The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Notes -
I notice something of a negative correlation between the quality of links I post and the reception they get. I posted the recent article about sex positivity vs purity culture, and while I had a higher opinion of it than most mottizens it seems, I still wouldn't consider it among the best essays ever written. Yet it's spawned over 200 comments. I feel similarly about my other links that got the most discussion, like The Media Very Rarely Lies and Is Wine Fake?
Meanwhile, links I have posted that I thought were amazing pieces of writing that were accurate deep dives into a topic that were some best in class writing, like Biological Determinants and Homosexuality that surveyed a wide body of well done research on a controversial topic, or Njall's Saga which was a hilarious and insightful look at medieval Icelandic literature and law, got barely any interaction.
Just Toxiplasma of Rage in action I suppose.
The Homosexuality article notably you did not post with a submission statement, which might affect engagement. Your characterization of the camgirl/femcel post as "sex positivity vs. purity" is interesting to me, as although I see why you use those terms, that is not the classification I'd have used (I'd have been less charitable.) I just didn't/don't like her writing style. I don't like the writing style of many who nevertheless gain quite a bit of readers.
Also you've posted about 7 or so articles--I was going to say "only 7 or so" to make my point that that's not a large number to start making assumptions about people, but I don't want to discourage you from continuing to post these because I enjoy them and I think we need more people posting standalone threads in this way. Basically I wouldn't make much of this. The Motte does not seem to me to be made up of homogeneous minds, despite occasional comments about a hivemind or whatever.
Yeah it's hardly a large sample size, but I think it's a pattern that's common on pretty much all the internet. And I'm not discouraged by it, more just that I think it's a bit of a shame that lower quality but controversial posts get way more engagement than higher quality ones. I wouldn't be surprised if it's not just comments and that there are more unique readers of the controversial links than the high quality ones too. But of course I do the same, it can be very hard to tell from a link and maybe a short blurb if it'll actually lead somewhere high quality, versus when there's 100 comments on a link you know there's at least something there.
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