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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   4353 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 04, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How many are thinking of deleting their Reddit accounts entirely once there's some confidence in this move succeeding reasonably well?

While I've occasionally commented on some other subs, chiefly SSC, I'm also a believer in pruning out the social medias you're not actually needing or using out of your life entirely, and the transfer would largely render Reddit into that category, for me.

I'm keeping it for /r/redscarepod, /r/redscarepodprivate, /r/slatestarcodex, /r/theschism.

I'm keeping mine. I use my account for generic hobby stuff, asking general questions about new places/things, and business. Reddit for all its flaws is still a good forum for non CW things.

Sometimes I want an answer to something specific, fast. Niche subreddits almost always deliver on that regard.

Same here. Certain subs are very helpful because of their experts' replies. Other -- as a quick way to assess range of opinions on the topic. Nice balance between interactivity and quality (eg StackExchange is usually high quality, but less interactive)

The culture war account most certainly. The other ones?maybe.

I'm going to stop discussing political and culture war topics on Reddit. It's been a bad platform for those kinds of discussions for a few years now and is only getting worse. But it's still a great platform for non-political interests and hobbies, especially if you stick to smaller subs.

I am split on whether I should delete all my posts, because fuck reddit, or leaving them there, because the communities deserve to have archives.

I've just copypasted all my Reddit posts (well, almost all, not the most recent ones) to a doc file, and am planning to categorize them and use them as grist for blog posts.

Why not just request a full export from Reddit directly? You get a link to an archive which contains comments.csv file; it's exhaustive.

@Devonshire

Is there a tool for doing this? I do have a database of reddit posts, mostly as an exercise for myself, but I never ran it against my whole profile.

You can use https://camas.unddit.com/ to do a lot of queried searches, and "your username, on The Motte" would be an easy task for it. If you're handy with a scripting language you can use it to dump JSON files containing everything you're looking for.

Yeah, should add that I used camas.unddit to fetch my posts.

Probably? I'm just going through them one by one, though. It's kind of relaxing.

I have a strong urge to use my 10 years of archived comments to train a GPT-3 bot and just set a few loose to keep commenting on a regular basis.

It could only raise the level of discourse over there.

I am very pro this.

Back them up and provide them here somehow.

I would hate to lose my place for discussing the local baseball team. But maybe I need to get out and do that more IRL anyway.

It's also different to /r/Drama which was and is comprised in large part of retirees from various other internet shitholes.

Is this an observation you made yourself, or is it a running gag? I do recall some time ago perceptive lolcow who called it a '4chan retirement home' and I found that piercing.

In any case, you really should try something like RSS or gaining sovereignty over your 'feed' - leaving it up to a third party like Reddit is asking for trouble.

For my part, I'd given up on using Reddit, so the Motte moving offsite gained a user, rather than losing one. I don't think the problem was banning as such, it was an ever-constricting line around what you can say which was so unpleasant. Living under a censor where the rules are deliberately made opaque is probably one of the worst things that can happen to a community that so highly populated by autistic people.

I found myself trending to individually check subreddits anyways, so I found that except for a bookmark which I already had on my toolbar my habits haven't changed much. As I've seen the more interesting subs constantly get maligned or removed for one reason or another despite their intellectual and milque-toast (seeing /r/itsafetish get banned was a travesty) posting rules I think it's ultimately for the better that Motte is proactive on migrating to a new forum instead of being eventually quarantined or banned with no preparation whatsoever.

I'll probably hang onto a Reddit account, maybe not the one I used on themotte, for a while. Until the archives become unusable or unsearchable with google. Reddit remains a useful repository of eg hobby information. There are probably comparable or better forums out there for each individual purpose, but I don't know what they are off-hand, and it's easier to search "Reddit typical repairs e46 3 series" and find a nice thread already put together, than it is to find which bmw forum is any good, figure out how to navigate it, etc. It seems unlikely that /r/weightroom or /r/trucks are gonna get banned for political reasons any time soon, though I guess anything is possible.

Can you usefully search reddit comments using google? I try to find my own stuff and it is incredibly difficult unless it was the main post.

https://camas.unddit.com/

Google is useless for Reddit comments, especially in big threads. camas works much better for finding specific content.

I've never tried to find my own work, so IDK that you can find a specific comment that easily. For me it's more like I hear about a new training program and search "Reddit /r/weightroom super squats" which tends to get me threads from /r/weightroom about Super Squats. If I couldn't do that, I'd probably lose interest.

and it's easier to search "Reddit typical repairs e46 3 series" and find a nice thread already put together, than it is to find which bmw forum is any good, figure out how to navigate it, etc.

Yeah, this is the problem I run into whenever I try to wean myself off reddit. I can just use Cold Turkey to block Instagram and other social media easily cause I don't also use them for information every once in a while. With reddit it's inevitably a problem. Which is unfortunate because it has too much of the stuff I don't like about Instagram, Twitter and so on.

So I'm keeping an account.

Already deleted.

Your social media rule is a good one, but I take it a step further and I actively try to cut out even the things I am using.

Recently I've been looking for off-BigTech communities, and it's crazy what a desolate wasteland the internet has become. Anything that can be done to promote these indie alternatives, should be.

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This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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