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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Two questions about The Motte;
Communities like this have the problem of attracting fresh meat.
Stagnant rather than growing. Fairly sure about that one.
Feels like decay rather than stagnation, but I may be wrong.
I've been worried about the fresh-meat-pipeline since we migrated, and AFAIK so far we don't really have one beyond word of mouth. But I don't have any good proposals on how to fix it either.
Do not get me started...
We have no less than 3 posters that broke out to a wider audience, I'm already quietly seething that none of them decided on their own to promote us on any of the platforms they have access to. But it's ok, they made it big on their own, not like they owe anything to us, or anything.
So then I'm seething even more that no one whosl's running the site decided to outright bribe them to promote us. With this amount of recgniziable names hailing from here, you could easily market the place as a dojo for Substack starlets. Yeah, yeah, so it would cost some money, give me your Paypal, and I'll be happy to chip in.
And then you realize that we don't have to stop at people who came from here. You can advertise at the scores upon scores of politics / debate youtubers and streamers. These dudes are still shilling Raid Shadow Legends tier shit for chump change. We already have "invite" functionality, so you can attribute registration to specific people, and literally pay them per new user.
Man, we're not even trying.
Patreon link is right here. Currently it pulls in $212 / month.
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I think you overestimate the degree to which most of us "care" that The Motte becomes A Thing in the zeitgeist, and underestimating the level of effort it takes just to get volunteers to keep things running.
Zorba does a heroic amount of work behind the scenes with coding and feature requests and the like. On top of that, you want him to be out there hustling for new members, trying to schmooze social media darlings into promoting us, etc.? Even in a best case scenario, none of this is going to earn enough money for him to do more than pay his expenses.
As for us mods, we got lives, man. Yeah, I care about the Motte and now and then drop a link to it elsewhere, but I am not going to go try to evangelize it (not like I even have a social media following) because that is not in my skillset.
Yes, I find it sad that in a few years the Motte will probably be just another dead, has-been forum, but that is the way of the Internet. Nothing lasts forever, there is always a new thing.
Sorry, this did end up sounding like I'm criticizing you guys for not working enough. I know it's hard to get volunteers (source: me, promising myself every week I'll start contributeing to the ccodebase). I also don't want the Motte to become "a thing" at all. I kind of dread the idea of reddit-tier newcomers swarming in here. But I would like it to keep chugging along.
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I think it would be quite interesting to map out everyone who's become a semi-public figure after starting out here (depending on size being examined, it's rather more than 3 by my count), but that's not a project I'd want to undertake without acquiescence of others and many prefer to avoid too strong of links between different parts of their online identities. As for me, I'm always happy to share posts from wherever to wherever if I see something interesting that seems worth pointing others towards, but haven't had too much time to read this site lately so am unlikely to come across the Good Posts organically. My relationship with the site as a whole has been and remains marked by years of messy Lore which I neither want to ignore nor unduly focus others on, making generic promotion a bit complicated as things go. I am working in stages on an article outlining basically the process of being useful as a writer (which will include a section discussing the role of the motte in my own path and spaces like it for others) but "when will I actually finish an article I have in the works" is always a complicated question.
It's all fair enough, I did mean it when I said you guys don't really owe us promotion, though in a similarly complicated manner, I can't stop feeling salty about it.
If it helps, you're not even the first person that comes to mind when I seethe. I can't forget listening to some DR podcast, and seeing Kulak on one of the episodes. As they chat away he mentions ymeshkout: "and my friend at The Bailey podcast..." - and there I go screaming at the monitor "have you thought about name dropping the other part of that medieval fortification, you selfish bastard!"
At the end of the day it's not a big deal, there's other ways of marketing, and like I said, we're not even trying.
I do get that, yeah. I don't know whether it would alleviate that saltiness or intensify it to mention that I can't help but wonder, when I think of things like this, if the same specific people who made ugly allegations against me during prior tense moments here are the ones who now wonder why I'm conflicted about recommending others spend time around them. No shade to you personally—I have no idea if you were one of the ones who piled on in the least pleasant moments—but in some cases, "nothing at all" is the kindest thing I can say, and it's less selfishness than a desire to let bygones be bygones that keeps me from saying all that much. It's unfair in some ways, since the great majority of people here have always been receptive to the great majority of what I say and I made a ton of meaningful connections here, but negative experiences retain a lot of salience and some bridges remain, if not wholly burnt, certainly badly singed from all of that.
My understanding is that Kulak is one who explicitly wants to keep the different parts of his online identity more siloed, which is fair enough as it goes, I suppose.
If you're referring to the Libs Of TikTok affair, I didn't pile on, but if I'm honest this is mostly due to having nuked my Reddit account by that point. I was also quite salty at that (and I believe I disclosed that). Otherwise I believe our interactions were always respectful, including on subjects we disagree vehemently about, like surrogacy (or at least I hope you recall them in a similar positive way).
In any case if part the reason you don't feel particularly inclined to promote this place is because you feel bitter after things got a bit hot, and hit too close to home one time too many, that's perfectly understandable.
On the other hand, maybe we could alleviate that with some sweet, sweet cash! Eh... eh? ;)
That was one of the moments that holds the most salience for me, yeah, alongside this from @FCfromSSC. This forum was very much the place I came into my own as a writer, which made it much more painful for me to hear how people saw me when I strayed from the anti-prog line. It's no small thing to watch a large crowd in your digital hometown, so to speak, cheer someone on as he emphasizes he wants nothing to do with you or yours, and no small thing to watch many of that same crowd go on to cheer others as they frame you as a lying agent of the Cathedral who should be banned from the space and whatnot. Many people I respect took issue with my LoTT prank; I remain uniquely disgusted with the reaction I got from this forum in a way that's not easy to shake. The shift from "my online home turf" to "just another forum I visit and post in sometimes" was a gradual one, but that settled it pretty unambiguously. And I'd be lying if I didn't look with grim satisfaction at the place others said would turn into a progressive monoculture and see that it has, despite being quiet, remained precisely the thoughtful discussion space I hoped it would be.
I have always been exactly who I claim to be, and always aimed to do exactly what I claim to be doing. Part of aiming to be honest and open in my self-presentation, though, is that it stings quite a bit when people I think should know better treat me as something I'm not, or reject me for who I am. Things get heated, yes; people don't mean quite that by it, sure; but I do remember.
You mentioned previously a concern about an attitude of "I'm going to cash in on a post from my niche hangout, and not give credit, because I'm afraid I'll get cancelled." I do think my behavior demonstrates pretty clearly that I'm not afraid of controversial associations, not even of attaching my name and career to them. I talk about rDrama in public regularly, where I'm a known regular; I go on podcasts with Richard Hanania and Alex Kaschuta and Walt Bismarck and anyone I think I can have a good chat with; I cover stories and topics sensitive enough that most won't touch them with ten-foot poles. I'll talk with anyone who will talk with me, and build alongside anyone who wants to build alongside me. But I also take very careful note of how people act when the chips are down and my back is against the wall, and when I see people place me on the enemy side of the friend/enemy distinction, I take that seriously.
It's funny, because in many senses I get along well with FC personally inasmuch as we interact; I've appreciated my interactions with you personally; I get on well with many people here and have a lot in common with many of them. In a sense, though, that's what makes it tricky: if my own experience here left me feeling burned, despite making many friendships, usually being well-received, and having a great deal in common with many here, how could I possibly recommend this place as a good conversation spot to anyone who doesn't share the dominant viewpoints here? If, every time someone gets frustrated and leaves this forum, the collective local mind sees it as an issue with that person, not crediting their critiques, what am I to think?
Unsurprisingly, I stand by my long-held critical analysis of this forum. I think it is torn between two purposes, one implicit and one explicit, and the implicit one has been winning for a very long time. Explicitly, it wants to be a respectful meeting place for people who don't share the same biases. Implicitly, it is a place for people who don't like progressives to chat about politics and culture. It works great if you want to be criticized from your right, or if you have an anti-progressive or a more niche idea to share, but people are doomed to disappointment at the gap between its implicit and its explicit purposes unless they share its biases, and if they share its biases they will only entrench those biases further.
I'm sorry to watch this forum stagnate, because after everything it still holds a special place in my heart, and out of respect to it and recognition that I already struck a blow against it once, I've refrained from encouraging people to join the space I think has broadly succeeded in the culture-building project this place envisioned (the postrat oasis on Twitter). If posts from here strike me, I'm more than happy to share them with attribution. When it's relevant, I'm more than happy to talk about this place and the role it's played in my own journey. I personally like, get on with, and respect a great many people here. And yes, of course if the users or mods explicitly want me to promote it in some form, I'm happy to take a look. But yeah, my memories of the Motte have been bittersweet for years now.
At its core this is a debate forum more than anything else, and most of the stuff you guys are talking about looks like fairly typical even-handed debate to me. I quite enjoy a lot of your more pro-prog takes, as do many people here. If how people reacted to your more liberal posts upset you, well, that's understandable. There can definitely be pile-ons here that make continued participation in the forum feel unpleasant.
That said, I think you're more partisan than you realize. Despite your very frequent throat-clearing about being an honest genuine seeker of truth, you (like the rest of us) have a very hard time truly criticizing your ingroup, or seeing it be criticized. I don't bring this up to score points or speak to the wider audience--I genuinely think you have a blind spot and am trying to convince you of this.
If your framing (essentially, If Only Buttigieg Knew) was a deliberate attempt to make your FAA post more palatable to your audience, I suppose I'll eat my words.
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You know, sometimes I think this place was doomed from the start, and it's very existence is a fluke stemming from the zeitgeist of a particular time and space (which itself was a fluke). The idea of getting people with fundamentally different values to sit down and talk is nice and theory, and interesting things can come out of it, but it seems sooner or later it runs into an obvious issue of the values being, in fact, fundamentally different. We naively believed that this is just a bump in the road. Some differences make us angry and it's just a question getting past the anger, other things are just a misunderstanding, and it's a question of explaining yourself better. But with fundamental differences we understand each other perfectly, and still think the other side is wrong. Any anger is a result of understanding, rather than misunderstanding, but quite often it doesn't even enter the picture. In fact, to the extent it did, I think it's the fault of the rationalist ethos.
Such is the case here. I think I understand where you're coming from, but I think you're just wrong. It is a small thing to watch a large crowd cheer someone on as he emphasizes he wants nothing to do with me and mine. I get that it's more Impactful for you, but I can't muster up more than "sorry to hear that, bro".
Yes. I think that sort of behavior is out of line. It can stem from a mistake, so it's possible it happened in good faith, but it should be promptly corrected when it comes out.
But this I don't get. It feels like a very luxurious belief to me, and I think it contradicts the very mission of this forum.
Or more than that it might even be literally impossible to avoid. My impression is that you, Chris Pratt, and whole bunch of other progs routinely practice rejecting people for who they are, except you do it in a roundabout way that comes off as insincere to people like me.
I can explain what happened here. I wasn't trying to ascribe any motivation to you, I was just putting myself in your shoes. I am afraid of cancellation, so that's why I would try to hide my associations with this place. I'd probably have no chance to guess your actual motivations, even if I knew / remembered how you feel about this place, because that isn't how I'd react, and I don't know you well enough to guess how you parse the world.
That's great to hear! Though I don't know if I'll ever be appointed the Director of Marketing for this place.
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Well, to be fair, you have to temper the promotion with a bit of realism about the mess, and you can't let yourself be too disappointed when people thereby dismiss any positive conclusions as Pollyanna, "must be a pony in there somewhere" optimism.
This is exactly what the Quality Contributions Report is for, no? Often they're not all winners, and usually not all the winners are there, but reading those alone probably gets you at least 25% of the best posts for at most 1% of the effort.
In theory, yeah, and every time I've stopped by to read it it remains quite good, but in practice I don't actually exert that much conscious control over where I go online. I got out of the habit of reading the forum regularly and never got into the habit of reading the QC report in lieu of it. There's a lot of good when I see it, I just don't usually see it organically these days.
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My impression is that Zorba et. al would rather the project die than have its mission compromised. The move was a full commitment to make it work or death. A concern beginning back at reddit where the lowest common denominator wandering in and ruining everything was a genuine one that required active management. The project is always in some precarious, delicate state of balance that requires a velvet glove.
I recall a year or two ago there was some shout outs from @ymeskhout and @TracingWoodgrains. They both have larger audiences and could do the same. Maybe they didn't see much effect. Mods are likely older and busier now which makes the idea of managing problems that come with a boom from widescale advertising unappealing.
Putting the vault on substack and having people blast that out seems like a good (safer) idea to filter out some of the troublemakers and attract more wordcels. Entropy, a bitch, etc. Before death, Kulak should put the site on blast to his Twitter followers for maximum going-out-with-a-bang witch gathering.
I reference the motte, its role in my development, and my continued participation here as appropriate and will always have a soft spot for it, but my experience here has long been a complicated one and promotion is similarly complicated. In some ways, it often threatens to stir up drama best left in the past.
Yassine has similarly complex feelings about it all, but I won't speak for him.
I don't have the opportunity to read it as regularly as I did in the past, but I think the best, most honest, and most natural way for me to shout it out is "Here's something cool I read; here's the source." Since I'm unlikely to see every post or comment here these days, I'm always happy to be tagged into things that seem particularly worth seeing.
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Well, aside from me not seeing how that would compromise the mission, from what I can tell neither does Zorba.
If there's too many newcomers you can just stop advertising until things calm down.
Yeah, that's a pretty good idea too!
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I don't know what if any restrictions exist but it seems like it could be fairly straight forward to cross post the AAQCs to a Substack instead of a subdomain (vault.themotte) that isn't even linked from TheMotte or the AAQC threads.
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Because (idr who, but a mod) has the insistence that the "aims" of the project can't be compromised ever in the name of anything ever. Even if it means the community dies out in the medium term. Signs of which are already evident.
And yes, opening a pipeline or advertising in any way shape or form is compromising whatsoever that "aim" is.
I think the "leadership" lucked into significantly more success from the Culture War thread offshoot that they thought they would and is under the impression that the conditions must be kept EXACTLY the same lest that delicate balance of a high quality yet high engagement community is ruined.
Its selfish, shortsighted and overly risk averse, but that's just my 2c.
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Stagnant is fine; decaying is bad. The Motte is decaying. My suggestion was to stop banning good quality longtime posters just because the Nazi contingent starts diligently reporting their every plausibly inflammatory statement, but the mods seem to disagree.
Which longtime posters were banned recently? I don't even know, there used to be a weekly thread about who got banned in the last week.
All I can think of was Hiynka and he's a far-out third (fourth?) positionist calling 80% of the political spectrum progressives.
FarNearEverywhere (sort of).
Ymeskhout doesn’t really count either.
You can filter the mod log like so and look for your favorites!
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Not a bannable offense. In fact, plausibly true, given some conceptual understanding of those words and the concepts underlying many people's positions. Kinda funny that this is what comes top-of-mind when thinking about why he was banned. Really bolsters jkf's claim.
He perpetually misrepresented his opponent and refused to engage with points actuality made, and he was snotty while doing it.
His average quality of engagement was low.
I read through the various comments cited for the ban, and I didn't really see much of this. I saw a more direct, "I think you're 'hiding your power level'." I don't think I've seen any clarity from the mods on whether stating such beliefs are against the rules.
Here, I think he did so in a way that was actually kind of reasonable. He openly and clearly stated that he rejected the underlying framework that led to the point being made. He gave reasons why he rejected it. This is good comment behavior, even if it really pisses off some of the people who have their entire underlying framework rejected.
This is probably the most accurate claim. Poor aesthetics. Oof for a permaban.
I think any commenter that continues to engage in discussion is going to end up with a low average, depending upon how "engagement" is defined. All long comment threads, for the sake of not-taking-infinite-time result in some amount of paring down, dropping some things that feel incidental, etc. I've had plenty of experience of times when I've repeated a point that I thought was significantly not incidental, calling out that it was dropped, perhaps on grounds that they thought it was incidental, but that I thought it was not. It is only after a couple/few repeated refusals (without explanation) that you can essentially build a pattern that they're simply ignoring a point because it's inconvenient, rather than due to believing that it's incidental or because they reject the underlying framework of the point.
Kind of hilarious that even Darwin came to his defense on this topic of dropping some points in the interest of time and trying to get to the crux, considering that he was a prime example of someone who would do the precise thing I'm contrasting - repeatedly refuse to engage at all with a repeatedly-stated point that was simply inconvenient (among other bad commenter things that he did).
He would not accept that many of us are color-blind meritocracy fans and recognize the factual reality of HBD. That combo just broke his brain. Perpetually misrepresenting the views of one’s opponents when explicitly corrected is shitty and intolerable behavior.
He would avoid dealing with the concrete evidence provided for the reality and utility of IQ, and its correlation to racial groups. He would make deluded attacks on academia—where IQ is not so popular a metric—and fail to acknowledge the contradiction. This is not denying the underlying framework. It’s being retarded and illogical. Several people who don’t like HBD pointed this out at the time.
If he had been consistently retarded but polite on the IQ issue, he wouldn’t have caught the ban and his average comment quality would have been good. Civility and order break down when those with status consistently and flagrantly violate rules and norms and the mods’ hands were forced.
Personally, I don’t care whether he caught a forever ban or just a really long one. Redemption is nice when you can get it.
To be completely honest, as someone who doesn't really participate in the IQ/HBD wars, this mostly sounds like regular petty whining that all sorts of people have lists of for their pet issues. When I've looked at the actual comments people cite for their similar claims, my statements hold.
Well lots of people, including the mods, saw it differently.
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Implying someone is "hiding their power level" (i.e. concealing their true beliefs) is not in itself cause for a ban. It is, once again, more about tone (how you say it) than about the specific accusation. Are you trying to engage someone or are you just trying to "call them out" or bait them into flaming back?
Once more: Hlynka's ban wasn't any one post (even if it was one post to which his permaban was eventually attached). It was a pattern of behavior going back years in which he would continually behave in an antagonistic manner, we would tell him to please stop doing that, and he would (sometimes explicitly) tell us that he was not going to stop doing that because he thought his principles and how he thought the Motte should be run were more important than Zorba's policies or our wishes. And you know, fair enough. In a sense I respect that he stood on his principles. But he did so knowing we were going to ban him, because we told him we were going to ban him if he didn't stop flagrantly violating the rules and all but thumbing his nose at us. In his calmer moments he would even tell us that he understood why we kept modding him (but that he wasn't going to stop doing what he was doing).
A long term good poster and someone with a lot of respect in the community absolutely refused to abide by the rules. Eventually, after many, many bans of escalating severity and pleading with him to knock it off or go touch grass, he got banned for good because we were tired of this dance (and of people asking us why Hlynka got to get away with so much).
Hlynka committed "Suicide by janny."
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Indeed not, but deciding that rules are beneath you and that Charity requires too much effort, and then acting on that belief, is. My understanding is that Hlynka was neither surprised by nor in disagreement with his ban.
That doesn't mean that it was good for the state of the community.
It's not clear how not banning him would be good for the community either. I'm not sure "good for the community" is on the table.
I miss him badly, and it's absurd to me that he's gone and I'm a mod. I originally wrote the above when I was expecting to be banned myself in relatively short order, and conversations with Hlynka fundamentally changed my perspective for the better.
It's usually pretty clear which users are heading for a ban, and I've been trying for a while now to find ways to engage with them constructively to try to stop that from happening, on the theory that the right conversation might be able to turn things around for them the way it did for me. Sometimes it sorta-kinda works. Sometimes it doesn't; I'm still frustrated that I never got to finish my arguments with fuckduck9000. In any case, the universal constant is that no one is happy with the results.
Indeed -- and if nobody on the mod team is prepared to consider the reason that long-time users are ending up in this downward spiral, it will pick up steam until the place is of no interest to anyone.
I think it's a separate issue at work, but on the other side of the aisle it might be worth considering that the new scene seems to have driven off darwin -- so attracting new posters of diverse viewpoints is probably a non-starter without some serious changes made.
So what do you think we should have done about Hylnka? Honest question, because we warned (and warned and warned and warned and warned and warned and warned and warned and warned and warned ....) him, going back to the old subreddit, giving him far more chances after multiple bans than almost anyone else in the history of the Motte has ever been given. And we took a lot of flack for that (because as much as you may like and miss him, and like @FCfromSSC, I really liked him and really, really wanted him to stop doing things requiring us to ban him also), he was equally hated by many, and a lot of people thought (with some justification) that he was getting away with way too much that no one else would get away with. So should we have just let him keep going forever after telling him, explicitly, multiple times, "If you keep doing this, we are going to have to ban you, we don't want to do that, stop doing this pretty please?"
Yes, banning Hylnka was (IMO) a loss for the community. I also don't see what other choice we had.
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I just linked my best assessment of the reason. What's yours? What's wrong and what should we do about it?
I'm on record arguing at length that Darwin was one of the worst bad actors this community has ever had, and one of the conditions I gave for joining the mod team was that I'd never be asked to mod him or to be involved in mod decisions about him in any way. Why do you think he left? More generally, what are the serious changes you think should be made?
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How has your perspectrve changed for the better?
He forced me to confront the hate in my heart, and reminded me that it is my own responsibility to reject it rather than embracing it. He did this in a way that probably no one else, here or in real life, could have done. That's about the best, shortest description I can provide across the inferential gap.
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Particularly considering the source...
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The mods have always had the problem that their number one overarching goal is to minimize shade, never to maximize light. Thus the steady stream of bans for many of the best contributors starting from the old reddit days.
Depends what you consider "best contributors." A lot of the best contributors are also the spiciest ones - i.e., the ones who write long polemics about how their outgroup absolutely sucks donkey balls. And people who share their feelings about that outgroup stand up and cheer, and get very upset that someone who writes so eloquently about how their hated outgroup sucks donkey balls gets banned. But the thing about those people is that it's usually not the essays about their outgroup sucking donkey balls that gets them banned (because they take great care to write those in a Motte-appropriate fashion). It's the fact that their seething hatred of their outgroup and anyone who would defend them leaks everywhere, so while the sucking-donkey-balls essays get AAQCs, their snippy, condescending, and antagonistic posts directed at people who disagree with them eventually get them banned.
Now if you think we should just let people who write really good donkey-ball-sucking polemics get a pass for insulting everyone they disagree with right and left, that would be one way to "maximize light." But it would also maximize heat.
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As discussion of controversial issues has been increasingly allowed on Twitter, and as Reddit has started to very quietly pull back on moderation (a lot of stuff on RedScarePod would have gotten the sub’s mods harangued by admins years ago) while trying to make itself profitable, the need for a separate forum has diminished.
As a relatively new user I made the jump to start frequenting the motte because the discussion at my former haunts had become increasingly shrill and monocultural. Moderation might be a little more hands off, but I see no such trend towards deeper and thoughtful discussion on the wider web.
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I notice that Scott isn't including it on his list of affiliated sites.
I would be surprised if he did, given what he said here about how having any official ties to the culture war thread upended his whole life https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/
Weird timing, because while it's not as major as listing it as an affiliated site, Scott actually just included a link to a motte post in his May links post (#38, second link)... except it's a link to an old motte post back on reddit, so I suspect not much traffic will end up here as a result.
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Fascinating rereading that post (I think that post was my introduction to the sub) and seeing all the people quoted who are still posting here semi-frequently.
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