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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   4024 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 14, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Does anyone feel that the motte is becoming more soapboxy?

Scrolling the CW thread, I feel like the #parent:#child ratio is much lower than it used to be. During the reddit times, there were threads that that had 50+ responses. That seems to be a relic of the past.

It feels off now. I scroll through the main thread, see yet another >1000 word post with barely any engagement, scroll past it, same thing again, and again.

I think the lurker and casual poster counts are decreasing, we are left with more and more soap boxers who do feel the need to produce endless walls of text, but not engage with other peoples walls of texts..

Do you mean higher than it used to be?

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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."

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