what had been. If everybody and his brother can launch their own clone of twitter, I'd like to see twitter launch a reddit clone. But I want geoblocking first.
I'm not optimistic about an independent clone though. Ovarit was terrible. The majority of the time I attempted to contribute my post got removed for board mismatch without a note of which board it should have been on (and the boards were vaguely enough named it wasn't clear). Voat never took off.
How are you going to handle European censorship laws? 4chans fights with Ofcom are hilarious but are you personally willing to stop traveling to the EU and the UK?
I don't know how you keep the moderators from going full nuts antifa though. Limiting how many subreddits one person can moderate? Being unmonetized keeps the 3rd world troll spam minimal, at least.
I wouldn't do this name thing you talked about, though. People search by /r/label and you changing the labels would be confusing and annoy people when they lost the community they were looking for.
If you want an experiment, you could do just one subforum for the culture war roundup type thread we used to have back on the reddit forum. I forget what it was called.
What European censorship laws?
Just because something is censored in UK or Germany doesn’t mean it’s censored Europe wide.
The Digital Services Act, and you already know this.
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First step, block stuff in Europe.
Second step, put a big banner saying "this is blocked in Europe specifically" when someone from Europe tries to access it.
Third step, add a citation to the banner, quoting the law and the legislators who enacted it.
Fourth step . . . and this is a very long-term step . . . see if I can start setting up a community dedicated to helping people become politically active and running for government positions, and link that from the dialog.
I am, shall we say, not a fan of censorship.
You just boot them, honestly.
I have no problem with moderators moderating a lot of communities as long as they're doing it well. If they stop doing it well, and they don't own the community, you just boot them.
I'm kind of okay with this honestly. I think we'd include a banner at the top of the page saying something like "are you looking for /r/other-label? They used to be here." but only for a month or two. Beyond that, if you're looking for /r/corn and you went to /r/corn and you got a subreddit about corn, and what you really wanted was a subreddit about how awful mosquitos are, well, this feels like maybe a problem we don't need to spend a lot of time trying to fix.
Unfortunately the EU is nowhere near this transparent.
Americans have congressmen to yell at. The MEPs, and indeed the European parliament, are basically for show, as the latest Chat Control vote shows.
Laws don't matter either; Russian media were banned by decree (and ISPs forced to implement blocks) even before The Motte existed as a separate website, and there is still no actual legal reason why this should be so.
The EU doesn't need to be; we do. We can always just explain the reason to the extent that we can.
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Yes? The only correct move is to keep your ass and your assets in the US, where the First Amendment exists. Elon Musk capitulated to Brazilian censorship when Brazil threatened to arrest X employees and seize X assets, and his mistake was going to Brazil in the first place. If he had not done that, he could have told them to fuck off, which is what Kiwi Farms and 4chan did to Ofcom.
I genuinely cannot think of any value in traveling to the EU or UK, especially if they are hostile to you or your site. Look what happened to Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram.
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As an aside: it amuses me greatly that we have so many AI skeptics here, on a forum that is increasingly AI-coded. I'm happy to concede that there are significant benefits to having someone who is a competent programmer running the show, but the jig was up well before the last idiot concedes it's up. May all the monkeys enjoy the last dance.
Case in point, we've got a CLAUDE.md on the github project. Fable claims 61/66 of the commits in the last 6 months as having explicit AI-labeling. 5.6 Sol claims 60/66. Your skepticism, brought to you by Claude. If I had any more irony in my system, they wouldn't let me near an MRI.
With my annoyance expressed into the ether, I'm supportive of this move. After all, it's shown dividends when deployed by rdrama, our uneasy ally with whom we share much of the code-base (or did, at some point, I'm not going to do a diff).
Stagnation is death. We've done better than I expected after our migration away from Reddit, but that is not the same as better than hoped. Reddit offered organic discovery opportunities that being a standalone (niche) forum doesn't.
I'm sure there's an audience. Particularly people who want their own quasi-independent silo but are leery of associating with the shit-flingers at rdrama (I'm fond of those monkeys, in small doses).
More importantly, I don't see much downside in trying. Not every ambitious project achieves what it sets out to achieve, but if the workload is ameliorated by LLMs, and if we're wisely offloading some of the hosting costs to those who care to pay? Bring it on. I will observe with keen interest.
Since I've given up on winning popularity contests, I will suggest something I've idly-floated for years. LLM-moderation.
It's been feasible for a while. More than feasible, in fact. At the risk of tooting my/our own horn: what makes this forum something more interesting than rdrama is a dedicated, hardworking (or hardly working) mod team that keeps the worst of the nonsense away from tender eyes they might tenderize. This is ridiculously rare, and a precious human resource that is easy to exhaust. Where are you going to find entities above room temperature intelligence, with a borderline autistic devotion to interpreting somewhat vague guidelines and what feels like a decade of case law, in the spirit intended?
Ah. Wait.
It would be trivial. It would be easy. More importantly, it would work. Not perfectly, but nobody ever accused us human mods of being perfect. But the Motte is a relatively slow moving, text heavy forum, and API calls wouldn't break the bank. You don't need frontier intelligence. I've tried this experiment years ago, and found adequate results. It's so boringly easy that I won't bother replicating it, unless someone I like asks politely.
The biggest blockers would be radioactively-hot CW-content that provokes a safety classifier or flinch reflex. That is nothing that can't be prompted away.
We don't have to replace humans wholesale. That is not desirable at present. But a lot of the scutwork would cease to be an issue. No more posts lying in the filter. There are implementation details to consider, such as intentional abuse through token-spam, but we're smart people. We'll figure it out. Or set an expenditure cap. Or get fucking Haiku to do it. Our auto-janny can do with an upgrade.
Forgive me. I'm always in a rush to automate away my job before someone does it to me first. That way, I get to put it in my CV, instead of looking for work at a CVS.
I will elide the boring concerns about the payment processing, handling illegal content etc etc. I'm not here to teach you, Granny Zorba, to suck eggs.
Y'all do what works but I have to question spinning up a datacenter full of gpus and spending dollars worth (retail value) of tokens just to make a one line change.
Idk maybe the ai helped figure out what to change, but if it saved 10 minutes of looking at the code then that's 10 minutes lost of better understanding.
$2000 - a small piece of biocompatible plastic/rubber/metal.
$25,000 - for the cardiologist who puts it in, possibly split multiple ways. He's gotta pay off the med school debt, and feed the wife and kids, and manage a down-payment on the Ferrari.
Zorba, if he has any common sense, pays for a Max plan. He has common sense. I can just about guarantee it. That means that regardless of how much the raw tokens cost, as long as he stays within his usage limits, those marginal dollars do not come out of pocket.
I also imagine that he charges enough for his time and energy that a spend of a few dollars to save 10 minutes of his time is a very favorable trade, even accounting for the negatives. I dare say he is a good enough programmer that he is able to audit and vet the AI-expanded code base to his satisfaction, if he hasn't already gotten Claude to automate away the tests. The "better understanding" can probably be priced too, and I'd be surprised if it made a jot of difference with how good modern LLMs have gotten.
In other words, if you disagree with his approach, you do you. It's not your money. It's not your pet project you've run for what feels like a decade. If you've ever paid for a taxi for your burrito, or intend to, that's probably worth addressing first.
If Zorba wants to make the project sustainable, and scalable, and wrest back control of more of his time in exchange for a service he probably already uses professionally? I'm cheering.
Maybe I'm just a very particular type of person. I've literally never used a meal delivery app in my entire life, even when the promo code makes it arguably worth it. I have piggypacked on a friend's order once or twice, when they insisted, but that's it.
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I'm maybe the second biggest AI fan on this forum after you but even I don't like the idea. AI for coding is great, AI for research is great, AI for thinking through ideas is pretty good... But AI for outward facing political discussion and especially moderation is a step too far. There's an informal policy where largely AI-written comments are discouraged I believe, or at least amadan leans in that direction. If it can't/shouldn't be posting, it certainly shouldn't be moderating.
Giving it the full context in a long reply chain could also be troublesome. Inference costs add up.
Also are there really issues with current human moderation? I occasionally see some bait post that still gets like 10 replies (people need to learn how to not get baited) and maybe a ban... that doesn't seem like it needs an AI system. It's totally fine to let things slip through, sometimes I click that 'the motte needs you' button and I see a massive wall of quotes and text and I think 'I'm not reading all that.' That's a normal human reaction that needn't be made up for by machinery. We could just as well let the posts sit there.
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It really has been useful with solving performance problems. I know the core fundamentals of scalability and bugfixing, and I know them very very well; I don't know Python as well, nor do I know Python web APIs well. So now I can just tell Claude "hey, X seems like a problem, how do we solve X systematically? would Y work? can Y be implemented?" and Claude says "absolutely, Y can be implemented! It uses this little-documented hook that you've never heard of in a software package that we are already using but that you've also never heard of, let me just do that for you" and it does it and finds an entire class of error that we then spend twenty commits systematically squashing.
(This is not a hypothetical.)
It's a fantastic partnership because Claude is great at a bunch of stuff that I'm bad at, and I'm great at a bunch of stuff Claude is bad at.
I admit I wasn't saying this . . . but I do agree with this.
Not for the hard cases - that's why we have mods - and probably not for bans, either. But there's a lot of reports where we look at it and say "why did you report this, knock it off", and an LLM could dispatch a lot of those very very very quickly.
I think I mentioned elsewhere of moderator force multipliers, and this is an example. We have years of history of how moderators approved or rejected posts, a lot of which is boiled into the janitor system, and we can use LLMs to both exploit and boost that system. It doesn't have to be perfect, it merely has to handle most cases near-perfectly and with no human input, and I think that's very doable.
As you say:
and yep. Use computers for the scutwork, save humans for the interesting bit.
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I think in your disdain of AI-critics you need to distinguish between people who are skeptical of AI's purported abilities and those who think it is evil, at least in the way it is currently being built.
To take your proposal for LLM-moderation as an example, I personally am happy to accept that it could work in some form, at least in this context I'm not a skeptic of AI's abilities. Nevertheless I would be very worried about letting openAI or Anthropic or some other big tech company run by people I personally consider to be insane or evil or quite possibly both to run the moderation of this place. Considering common complaints in these parts about the moderation of social media, it seems to me that the techno-capitalists ideas about moderation don't exactly match the mores of this community. If you can implement it in such a way that the castellan of our motte Zorba and his trusted moderators are in full control of the LLM, like you use an opensource LLM and you run it on your own server or something, then I wouldn't be opposed to automating some rote moderation work with an LLM. But if we seek to be free and independent to run this community by our own standards, making our moderation dependent on tech companies with all sorts of incentives that don't align with ours seems misguided.
~ Frank Herbert
I choose my own bugbears. Or rather, I have them imposed on me and make peace with the fact.
At a difference of values? I shrug and move on. I can do rhetoric. I just don't like it all that much.
When it's a matter of fact, of observing clear trendlines for years? At some point in the last year, I've concluded that most of the skeptics are simply wrong. Or simple idiots. Arguing with them is no longer the best use of my time.
https://www.themotte.org/search/comments/?sort=new&q=author%3Aself_made_human%20LLM&t=all&page=1
Nobody can claim I haven't argued. At length. With remarkably unpleasant people. All while hoping to change their minds. All I got out of it was an ulcer, hernia and an aneurysm.
"AI skeptic" is an imperfect taxonomy. There are people more conservative than I am (and it's reasonable to disagree on priors). There's the people who think we've got AGI with GPT-4. And then there's Gary Marcus, Hlynka, and other people who misuse the gift of cognition.
There are reasonable skeptics. There are people who performatively attempt to mimic being reasonable, and fail, because their reasoning is as motivated as R1 trying not to mention a certain square. There are people who never even pretended.
And then there are the normies who don't know better, with varying degrees of their own motivated cognition. The "AI drank the water from my granny's IV drip" kind. The "they turned off her ventilator because of the electricity bills" fools. The world has never lacked for useful idiots.
If you say that you're unhappy about OAI and Anthropic's duopoly (as fragile as it is), then what can I say except so am I? In a reply written before yours, I've already suggested Chinese models as an acceptable alternative to the privacy conscious.
I am a moderator. I know how difficult doing that task well is for a human. I know that is not particularly difficult for even an older LLM. I have quite literally tried, nodded, and thought the models got it. Years ago.
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This is my biggest concern. I wouldn't trust any of the woke AIs to mod The Motte even if they had the technical capability to. Grok, maybe, but that's not a SOTA model.
My second biggest concern is technological dependence. If we built a forum based on active AI participation, what happens when the companies pull the models? We would have to use open source AIs to be safe, but those are a year or two behind proprietary models.
This is not true. As long as distillation works, open source models could potentially keep up. See Z.ai's GLM 5.2 is Claude Opus-level.
Not what I see.
Since this thread is about forum moderation rather than coding prowess, let's look at the text leaderboard on Chatbot Arena. The strongest open source model is glm-5.1 at 25th, followed by mimo-v2.5-pro at 32nd and glm-5.2 (max) at 33rd. The 24th strongest model is claude-opus-4-5-20251101-thinking, which as the name suggests came out in November 1st of 2025, 20.5 months ago.
Seems to me like "a year or two behind proprietary models" is accurate.
EDIT: Whoops, I accidentally added an extra year. Opus 4.5 actually came out 8.5 months ago. So open source models are less than a year behind proprietary models.
That leaderboard looks super sketch to me. Opus 4.6 better than gpt-5.6-sol-xhigh? It's definitely not been my experience that glm-5.2 is worse than Sonnet 4.6.
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The text leaderboard is completely useless; it has much more to do with writing style and formatting when answering banal questions than any serious difference in capabilities. For any reasonable definition of being capable of "forum moderation" pretty much any LLM will saturate that definition.
That being said I agree it is an extremely horrible idea to leave any sort of moderation to any LLM, no matter how capable it might be in theory.
Please don't do this.
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You don't need a SOTA model. I've definitely seen how well Gemini 2.0 Pro does that at job, and probably Gemini 1.5 Pro.
At scale, it would make sense to run our own open-weights model. The Chinese make them cheap, cheerful, and good-enough quality. There are "uncensored" or abliterated models falling off the back of a truck on HuggingFace.
The MVP would be something that can filter out the real dogshit, or at least flag it and reduce moderation load. Include the constitution, some worked examples (particularly tricky cases), and so on? It will work. No real need for extensive fine-tuning, the models have long been smart enough to figure it out on the fly.
Could an open source model solve the problem of radioactive CW threads triggering a filter? After all, if the model is open source, would that not mean it is possible to fine tune it so that it fits with the spirit of themotte?
It could. There are uncensored models out there that will at least attempt to do anything you ask of them. I haven't kept close tabs on what the most powerful/useful one is, at the time of writing. That's a moving target, but I keep stressing that we don't even need the latest and greatest of matrix multipliers.
This isn't a particular blocker. Even the frontier models would be adequate at the task. It would be possible to set up things at the backend such that a refusal or safety discard would simply mean that a particular comment/post gets moved to the "human approval" queue. In fact, if something is so radioactive that it absolutely won't be engaged with by a typical LLM in prod, then it likely warrants human intervention. We might let it through anyway.
As I've said before, somewhere, at some point: fine-tuning is usually a waste of time. You don't need it. You can probably fit every single moderation decision ever made on this site into <1 million tokens. You only need somewhere between a few thousand or tens of thousands of tokens to enable a decent model to learn in-context. To be clear, I'm using the formal-ish definition of fine-tune, which is a form of post-training.
Example: collect every moderation decision with more than 20 upvotes. That's a strong proxy for both being mod-approved, and for being a decision supported by the community. Can't be more than a thousand of those. Go to >40 and there's probably a few hundred. That is a degenerate but perfectly functional approach.
You'd do it with a harness and some md files surely. Have it go through all moderation decisions and distill the general rules into a file or set of files, keep all the base decisions on disc but only pull them into context when relevant. hobbyhorserule.md need only be parsed when the model thinks a post might violate that rule. Basic harness building stuff.
You could do that. I dare say you should do that. But even the no-effort option would work adequately.
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You know that all your posts got way more insufferable when you started passing them all through AI, right?
You used to be one of my favorite writers here. It's really a shame.
Are you accusing me of using AI on this post? Hah. No. I considered getting Fable to do the work for me, because that would have been mildly amusing. I didn't succumb to the impulse. Go check Pangram, if you care to.
If not, then all I can say is that I do consider feedback. My decisions are rarely not considered in depth. The unfortunate reality is that I have limited time, limited energy, and that I have good reason to use LLMs the way I do. I'm just more honest about disclosing the usage (limited and scrupulous as it is) when challenged or politely asked. Annoying people has never been an end-goal, but you don't become an Unslop finalist by being bad at what you do.
I am not bad at what I do. If you believe otherwise, I can only shrug.
Well, whatever the reason, there was a noticeable stylistic shift in your writing at some point. You became a more robotic caricature of yourself. Maybe a meds change, maybe life circumstances, idk. I hope everything’s going alright.
I am listening to your opinion. I am also going to point out that I'm an ACX BR finalist. On my first and only entry. It genuinely is too much to expect me to please everyone. I don't have the budget for it.
I can't think of a change in medication that could possibly account for what I will concede is a change. Everyone changes. It's a side effect of living, or at least learning from experience. I have no idea how much of the stylistic drift you've picked up on is due to internal processes, or because of LLM contribution. Which I have always explained has been less than 10% of the total of any given body of work. Usually less than 95%. Often less than 99%.
Incidentally, that book review is personal. I don't have to name which one it is, since it's rather obvious. If someone else can handle being repeatedly, unforgivably failed by the same system he works for better than me? Haven't met them yet. I think someone who had to pull themselves out of a moderately-severe depressive relapse, do what I've done in the last few months without writing about most of it - could get away with being much less kind and much more bitter.
So yes. Life circumstances. It's a miracle that I didn't hand in my resignation at multiple opportunities. Clearly there's something about my job that keeps me going, or my psyche has built a load-bearing pillar called "not giving up." There are worse pillars.
Now that Prima opened this can of worms, I concur. Your writing got more verbose and rambling than necessary around the time you started extolling awesomeness of AI assisted writing. However, as this is not a forum for writing advice but (supposedly) for debate, I don't think you get that much feedback about it. It's not really a great argumentative move to switch rails from topic-level argumentation to unsolicited stylistic opinions.
Let me illustrate. For instance, your comment here has two or possibly three points: Your book review was ACX finalist, so your writing can't be that bad. You claim that a percentage of your writing is not AI. [1] But you concede that you did have a depressive episode, and you found it helpful to write about it. All of which could have been one paragraph, not four.
[1] I find figurative use of percentages unpersuasive in general, but here in particular, what even is the claim stranded here in the weeds of rhetorical grandstanding? "[...] has been less than 10% of the total of any given body of work. Usually less than 95%. Often less than 99%."
I also agree, though I don't know about the rambliness. SMH could never be accused of being concise. I do feel that the quality of the comments has been worse.
On a lark, I got hy3 (free on openrouter!) to scrape @self_made_human's comments and graph length and score. I don't see a clear trend in length, but it does seem like there's been more comments with zero or negative scores since late 2025/early 2026.
/images/17841653280827062.webp
Thanks for doing that. If only anyone else who critiques me bothered to use actual data. Or actual effort.
Late 2025 onwards does not coincide with an increase in LLM usage, or the start of LLM usage. It does coincide with exams, incredible work-related stress, and the redirection of my energy.
If you care to check, you will find that for a while now, even my most innocuous comments reliably attract 2 to 3 downvotes. Who from? Dunno. I believe the informal term of art is "haters".
When I was effort posting, or putting more effort into my posting, that would have been masked by a significant number of upvotes. When I'm increasingly showing up primarily in the non-CWR threads, where most comments get a handful of votes anyway?
Still, I appreciate you checking. If you have a simple guide to how you went about it, I'd be keen. Or I can set 5.6 or Fable on it, now that I know hy3 can do it.
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Let me explain what is going on.
Apropos of very little, someone comes and tells me that they no longer like me, because I've done something they've disagreed with.
Sure. It's a free country, somewhere. This is a mostly free forum too, or at least a benevolent dictatorship. People are entirely allowed to say they don't like me. All else being equal (which it never is), I'd prefer they did like me, but I sleep easy at night regardless.
I have pointed out that they have the right to say what they wish, a right I'll defend to a sensible extent, if not to the death. I also have the right to disagree right back, and point at a mountain of semi-objective evidence.
From a Bayesian perspective, I would be an absolute idiot to overindex on a small n of people taking offense to what I consider an entirely benign practice, when I quite literally am being amply rewarded - financially, or through feedback - for what I'm doing.
To be blunt, if someone wants me to do something, and feels that strongly about it? Pay me.
An annoying post-hoc hypothesis, regardless of factuality. I regretfully inform you that my posts have always leant towards long and rambly. If you've managed to find some kind of canonical tipping point, ran things before and after to Pangram, or simply did intensive manual textual analysis to demonstrate your point? Then I would reward that with a more in-depth rebuttal. I have provided said rebuttals in the past. I also have work, and the need to sleep before work.
They're not figurative. You can go looking to find me counting, or estimating, at the time of writing.
"Sure."
Or: "I did not have the time to write a shorter letter."
I do not care to debate (very strongly), what I do in my free time, mostly for free.
How much are we talking in order to get you to, say, never consult AI in any fashion (not even editing) for any Motte post for 6 months?
I would pay to have the old you back, yes. I hold your older posts in extremely high regard.
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I really do hate what reddit has turned into. Some people say it's "dead internet theory," with the site getting ruined by bots. I say I wish they were bots, but I'm afraid that it's actually a humans who have been turned into something worse than bots. I feel like I'm actively losing brain cells every time I look at reddit. And yet I still find myself going there, out of habit or because google leads me there or because there's just nothing else left for large active text-based discussion forums.
To be fair, it might not be the fault of reddit itself, but a larger problem with the entire internet. There used to be so many independant websites and discussion forums. That meant a lot less pressure on any one site in particular. You could self-host a small, niche site with minimal features and weak security, and it would still limp along and be fine because it was part of a large ecosystem where everyone was using such sites. Now, it seems like every site has to either evolve into a large corporate walled garden, or die off entirely, either from complete lack of traffic or because it gets hacked and only used by bots or scammers.
I wonder if you (or, not literally you, but someone with a lot of resources) could attack this in a more indirect way? Part of the reason that small independant forums flourished in the 2000s was that there was so many free, easy tools for people to make and host their own websites. Nowadays those free sites are usually seen as not good enough to be exposed to the open internet, at least not without a lot of effort and customization, so people just default to using reddit/substack/youtube/whatever. But if you could create a tool that would allow someone to quickly and easily spin up their own custom site that is (a) open to the internet (b) easily discoverable on google and other algorithmic search engines (c) secure) (d) easy for new users to sign in and comment on (e) for the site owner to customize and monetize... then perhaps we'd see a resurgence in people creating actual, independant websites. And then you'd have less of the "responsibility without authority" problem of sites like reddit, where the mods that do the work are still stuck beholden to bland corporate policies and random anonymous idiots. We'd get all the advantages of real, private property instead of people just squatting on public land while park patrols try and fail to run things. And like you said, we might be getting close (or maybe even already there?) with vibe-coding tools where anyone can be like "make me a website focused on my incredibly niche interest, which looks like an old myspace page, but with great SEO and modern security."
Y'know, in some ways this isn't that big of a departure from what I'm already planning. All it requires is that the person be able to attach their own web domain to the submotte instead of just running it through our main domain. That's doable.
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IIRC, Usenet still exists.
Like all programming languages are just poor versions of Lisp, all forums are just poor versions of NNTP.
And that's a good thing?
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On this point, I don't think the main issue is about the tools or how easy they are to set up. There are too many academics running Discourse forum in default skin for it to be difficult to set up. I find the technical problem is twofold: Discourse and similar tools that have modern mobile-first look and feel tench have bad UX for serious discussion, but battle-tested forum software with good forum-discussion features looks old and is not mobile-friendly (if it has security patches). I suspect there may be root cause which is related to the mobile form factor vs typewriter form factor of the previous personal computing generation.
Anyway, I think you are on the right track on two important points. Reddit is worse because Reddit is people, not bots, and something important went missing when privately owned space of blogs and forums died. I'd just put social and network effects as the first primary reason. A social media monolith likes Facebook or Reddit or Discord won because literally everyone would be on their Discussion As A Service platform. Eventually every prospective forum admin who wishes to set up a niche discussion forum would be foolish not set their forum up in the most popular DAAS, as they can trust not only there will be enough people to populate it but all the relevant people are there. But because everyone is there, not just the people who the admin wants, another problem presented itself. Consequently, observe rise of the anti-FB, Discord ( discussion spaces are invite-only, and easier it is to find a discussion place, higher the chances that it is spiritually dead in bland noise of cacophony).
A second thought. I have an impression that many people who would have had inclination to participate in internet discussion for fun in the '00s or '10s have less time to do it. Either absolutely less time, because they are busy with jobs or other internet services, or relatively, because content by hobbyist will always be outcompeted by people who produce similar content professionally, full-time, for living. Exhibit A, see the modal career path of Youtube streamer you have heard about. One hears about streamers usually after they go pro for a reason. Exhibit B, see Substack. Why write posts for free if you are good enough writer to monetize on it?
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I don't think you can purposely replace an existing social media site like Reddit. Barring the problems of this probably being considered an 'extremist' site in the eyes of a lot people, the networking effects of something like Reddit are just too hard to overcome. I think what you can do is make this its own place that evolves over time to fill its own niche -- namely a place with strong moderation rules and wide allowance of acceptable topics.
The trouble as we've all known since back on the CWT on the SSC sub is that this type of forum attracts those who desire open discussion but can't have the discussions they want on any mainstream site. Those who want to engage in that discussion from the other end of the political spectrum might find it enjoyable to engage, but they'll almost always be overrun because they have lots of other places they can go talk, but the smart righties don't have those options so they stick around longer. You probably end up with lots of people like me who fall into the center-left (in the old definition) neoliberal types that don't comment, and instead just read because we like the variety of opinions that we normally don't see, but we also don't want to get into genteel fights with angry extremists.
I think it could theoretically be possible to broaden this space. I don't really post in CW threads but I might post in other threads. The problem is that the people who are here are here because of the culture war stuff. There are other dedicated spaces to talk about gardening that are full of knowledgeable people. The only real reason to talk about a topic like that here is because you've come to know the others on the forum and it brings more personality and history to the discussion. What you need is some reason for an outsider to come and join in a non-CW thread, but that doesn't really exist at the moment.
Of course it's easier to critique than to build solutions. I don't know what the solution would be. Is there some CW tangential topic that this community has an advantage in talking about that would provide value to an outsider? That's where I would start.
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My advice. I made it very specific, but of course you can take and leave whichever parts you want:
Start by re-creating this website, with better architecture and minor improvements, but no major new features. First list all the features of this website (posts, comment trees, upvote/downvote, context, user profile, followers...), then come up with an architecture, then implement it, then copy all the data from this site onto the new one, then deploy it on https://beta.themotte.org and let mods and volunteers test it, then replace this site with the new one. Feel free to use Claude for everything, not only to implement the copy but list the features and maybe even plan an architecture etc. He is very useful as long as you make sure to go over everything he does and improve it to your standards. Again, don't implement any major new features until it can replace https://themotte.org.
Do exactly what Reddit has done with subreddits except where you've noticed issues, specifically the ID/name thing. That is a textbook example of great design: extremely simple (low code maintenance cost and user-facing, you don't even have to mention it exists) and fixes a real problem without any real downside.
Accept that this forum may not grow much so there may not be many communities here. Maybe you can create separate ones for the recurring threads: Culture War, Tinkering, Wellness, etc. Or maybe keep the Motte one community, and create a separate spin-off that has multiple.
If you create a spin-off, ask yourself: why would someone join my forum instead of an alternative, or create a community instead of a subreddit etc.? For example, maybe you can make a game dev spinoff that's better than existing game dev subreddits. Make sure to advertise why wherever you promote it. I recommend any politically-correct spinoff be an entirely separate from this non-PC one. I don't think lack of interoperability will be an issue. Speaking of...
IMO, most attempts at federation are a "solution in search of a problem". I recommend adding all federation features ad-hoc: only when needed, as simply as you can. In fact, I recommend this for all features that don't already exist on this old site.
For example, if someone wants to link a post from another instance of this forum (which implies you succeeded enough for there to be two instances), they may simply create a post whose URL is that of the post from the other instance. What I would do, is tell people to do that initially. If it becomes common enough to be worth spending maintenance for better UX, I would add official support so that, when the website sees a link to another forum instance, it displays it as a fancy "crosspost". The website can even pull comments from the other instance's post, and let it provide authentication credentials, then push local comments to it (making both posts effectively the same)...but only after crossposts are first implemented, if by then it seems like it would be useful.
Similarly, if someone wants to create an account on another instance, they can create it with the same username. If they want to show that they own both accounts, they can add a PGP key and list both instances in the account bios. "Federation" could be adding explicit support for this: if it's common enough, split the "bio" into "bio" and "PGP" (you can migrate the database), allow instances to store a list of "federated" other instances, and then for example, when someone follows a user, the server can notify them if not only the local account posts, but any account with its PGP key on any instance posts (possible by the instance servers pinging each other any time a user posts, just to alert followers on other instances).
Unfortunately, I'm skeptical this would work out. Why would people trust you to host their site (instead of Discourse etc.), especially when if they really trust you they can simply create a community? But I think the bigger issue is you will not want to host the instances of people who ask you. There are two big issues: 1) these people aren't technically proficient (or they'd self-host), so they'll constantly ask you for small fixes and threaten to move if you don't help them; and 2) these people will sometimes get into trouble with law enforcement, unless you moderate them the same way you moderate your own site. All these issues raise the question, why not just host the community yourself?
If you truly want to give others peace of mind and absolve yourself of responsibility, then make your forum software open-source and self-hostable. You can make it easy to self-host by creating a Docker container, which is deployable to a VPS in basically one click, and I don't think you have to worry about making it accessible for complete laymen, because the only people who will try to self-host are technically proficient (others will just make a community on your or another host).
Ultimately, communities succeed or fail by their culture, dictated by moderators and members, more than technology. The "Foundation" you have on this site can be the default for new communities, but trying to force their moderators to adhere to it is pointless at best, because if the moderators suck the community will fail.
You already proposed what I think is the proper solution to bad moderators: give admins (yourself) the power to rename a community to something niche and create a new community with the old name and new moderators. I'd recommend letting moderators police their own communities mostly hands-off, with three exceptions: 1) obviously if they do illegal stuff remove them, 2) handle moderator disputes like "rouge moderator removes everyone else before they can remove him" however you feel is best, and 3) if it's a community you really care about, make yourself a moderator (which tells members that you will interfere and enforce your Foundation, and if they don't like it they can create their own spin-off).
The Fediverse is the principled direction to take here. I imagine a bridge service could be created. Lemmy for example is federated and it's also basically a reddit clone, so the data plane should be compatible. When the exodus was being prepared by @ZorbaTHut on the OG /r/TheMotte I brought lemmy up, but its aesthetics were worse, and my spare time was negative.
ETA: Since code is free, maybe we can link up to Bluesky too? I recall some grumblings that the TheMotte is too right of center
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So I'd actually take this a step further; what I'd do would be to freeze the DB schema, reimplement it on top of the same DB, and then make changes from there. No copy required and it lets us do a gradual changeover and even a backpedal if needed.
Yeah, absolutely agreed. I think there are improvements to be made, but Reddit works, we'd just start there.
Yep. It's quite possible that it just ends up dying an early death. Such is life.
So there's a few reasons I really want federation.
Part of it, I will acknowledge, is as a kind of moral pillar. I don't like vendor lock-in. It sucks. I don't want to be part of the problem.
Then another part of it is so I can kick subcommunities off without feeling too bad about it. Getting kicked off Reddit is nearly a death knell; getting kicked off Gmail simply isn't. I don't want to be in charge of delivering those death knells, and the easiest way to avoid that is to make sure they're not death knells.
A third part is that in theory we can link up with other groups like Lemmy. I dunno if that would actually work out, but I like the concept, at least.
If they make a "community" community, they don't own it, we do, and we'd be pushing the "foundation" thing. A lot of people will be fine with that and never run into issues! Not everyone though.
But also, it's a single integrated site. A lot of people don't look at The Motte simply because it's not Reddit; they have all their links in one place. There's a number of other forums out there that maybe I would join, but I would never look at, because I don't want to add another stop to my rotation. So "we'll host your site and add it to people's comment notifications" starts looking relatively attractive.
Absolutely! :)
So, a note here. I'm not suggesting having a single metamotte-wide Foundation (well, okay, I am, but not one that specifies rules), and I'm not suggesting holding other people to the Motte's foundation. I'm saying that at some point they are required to write something reasonable - which I'd help with - and that they will then be subject to it. It's not "force the moderators to adhere to it"; it's "if you cannot adhere to it, you will not be moderating this community anymore", and then we elect new users out of the community.
But this is only if they really are breaking the intent of the community. If it's a young community without a foundation, or a private community, fine, whatever, we'll just rename it elsewhere and let someone else scoop up the namespace.
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I'd be willing to throw some hours at this, though I'll recognize my area of focus is neither webdev nor the massively parallel http serve optimizations you'd need to have this scale.
My biggest immediate concern is the face value of "What if subreddits had a unique internal ID, but the front-page label was replaceable?" That's a hard problem, and one with a lot of bad solutions. Reddit (and tumblr, and a lot of other social media) overloads the value of 'name'. It's both an identifier for access purposes, a community label, and a navigation and search aid.
So... let's pretend we have /r/trees (id: 101) and /r/pot (id: 102), which are humorously mixed up so that 101 refers to marijuana, and 102 is the horticulture of apple trees. The joke finally got old, and everyone agrees (note: this will never happen) that they need to be fixed so that /r/pot is attached to ID 101, and /r/trees is ID 102. What does that mean, from a technical level?
Is the new link themotte.org/r/101/this-is-a-pot-thread, and all that changes is what themotte.org/r/pot redirects toward? Because humans don't remember even small numbers well, and if the IDs are alphanumeric or GUID, they'll hate it. Or is it themotte.org/r/pot/this-is-a-pot-thread, and any previous links are updated automatically (that seems a database nightmare, and impossible for off-site links)? Or is the ID part of the thread identifier, and the submotte id only a navigation aid?
Who arbitrates when /r/politics has been taken over by your outgroup, can they fund the inevitable lawsuit or forced arbitration, and what's that look like to normal users?
I think there's ways to sell it, but I think it matters heavily what you're selling. People like reddit, tumblr, twitter, yada, because it's hilariously easy to go from a community member to running your own minisite, and the pressure to do so first means that anyone on the fence either jumps or ends up drawn to an aggregator. Even though setting up a XenoForum site is just a couple hours of work, the
Part of your alpha is the direct website functionality and the aggregator work, but it also needs to be the services you're offering, which is one of the spots that Reddit/Tumblr/whatever have historically been the worst at. People get committed when they buy in, even small costs, and there's a lot of genuine services that are pretty valuable to users and that traditional social media has avoided.
But those services are their own fracture point: DNS means you can get ARFCOM'd, private messaging or live chat adds a lot of COPA concerns, custom templating rather than rawdogging CSS means support costs. So tradeoffs, there. And there's a very serious temptation to go full Discord and start upselling useless crap, at which point your customers hate you.
Uh, some non-obvious problems:
Categorization. I'll take ARK as an example: you have /r/playark at the 'official' subreddit, /r/ark as the community subreddit, /r/survivetogether as the 'official' server listing, /r/playarkservers for community server listings, a handful of other subreddits for specific ports, yada, and that's just the stuff that's on reddit. And while ARK is particularly poorly thought out (badum tish), that's not really unique. /r/ffxiv has about thirty related subreddits, and maybe a dozen or so subreddits that are still about FFXIV that the /r/ffxiv moderators either don't want to highlight or actively loathe. This both pollutes the namespace, and it also means finding a list of everything ARK-related or FFXIV-related is extremely difficult, rather than a single existing page.
There's a couple solutions here. The namespace solution is the obvious coder one: r.games.ffxiv.<community> and r.games.ark.<community>, throw a page that lists them with some sort capability (and maybe allow management of that page by moderators for the recognized community), done. (uh, until you think about Prey 2017 vs Prey 2006). And then you think about literally anything other than video games, where the categorization gets weird fast. This is how usenet worked, but it's also why usenet ended up with things like alt.horror.werewolves having a bunch of furries and therians.
The other is tag-based. Still have the collision problem, but the bigger issue's whether you allow user tagging -- see tumblr's search for how that goes -- or have to do some work to manage it.
Separation. Even if you don't host images/video, you're going to get content you don't want available to every user, and you're going to get content that goes together like peanut butter and some of reddit's now-banned infamous subreddits. Smut's the most obvious case, here, but it's also the 'easiest'... and it's pretty telling that Reddit's NSFW marker keeps getting reused for everything from spoilers to gore to trychtophobia to spiders to a million other things.
Search. Good fucking god, reddit, what the everliving fuck.
Federation and the Transitive Property. I'm... not sure if this is a general problem, or one specific to the Mastodon implementation, but there's historically been a tendency to threat some forms of content as fundamentally corrosive, and I don't expect that to decrease. Technical solutions haven't historically been sufficient, in general because of reputation effects, in some cases (the baraag saga) augmented by legal concerns.
I like this, it's like reinventing USENET. Arguably the overarching vision here is exactly USENET, but on the web.
Y'know, you're not wrong about that.
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This is roughly my plan, yeah.
themotte.org/r/pot means "the current subreddit named pot, whatever that might be"; it is not actually a unique identifier. It's possible that if you go to /r/pot itself, you would get redirected to themotte.org/r/pot/main/102, which will always refer to Subreddit 102, later to be known as trees, even if it's no longer /r/pot. This means that anyone going to "/r/pot" ends up in whatever community we currently have blessed with the name "/r/pot", but a copypasted link gets that specific community even if it has since been renamed.
Thread links don't include a subreddit ID, but they do include a post ID; the subreddit and thread name are completely irrelevant. Reddit already does part of this -https://old.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/1tehscm/theres_a_fox_family_living_under_our_front_porch/ is the exact same as www.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/1tehscm/i_sure_do_love_beef/. And while it does validate the /r/aww part for some reason, the comment ID is globally unique. We just have to make it pay attention to that.
Well, the buck stops with me, in the end. So, "me, or someone delegated by me to solve these problems".
One thing I'm currently unsure of is how to tell when it needs actual attention; obviously any subreddit as big as /r/politics is going to have people constantly spamming "this subreddit is violating its own rules" reports. But this feels like one of those "we'll deal with that later" things; I can't come up with a solution when I don't see how the problem behaves. It will be a problem, but this also feels solvable.
Yeah, this is fair; I may have to bump "you can make a site" up in priority for the sake of buy-in.
DNS may be a surprisingly small issue; ARFCOM was due to being kicked off Godaddy, I think? There are much better DNS providers out there who are far less eager to kick people off.
I'm actually not too concerned about custom templating, you can do sufficiently bad stuff with CSS that a real bad actor will find a way to be a nuisance anyway. One step at a time here, honestly.
COPPA is a gigantic pain. I would probably just remove 13-or-younger logins to start with, frankly. This is maybe something I should be doing already though. I am . . . not looking forward to the legal side of this.
Huh. That's a neat idea.
It is definitely . . . controversy-fraught, let's say. At the same time, if community names really aren't permanent, it feels more adjustable. Something like the Ark situation could be handled by just tossing a thread onto all relevant communities and saying "hey, we want to solve this, hash out what names you'd prefer?" and doing a doge-ish process to come to a sensible agreed-upon conclusion.
(I would fully want to automate the Doge process.)
I'm actually not familiar enough to Tumblr to know what's going on here. What did happen?
I think my gut feeling is that user tagging works actually pretty well as long as you have reasonable thresholds for when you officially bless tags. Steam games are technically user-tagged and do just fine; I can also think of, uh, a site with a number in it that has a phenomenally thorough crowdsourced tagging system.
This does tap into one other actual big problem, which is the increasing tendency of governments to want to segregate anything even vaguely adult away from the entire rest of the world.
I can think of a few approaches.
One is to just not worry about it. Reddit still has porn. Deal with it. I feel like porn is less of a problem for communities than it is for community managers without a spine, and I don't plan to be that person.
Another is to have a "everything except the porn" URL, and then an "everything including the porn" URL, using the "everything except the porn" URL pretty much everywhere we can. You want the porn, someone will eventually mention the with-the-porn version; go to that site.
Yeah, you're not wrong.
I think there's a point where this can be solved by the biggest whale simply saying "no, we're not going to do that; you can de-federate with us if you want, but other than that, deal with it, because we are not planning to de-federate with other groups". There's a lot of really awful people running email servers that can still send emails to gmail, so this is clearly not an unsolvable problem. And that's not even indirect federation, that's direct sends!
Copypaste seems survivable, but I'd be a little cautious about what that does if people manually type a link to a community. Admittedly, might not be a common enough use case to matter.
Yeah. And a lot of the metrics that would be naively useful, like whether there's a bunch of splintering or a quickly growing competitor subreddit, are bad to make actual measures because Goodhart.
Fair point. I'm mostly thinking about the incompetent actor that needs ten hours of your tech support's time while you get a reputation for 'breaking' a sub for them putting a period in the wrong place. But that's what reset/load default buttons are for.
For fandom reasons, Tumblr's pretty notorious for weird, overlapping, and very unintuitive tags, and despite that, those tags can take off aggressively. Sometimes this works out well, especially when it's got some coordination: #undertail has 'stuck' several years after Toby Fox proposed it, if anyone wants to see Asgore dad bod and some skeletons bumping uglies. Just as importantly, if they don't, they have to make a significant typo to get from #undertale to that one. But more often, you end up with (overlapping) acronyms, barely related content using snowclones, or bizarre memes (general news updates get tagged with SPN shipping names).
And then you get trolls that will spam every high-profile matter with unrelated content, either to screw up tag following, trying to push their own visibility, or to start fights.
Tumblr's user tagging system has been kinda reused as a way to out-of-thread comment, and it's tied to (thankfully only original) posts rather than to subreddit or forum equivalents, so some of those issues (eg, threads getting tagged 'lmoa' or 'yes') aren't as likely to show up in a sanely designed site. But they're illustrative.
Yeah, the boorus have definitely made it work. That said, they've also typically had to do so with a very heavy hand and a lot of cruft: you probably don't have to worry about a four hundred line analysis to translate "pussy" to "vagina" (a literal two-year on-going process at e621, still incomplete), but I'd still plan early around a situation where a big fandom coalesced around thirty or so completely unrelated tags, some of which overlap with other intended uses of those same tags.
That's fair. I'd long-hoped that the old compromise of 'I won't make you see it, you don't make me see you whine' could last, and despite its difficulties, there's reason to hope it was rejected rather than really failed.
I guess I'm more motioning around the non-porn variants being a problem that will arise, if not one as immediately likely to result in legal threat.
Worth noting that Goodhart is relatively easy to avoid if you just don't mention what the metrics are. The Motte has always had thresholds for new users to stop getting their messages filtered. Nobody but the mods have ever known the details of those and we've never had trouble with people gaming them.
I'm honestly fine with a heavy hand for some of the larger and more popular tags, and the smaller ones aren't as important.
. . . that said how does it take that long to change one word? Shouldn't that just be a mildly fancy SQL query?
Yeah, this is fair.
I think my answer here is to follow the letter of the law, because I mean, it is the law, but also to make the rationale as public as possible.
"We have removed this due to a legal note from this party."
Fair solution.
You'd think, but there's a lot of uses where the slang term is the actual word and it shouldn't be changed (generally forms of outercourse), where it's used for an entirely different reason (there are four characters and three artists with the word in their name, mostly as cat references), and an absolute nightmare of spaces where sometimes it'd mean vagina exclusively and sometimes it means vulva exclusively.
Which is funny for a sex booru debating whether the vibrator is going in or going on for each of 4k posts, but might be more tedious when dealing with 100 indie games that may or may not have been mods at some point.
Still, "generate a list of terms where it shows up, sit down and solve all the tags with a hundred uses or more, ask an AI to do a first-pass judgement on the rest and report on any with a very clear answer, put the rest into a quick crowdsourced list".
This feels solvable.
Ah well.
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How funny, this is right around the 4 year anniversary of my banning from Reddit. I genuinely don't miss that place, but it was never, ever clear as to why they nuked a high-karma account with 9 years of history and no actual misbehavior on record.
The way bans are handled was probably my least favorite part of Reddit moderation and administration, because as you state:
People were banned despite not violating the rules, or violating rules that usually go unenforced, or for violating rules that changed regularly and without much notice. And they always deflect from any responsibility to explain. And the appeal process is nonexistent.
There was a very shifty tactic I noticed where if the admins or some other group wanted a particular sub banned, they'd go about targeting that sub's mods for bannings, and then when there are no mods left, ban the subreddit itself for being 'unmoderated.' Which is a nice, clean reason for banning... but there's no effective route for the members of such a sub to jump in and save it! They can only spin up another one and hope it doesn't catch the eye of Sauron right away.
The other option, of course, was to let one of the admin's allies onto the mod team, which then meant they could take it over almost any time they wanted. Moderation is a difficult job especially when done for free, but if the moderation job has too much power that can be exercised arbitrarily, it will inherently attract the exact types who should never ever be entrusted with it.
Hence why I think the 'killer feature' of TheMotte is the explicit moderation policies that make banning a very much last resort, and give warnings, with explicit identification of what offense is being punished, and generally proportional punishments, that can be scaled up or down based on other moderators or users' input.
That's hard to do at scale. Maybe easier if you allow some AI assistance.
So when you talk about scaling, I'm somewhat less worried about the codebase (not my area of expertise), and I think you could just point Fable at it and get all that fixed up. I'm worried about the part that requires a high-conscientiousness human-in-the-loop to apply the rules with an even hand, even when they're personally offended.
Those types of people are rare. Their time, valuable.
You'd need to be able to handle the massive influx in reports that come when normies get into a space where mere consensus isn't enough to get someone booted, and they are constantly trying to invoke moderator power to get rid of people they disagree with. The endgame is that moderators are forced to spread their efforts thinner and we see more false positives and false negatives, which reduces trust in the moderators, or moderator burnout.
I'm just looking into my crystal ball here, I trust your judgment with regard to this places' future. But if you ever decide to step down (as said elsewhere, you're a true Cinncinatus, I understand if you want to return to farming), do please try and give the users a chance to step in and keep it running.
Reddit has somehow, for some reason, banned /r/random "due to being unmoderated". That makes the "Random" button in https://old.reddit.com no longer work. That fairly represents the more general state of the site today.
L M A O
See, there's even a subreddit that purports to allow one to claim banned/abandoned reddits and I've not once seen it work.
Apparently about six months ago it was used to hijack /r/puppets. On behalf of some private business. Yeah that about sums up the state of the site.
I've used it successfully, for what it's worth!
Like eight years ago, but still.
My brain immediately went "8 years? Oh so circa 2013 Reddit wasn't so bad back-ohhhhhh."
But yeah, Pre-Covid. The_Donald still had a strong foothold at that point. That was before Huffman intentionally editted that one guy's comment.
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Or worse, they ask a question in the final post and then they block to give readers the impression that their interlocutor was left speechless.
No better place to find the most bad faith actors imaginable than Reddit.
At least on twitter, you can screenshot the block and attach it to the conversation easily.
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I was talking with someone about this phenomenon years ago, unrelated to Reddit. We were discussing people’s extremist, polarizing and asinine views and attitudes they have and how it mixes in with the Internet. One thing people forget is that these people have ‘always’ existed, long before modern tech was a thing. Lunatics abound in every community, we used to call those people the “village idiots.” All the Internet has done is given it visibility. I had that epiphany once when someone sent me a YouTube video of some redneck who was hosting a talkshow and my first thought was, “so microphones and a video camera have just now come to Alabama for the first time…”
Back when Jack Dorsey was still running Twitter and their content moderation policies were generating a lot of controversy, he did an interview with someone where he was talking about the difficulty of trying that part of the platform correct and he made a remark about “making Twitter a better place,” by “cross pollinating people view different views to interact with each other,” and I started laughing when I heard that. Because that was never going to work and this has been the way of the world for thousands of years. People naturally don’t stomach the views of others they disagree with very well, and tend to have an intense emotional dislike of people whose core values to their identity oppose their own. It doesn’t occur even to more intellectually minded people that most actors out there aren’t like them and most people are bad faith actors; just not in ways they realize.
Reason really is an acquired taste for most people.
Yeah, I think there's a dark pattern that results from being relegated to an echo-chamber about 90% of the time, then the algorithm feeds you a rage-inducing post from someone from the outgroup so you can unload on/dogpile them, then immediately return to your echo chamber before you have to possibly learn something from them.
That's what cross-pollination does in practice.
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Hah, wow, I hadn't seen that one before. Admiration for that being clever, I suppose. Also fuck those people.
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I'll give you my honest feedback.
You are a smaller, modern Cincinnatus. I have an incredible amount of respect and admiration for what you've done here, and the extended operation of this place is something I view as an act of providence.
I cannot overstate how much I appreciate you and what you do. This may be a mostly thankless job, but at least today, it's not entirely thankless.
Thank you.
You're welcome. I hope I can keep doing that for a very long time :)
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Honestly I think focus on uptime and more distinct formatting / structure for the CWR thread would be a better move. But then again, now that I think about it, I really like that the website is pretty bare bones and not super heavy. I’ve been really interested in the idea of community token budgets - as models are more able to do things autonomously, the limiting factor is token cost. I think it’d be cool to replace the Patreon with something that serves as a bucket for AI token cost for site improvements.
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. I ended up leaving because I felt I was exposing myself to extremism. 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 pay for ChatGPT Plus (and somehow seem to have access to 5.6) and almost never hit even half of my token limit. I'd be very willing to donate usage somehow for site improvements or community needs. Idk how people use that many tokens.
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Is it? My phone's web browser is a native app, and although its programming language options ("Javascript" or "something more tolerable that transpiles to Javascript") aren't great, it seems to run pretty well, from my perspective anyway. It works much better than some of the apps I have. Some of the web browser characteristics that "run pretty well" from my perspective might be bugs from some providers' perspective, like how annoying notifications are opt-in instead of opt-out and nothing can demand my contacts list, so I can see why apps are popular to provide, but it's harder for me to see why they'd be greatly preferred by users. Is it just that providers stack the deck? When a web site that works perfectly well on my laptop instead gives me a "you should use the app!" blocker on my phone, I'm pretty sure that's not because phone web browsers aren't universal turing machines anymore, and I wouldn't be surprised if providers who want you to use their app anyway see things like substandard mobile CSS as a less intrusive way to help nudge you to it.
Agreed very much.
"Install the The Motte webapp by saving this page to your home screen!" is definitely my favorite kind of app.
Installing an app is basically inviting that random pale stranger with a Slavic accent into your house -- it allows the service you want to use to grow roots in your device.
For some apps, I judge they have good reason to be an app -- an OTP authenticator running on a website would seem slightly pointless, for example.
But we are in an age where people can build usable videoconferencing websites. Where you can play quake3 in your browser.
The Motte is very much running on text, the kind of content browsers have been able to display well for as long as they have existed. (Unless you are viewing comments on substack. Then you just need a bigger machine to accommodate all their fancy JS frameworks which save you from having to click refresh to view new comments.)
Besides, my feeling is that half of the apps are just glorified wrappers of some website in any case. For example, I would be utterly shocked if the imgur app had any advantages to the website, instead of just wrapping a browser engine without an adblocker and adding notifications.
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I'm pretty much with you. Native apps are more powerful than web pages, but developers don't reliably use that power to improve the experience.
Sometimes they simply don't develop the (easy) features that web developers would struggle to make, and other times they make user-hostile features that web developers can't.
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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)
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 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.
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You know, I am very happy that this space exists. It's great. I can voice my righty opinions without being mobbed by the average denizen of Reddit. But it's precisely because I can do this that intellectual left-wingers leave the space. You've seen it. I've seen it. The nice ones that would be pleasant to talk to have genuine emotional distress to arguments that they find distasteful. They don't stick it out to fight it. They leave and never return. So the conversation to expand the Motte might be - how do we keep the people we already have from disengaging from the space we have now?
I... believe, that mods engage in affirmative action, to keep the leftists we do have from leaving. I have no evidence of this. But from observed experience, there seems to be a longer leash for the provocatively left-leaning. But the problem is that the temperament of those that remain are not in the first group. They are either clever trolls or freshly educated zoomers who seem to be unaware of the very basic rightist objections to common leftist beliefs. A policy that is intended to preserve our left-leaning goodposters saves the worst of them, instead.
Is this better than having no leftists at all? Supposedly. As good as mod work is in preserving the character of the Motte, I think the fault of the righty-consensus here - in addition to the usual social media partisanship factor - is exogenous. Namely, the broader leftist intellectual sphere is intolerant. Not to say that righties are any better, but they lack the cultural and academic soft power to abuse ingroup inclinations IRL. There's nothing we can do about it. The academic-NGO complex moderates righty ideas out of the public conversation. You have to go out of your way to even know that such objections exist that do not immediately cast our motives as racist, misogynist, etc.
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 don't know how to solve this partisan self-sorting problem. But it should be something that should be kept in mind. 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.
Resident leftist here (at least on some topics: degrowth, veganism, openness to at least reading about things like Marxism). I don't feel like I fit in either of your categories (freshly educated zoomer, troll). I sometimes get dogpiled here, but my most severe dogpile came from a rather rightest view (castrate all chads), and I think that I have both learned quite a bit from this forum, and hopefully also done some enlightening myself.
How is this a rightist view at all? I am not trying to be uncharitable but I broadly view all of leftism as an attempt to castrate all chads. The right is much more tolerant of letting chads be chads.
The idea that we need to regulate the sexual marketplace via tradition is definitely a conservative view. Not a libertarian view mind you, but libertarians arent really rightists.
You fantasize about castrating chads because you will not allow yourself to fantasize about putting women in chains. That doesn't make you a rightist, it makes you an incel.
I do not fantasize about castrating chad anymore. I was shown the errors of my ways.
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I’m pretty right wing but I find a little of Marx’s writings interesting. For example, I think he is right on the alienation of labor. Doesn’t mean his solution makes sense.
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I speak in the most general of terms. I applaud you for sticking around. I admit that my bias towards replying to the comments that annoy me the most has skewed my perceptions. I may have exaggerated in my charactization of the political polarisation but I do not think it is baseless.
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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)
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.
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.
I think you just run into network effects. It is hard to take on the incumbent because of network effects even if your replacement is better.
Absolutely true, yep.
But it's easier if the incumbent sucks :V
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The blue tribe has Reddit.com The red tribe has scored.co which grew out of Reddit’s ejected The_Donald sub with 6m members at its high point. The grey tribe has lesswrong.com
There are others, but these are pretty big sites.
We really are about as active as a single subreddit. I’d love to see a philosophy thread here, focused on the abstract and non-culture-war, with these insightful and interesting folks, but I’ve gotten little buy-in on my threads.
However, I do have some ideas for a distributed problem-solving forum which might be integrated into the codebase.
Whatever the place where the grey tribe discusses (non-AI) politics, it is certainly not LW. Politics is the mind-killer and all that. This does not mean that the grey tribe is apolitical (Scott certainly is not), just that they discuss politics elsewhere (e.g. ACX, or here).
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...So long as the prevailing powers that be in the space are ultimately on their side. They're content to be there when they still have the Global Rules they can get you sitebanned by the sympathetic admins under. They're content to be there when they know mama's watchful hand is poised to strike the mod team if they ever allow anything they consider truly contentious. Reddit Motte was not free; that's why it isn't on reddit anymore.
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.
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I mean even when the Motte was on Reddit I don't think it's ever formed a meaningful Lefty-Motte. If you want to just get automatic positive feedback for left alignment you've got like 90% of the internet to do that on.
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the donald along with kia2 tried to make a reddit clone but it flopped quite badly. And the donald is much bigger than this place. They are still somewhat alive but engagement outside the core subs is essentially zero.
I think the fact is that few people in these niche subs actually browse a significant other portion of the site, and of those who do, there is little overlap in the other subs they browse. Besides that, I think other big subs are heavily driven by a handful of power users.
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 :)
There’s always the option of running bots that populate the subs with high-quality engagement bait and are explicitly listed as blue, grey, or red tribe bots. Add a switch for users to show or hide them, and a switch for users to show subthreads that get at least x amount of positive engagement.
The tricky part is figuring out how to scrape that data so we're posting quality links, which is a tough problem in its own right. But, yeah, not necessarily an impossible one.
We can frankly also just leech off Reddit by looking at what's posted there and reposting it :V
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There's a bigger problem here, and it's the perennial story of enshittification: Everybody has a price. The thing you're describing would be worth a lot of money if successful, for various reasons. 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.
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I love TheMotte. Over the years it has quietly become my default reddit alternative for serious political and culture war discussions. I appreciate the hard work of users who consistently put out quality writeups, the moderators for keeping the place true to its founding spirit, and you for keeping the site alive. I’d be happy to chip in financially if it helps sustain the project.
That said, I think the biggest barrier to turning TheMotte into a serious reddit alternative (beyond the coding difficulties, I suppose) is precisely the high standards that make it what it is. Reddit (social media generally) rewards low effort, high engagement content. Outrage coded one liners and tribal signaling are the only things that drive content virality and user traffic. It's human nature. A top comment here on the Iran war might be a detailed, insightful commentary with citations. The reddit equivalent of the same would just be a never ending list of “Fuck Trump” with 10k upvotes.
Mottizens have their obvious leanings, but the upvote system here still rewards effort and substance over pure engagement. I may disagree with the jannies on various points, but you genuinely captured lightning in a bottle with the current crew. 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. It’s impressive that it works as well as it does.
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".
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These are some exciting propositions. I also use reddit for a lot of things, but generally, TheMotte is better in most ways; freedom to say what you please, some ideological alignment on my part, pretty decent moderation. If you're asking if users are in favor of this, I am in favor of it.
One of my favorite subreddits these days is /r/DeepStateCentrism for providing a lot of article links, getting you past the paywall, and providing pretty good discussion of it. I wasn't around for the bare link repository, but my imagination says that it was something like that. Perhaps this is a route to get the bare link repository back. And, if what happened to /r/moderatepolitics (takeover by left wing partisans) happens to a muttereddit here (we need to hold a poll of possible names for submottes), or really any number of subreddits that basically got brigaded after 2024, it can just be renamed, which will be far less frustrating than pretending it's always been like that. That might not be scalable, though.
As far as feasibility goes, nobody knows if you'll be successful until you try. As you and others have noted, rdrama and themotte have been pretty wildly successful as far as reddit offshoots go, even if there is no growth, because all the rest of them die off quick. I guess some pertinent questions would be where you plan on getting more users, and what could entice them to leave whatever they're using now. The obvious answer there is reddit, but I imagine it's going to continue a rightward skew, because most of the disillusioned redditors tend to be right wing. Oh well. Hopefully there's enough space for a TheSchism submotte.
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You know, I've also gone back to Reddit a bit recently, and find that even beyond the normal "Redditor complains about Redditors" complaints, AI chatbots have basically killed it for me as a concept
I started playing World of Warcraft Classic recently, which is more videogaming than I've done since, well, I raided on World of Warcraft fifteen years ago. And starting up again, I had a lot of questions about things that I needed answered. Both mechanical questions, like "What stats should I prioritize for a leveling fury warrior, what's a good rule of thumb for comparing the dps from dual wielding 2 1h weapons versus using a single 2h weapon as I level?" and more social questions like "What's good loot etiquette in a leveling PUG 5 man group for needing stuff for a main spec if I'm playing an off-spec for the group?"
These are questions that Reddit is naturally great at answering, but they're also questions that in the late stages of a twenty year old game, nobody wants to answer on Reddit, and Reddit's search function remains intentionally trash for the purpose of avoiding questions being easily answered. If you ask the question, you might get a couple dismissive non-detailed answers ("Just use the standard arms build moron") ("It's a twenty year old game don't you know this already!"), you might get a recurring argument among powerusers that doesn't really answer your question, you most probably get low engagement and nothing at all. Chatbots aren't good at answering these questions on their own, they tend to get lost and make so many mistakes that you would get kicked out of any group if you made mistakes like that ("A lot of Rogues need on Corpsemaker because they want to try out 2h axes for a while!"), and hallucinate things that don't exist ("Hunters should farm Herod in Scarlet Monastery for the Scarlet Rifle rare drop gun").
But combine the two and you have a stew going! Ask ChatGPT or Grok or Deepseek to simulate a /r/classicwowtbc discussion on a scenario like "I was tanking RFK and Corpsemaker dropped, I needed on it because that was the only item I was running for, I won the roll but the Ret Paladin ragequit and tried to wipe the group by pulling adds, was I wrong to do that?" and tell it to simulate it as though there was a lot of engagement, and it will do a good enough job simulating all the replies from different angles and help me understand how players view the question. It's actually a lot of fun, it lets me simulate Reddit if everyone on Reddit cared about what I cared about.
The problem is that whenever I go on Reddit now, DeepSeek does such a good job simulating Reddit comments, that reading Reddit comments, I feel like I'm just reading Deepseek. Even when I write a comment, I feel like I'm just writing Deepseek simulations. What's the point? We're all just going through the motions so predictably, why even bother?
This does present obvious future ecological problems, what are the bots going to simulate if everyone stops going on Reddit because it's too easy to simulate? But that's not really my concern when I'm asking "What are good guidelines for which dungeons to run as a leveling priest?"
You need really weird nonsense to make a forum non-predictable and immune to simulation. Which this place sometimes achieves.
Does WoW not have wikis with guides that cover literally everything?
Also interested in the deepseek simulations, do you have examples and/or prompts?
It does, but largely they're oriented around end game content, and I'm more interested in leveling content. WoW is really at least two, and maybe as many as five or six, separate games packaged as one, leveling is a mostly solo game with occasional group content, PvE end game is entirely group content and involves very specific stat combinations on very specific pieces. So when I look up "Fury warrior stat priority" I'll get answers appropriate for level 70 raiding prep like make sure you have enough hit rating, which you don't even start to get hit rating until level 50 or so, and I'm only at level 30, it isn't that useful for me.
Now, the standard and objectively correct answer to precise stat priority while leveling is something like "don't worry about it too much you're level 30, you'll replace it in like four or five hours." Which, yes that's true, but I like sweating the details just a little, it's fun to me, I'm a gearslut. If I get an axe that's .5dps better but the sword I have is a slower swing speed and has +3str and +5agi over the axe, I want to know which one is precisely better even if it isn't really that big a deal, not knowing bugs me.
There are also, as of this writing, at least four or five different live versions of WoW online and four or five more dead ones, so advice can vary across which expansion you are playing. There's probably a guide somewhere out there for exactly what I want, but I didn't find it. This is something I'd try to find on Reddit, but I didn't find it there either easily.
Since getting back into WoW I have found PUG looting culture fascinating as both a functional and ethical question. There's a whole 'nother thesis to be written about loot distribution in guild raids, where you have the same regular people trying to progress as a team over months and years and there are a number of systems and methods used to balance progressing the group with rewarding high contributors with making sure that everyone has enough buy in that they stay motivated. But I'm playing casually and so entirely dealing with Pick Up Groups (PUGs) in 5 man dungeons. These are a group of 5 players getting together to team up and work on an objective they could not otherwise reach by themselves, typically an instanced dungeons with bosses that drop higher level loot.
If you've never played, the basic mechanic used for loot distribution is that when a good item drops during a group run, you can roll either Need or Greed on it, or Pass on it altogether. Everyone who rolls Need rolls 1-100 against each other highest takes it, if no one rolls Need then everyone who rolled Greed rolls 1-100. There's no situation where a Greed roll beats a Need roll, and Pass never gets it. There are rare scenarios where everyone passes and then it can just be freely looted by anyone who clicks on the corpse, but those are so marginal they don't really matter.
That's the whole of the game mechanics. The rest is cultural interaction. There's no restriction on who can click Need and who can click Greed, you can click Need on something you can't equip or wouldn't benefit from. The only mechanic for punishing someone who needs on something they shouldn't is for the group leader to kick them out of the group, or if the group leader refuses to do that (or the ninja-looter is the group leader) for any offended party members to quit. In most cases, this means ending the run altogether. For the last boss in an instance, the group would break up anyway, so there's no mechanic for punishing them whatsoever. Historically, it was at least a repeated-game situation on smaller servers because you ran into the same people over and over and didn't want to get a bad reputation, but in the classic-revival era the servers are so large and leveling is sped up so that reputation barely matters, I rarely remember running into the same people twice anyway.
It's a basic prisoner's dilemma setup where it always benefits the player to hit Need/Betray if everyone else is hitting Greed/Cooperate, but in order for the group to work everyone has to cooperate most of the time. The rules aren't even really written down anywhere or part of an in-game tutorial tip, they're just transmitted orally from player to player. Amazingly enough for the internet, it actually works, 95%+ of the time it goes off without a hitch and no one does anything weird and there's no arguments and it's fun. I would actually say I see outsize acts of altruism where players pass on a small upgrade for themselves because they think it's a bigger upgrade for another player more often than I see problems, but you do see problems crop up. Because there's no formal rules that anyone wrote or everyone agreed to, just a set of informal heuristics everyone picks up from each other about what is "fair" over the course of years of playing.
The obvious situations are simple and everyone agrees on them: the Mage doesn't get the big battle axe he can't equip, the Warrior does, problem solved. If a Mage needs on an axe, he gets kicked, because he's either a ninja-looter who is just going to sell the item for a minor amount of gold or he's r-slurred and has no idea what he's doing and either way you don't want him in the group. But there are a million variations of gray areas. Warriors and Hunters can both equip bows, but a Hunter benefits orders of magnitude more from a good bow upgrade than the Warrior does, can the Warrior roll against the Hunter for the bow when it drops? An Enhancement (melee) Shaman benefits hugely from an axe upgrade, but a Restoration (healing) Shaman doesn't benefit from it at all for healing but might use it when leveling solo, is it a crime when a Shaman rolls on an axe against a Warrior if they're currently healing? What if they mainly play Enh melee but they went off spec to heal to get the group going? What if it's an item where it's off-spec for both players, but maybe more off-spec for one than the other? What about super minor upgrades for one character versus huge upgrades for another? What if one litigant is a higher level toon carrying the group through lower level content and contributing more to the win, or if one litigant is a lower level toon that barely contributed anything to the group? Those all start to get different answers from different people. So partly just because I find it interesting, and partly out of a sense that I want to act ethically deciding to roll on a sword when I'm healing on my Paladin, I set up a debate on an LLM.
Keep in mind this is buried within the context of pages of random questions about WoW, so there might be some context missing if you tried the same prompt yourself. As I got into playing with it I'd post the same prompt into ChatGPT, Grok, and DeepSeek. Generally it comes from me thinking about a problem I ran into in the game, and thinking what other people would say about it if they were discussing it in the same autistic overthinking mode I do. Generally I use a prompt like:
In addition to Loot Court, I've tried to simulate philosophical debates like "Is the tank-shortage a result of the decline of masculinity?" or "Which class is the dumbest?" or "Which faction is more Red Tribe versus more Blue Tribe?" Deep Seek has become my favorite for all CW questions. Grok is an edgy yes-man, always taking what it thinks is my side, always ready to say "hell yeah man based take way to Notice;" Chatgpt is hard PC guardrailed and won't touch a question about masculine vs feminine values without saying "that's not how it works man;" Deepseek will actually discuss the issue and try to make an interesting conversation out of it.
P.S: If I were an academic working in behavioral econ, I'd want to get Microsoft or a private server for WoW to simulate luck as it impacts life outcomes. There's so much opportunity for study! Does early in-game luck, say winning a roll for a good weapon in an early dungeon, impact later level-outcomes for the same toon? Are warriors who win the roll for Corpsemaker at 28 or Ravager at 35 more likely to reach level 70, or hit a higher gear score when they get there? I could see it having an impact because good gear makes leveling easier and more fun, and might make you more attached to the tune; while bad gear luck makes leveling a slog and might make you more likely to abandon a toon and reroll. Or it might have no impact. Or maybe it even has a reverse impact, because when the game gets hard again you give up. I think it could tell us a lot about people's behavior.
I have always found it deeply weird that they set up this giant cooperative experience, and then the instant the boss is dead, slam it straight into a zero-sum PvP experience.
I'm convinced that it is a major factor in WoW's long term success, the existence of injustice and unfairness increases the loot-box nature of progression, and makes socialization a natural factor of the game. A more sophisticated loot system would undermine the degree to which you rely on your teammates. The Prisoner's Dilemma is a naturally attractive state of affairs for humans. If there were no cooperation-competition aspect to the game, then it could be "solved" in a way that it can't currently be solved.
Because the surprising thing is that it works the vast majority of the time. You see more people pass on an upgrade because it's a bigger upgrade to someone else, than you see people ninja-loot something they shouldn't. Even though there's no real motivation to do so beyond being pro-social, maybe that the player remembers you fondly, or returns the favor at some point, which are both so tenuous that pure altruism is the best explanation.
And guild-raid distribution is a totally different animal with its own rules, which overlap and confuse the situation in other situations.
The human element makes a game infinitely repeatable.
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I remember when I first started using Reddit I considered “neoliberal” to be in my ingroup since well I liked Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman. At some point I found out I believe it was Hillary Clinton was called a neoliberal which is a little true because Bill’s rise did involve before forced to adopt a lot of Reaganism to revive the Dem Party.
But neoliberal Reddit was NOT my ingroup. It wasn’t my nice smart Milton Friedman book club of conservatives. And I was quickly banned from neoliberal for wrong think.
I’ve noticed Reddit won’t let you read it anymore without downloaded app. I’m like all banned from Reddit. Since they became eyeballs for AI public company do they let people back onto Reddit? I may be low IQ but it’s too complicated for me to figure out why Reddit isn’t marketing to the people who all got banned since they’re now a public company. I guess I have Twitter.
I will draw a nuance between someone who’s banned for wrong think, having a contrary opinion and someone who is banned for being a low effort bottom feeder who happens to disagree but without anything substantive to say. The former is obviously much more common in discourse, but I tend to see it more as getting evicted from a social club. Sure. If it’s your community, you can run it as you see fit. Getting banned in a debate sub however? Thats more than a little ironic.
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Are you in contact with the rdrama folks? They seem to have similar ambitions on a similar architecture and if this kind of project is to succeed it seems a big advantage to start out with a large and varied userbase. And also them being... often objectionable... provides a kind of trial by fire of how we're going to handle tolerating interlocked communities with different norms.
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
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!)
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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probably not a collaboration issue, I'm assuming it's extremely hardcoded for a single sub and will explode when trying to add more.
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!
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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 trustees 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 rightoid/leftoid causes" way) would be a vast improvement.
But broadly speaking, I am in favor of the site developing in this direction.
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!
My $0.05 of Not Legal Advice because I Am Not Your Lawyer, agreed a 501(c)(3) would be a Bad Thing for TheMotte's mission. A sole proprietorship, i.e., functionally what you have now, would also be a Bad Thing if there is expansion because (God forbid) someone decide that they want to sue, well the sole proprietor of a sole proprietorship has no "corporate veil." That is to say there is no shield between the business (TheMotte) and the sole proprietor (you). Your personal assets are liable to forfeiture for restitution. Bankruptcy becomes common in sole proprietorships that have litigation become prohibitively expensive (a good bet) because there is no corporate veil.
So what might be a good fit would be a Limited Liability Corporation (LLC). An LLC is not required to have a Board, it can in fact have whatever ownership and leadership structure (subject to some restrictions) you so choose. It can have a board, or it can be a Single Member LLC (exactly what it sounds like), a Multi-Member LLC (also exactly what it sounds like), a Closely Held LLC (multi-member but small and increased rights of all members to prevent transfer of ownership shares), or a multitude of other options.
Even forming an LLC is not a guarantee of course, courts can "pierce the corporate veil" in the parlance, meaning they can decide that the actions of the corporation's ownership/leadership are so egregious that they can be held liable as individuals, but a competent attorney should be able to provide a list of what not to do to avoid this. If the Dictatorship decides that increasing scale is a good idea, then I would strongly recommend consulting with an attorney specializing in small business regulations to determine the best path forward.
I admittedly hadn't consciously thought of doing an LLC, but you're right, good idea before scaling up.
I've actually got two companies (one LLC-as-S-corp and one C-corp) and am about to start a third anyway, this is ground I am reasonably familiar with so the actual doing-of-it isn't a big deal, and thanks for the reminder that I should do that :)
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Once an attorney is involved, the economics of a small venture turn infeasible very quickly.
This is true, but it's also reasonable to add it on a list of checklist things to do when the small venture is threatening to no longer be small.
I think if I had to set up a schedule:
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I am not a lawyer, but my limited understanding is that 501(c)(3) and like grant tax exemptions to certain organizations that operate for the particular kinds of "public good", which is a nebulously defined concept, and that's why the government gets to insert itself as a representative of the public
Having a separate for-profit legal entity solely owned by you may still be beneficial if the Motte goes big.
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This all sounds basically correct, I think (I haven't really studied "business associations" since I was a law student, though). Provided you're up for taking some individually-directed heat (and I have no reason to think you're not up for this) then by all means: be our beloved tyrant! It just seemed like an option worth mentioning.
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I think how best to do this depends a lot on the motivation. 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.)
Why not create a separate site for that purpose?
My first suspicion is that, if you don't, TM as it exists now will be slowly killed.
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.
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I sort of feel like you're just reverse engineering the old Invision PowerBoards days of the internet, when every website would have its own cheaply hosted forum made on the same software with varying levels of CSS editing. And I'd like that, because that was a genuinely better state of the internet.
Subreddits aren't a million miles from this concept, save for the huge catch of all being governed by reddit's rancid piece of shit admin team and their global rules. Which is a lot of the problem with reddit, honestly. Most of the rest of it being the type of moderators who will thrive within those global rules. Getting rid of the name thing will help, because it removes the prestige of having the "official" subreddit for something, and therefore discourages such mods who are only out for control. 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.
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.
But assuming you have factored that in, what you probably want to do is come up with a customisable experience to fit the needs and whims of the communities who might use it. I'm just going to throw a couple of completely not thought out at all things that might make such a system stand out and offer something people might actually take a look at for being different;
Ability to change between forums-style strict chronological comment ordering with quotes, and reddit-style cascading comments section. God I fucking hate reddit comments sections. Wading through all the cruft I already read is tedious. Though I can envision this causing issues as people try to crosstalk between different preferred layouts and miss responses... but with ping replies I don't see it being a big issue.
Topic tags, sort of like flairs on subreddits, except that one topic could have multiple tags, and you can maybe separate them into sections, a curated list of admin-defined ones for easy after the fact searching, and then user defined ones like the way steam game tags work, with topic creator given the chance to add theirs on topic creation.
The ability to replace or remove up/downvotes. I actually like the kiwifarms thing where they have a ton of reacts for a comment. Helpful, funny, and so on. Functionally up and downvotes basically equate to likes and dislikes. This is just adding more options. Here in particular I can see potential for people to rate things as "dislike" but also "informative". Further to this, you can let people set their own filters to auto-collapse or highlight comments that get more than X reactions of a particular type, search the topic for the comment with the most reacts of a certain type ("helpful" when dealing with tech issues...) or what have you.
Public moderation logs. Which mod removed which comment? Which mod changed which tag? which mod banned which user? Well, now you know. If someone is abusing their power, it will be there in black and white. Ideally this would be enforced, data collected by your forum software and sent to your servers, and the mod logs for any forum should be available by plugging the ID into some page you maintain. Mods should not be able to hide this. Maybe you can let them buy you out if you want. You can have the software and none of the oversight... for a fee.
You have no clue how many times I wish I could rate something "informative" on the rest of the Internet.
The only thing about stickers I would recommend is to never send notifications for them, not even as an option. Xenforo has them out-of-the-box and Josh has to constantly deal with users who get negrated and then in turn revenge negrate every single one of the other user's posts. For a while, he disabled notifications entirely, until people complained (completely genuinely) that they relied on the sticker notifications to engage with threads they wanted to keep up with, rather than anything sane like the forum software's watchlist. Also, people were writing userscripts that aggregated all the stickers from their posts after he deliberately broke that functionality. So he begrudgingly re-enabled it.
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.
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wouldn't be the first time
But yeah, this is kinda-sorta the idea.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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I'd just like to take this opportunity to once again thank you for all the hard work you put in to make this space possible. You really are the unsung hero of this place, I'm proud to make my monthly Patreon donation, and would encourage anyone else who appreciates the work Zorba puts in to match it.
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.
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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.
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?
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 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.
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:
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.
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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.
I like the idea of adding sub-communities, but I don't know if we have enough people to fill in 7 zillion niches.
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)?
The latter in the long term, the former in the short term, because . . .
. . . 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.
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.
I was thinking more in terms of work that needs to be done. 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?
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.
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.
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.
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