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I think if you focus on old-school forums you will miss out on where a lot of discussion is happening these days, namely Twitter/X, Substack comment threads, and private Discord servers. The first two in particular host a growing collection of in some cases relatively influential Motte alumni that you could follow or whose networks you could poke around in to curate your own feed. If you don't like any of those guys, then it may take a little longer to get the recommendations you want, but the algorithm is a hell of a thing and will get the job done eventually.
As to your more fundamental point, I don't see how this moment in particular is much different from any since the creation of the internet (I wasn't around for them, but maybe early reddit and some previous iteration of 4chan were really that great?). It takes a very particular sort of high IQ, high-decoupling, politically-interested wordcel to be a successful rules-following contributor here and I think it's to be expected that there are less than a dozen places online where such individuals congregate in sufficient numbers to be noticeable.
It takes a particular kind of owner of the space as well. The temptations of money beckon on all sides in this day and age.
/r/FemaleDatingStrategy became a popular subreddit around what amounted to a feminized version of PUA. The head mods chose to move off of Reddit to a new proprietary website where they focus more on their podcasts, merch, patreon content, etc. I stopped hearing about FDS about the point at which they moved sites, but for the mods it has gone from unpaid Janny work to profitable side hustle. The move undoubtedly throttled audience growth, but it turned the audience they had into paying customers.
The temptation to cash in, at the expense of the growth of the forum or of the original mission of the forum or of the original members of the forum, is great. You need an owner of the forum who doesn't want to cash in, who is content to stay small, who doesn't want to get invited to the good parties and have prestige over it.
This impacts political forums the most, but it hits everything from sports to fashion to philosophy. We're lucky here that the goal seems to be a permanent member's club, where we all hang out to chat, but even then we've seen former power users alter their posting (and their politics) to try to hustle a living on the internet of beefs.
Kulak and Trace are the only ones I’ve seen cash out so far. Are there more I’m missing?
Yassine?
We had a former lawyer who went on the podcast route as well, IIRC
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I'm subscribed to Noahpinion because he seems like he knows what he's talking about economics-wise, though I 100% disagree with his stance on immigration (since he completely ignores cultural issues (On that front, Peter Brimelow's Alien Nation strikes me as just plain common sense.)) and American exceptionalism.
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I think in the past, I overestimated what fraction of people are high-decoupling. I have always been a high decoupler since I was a kid, so maybe it's just hard for me to understand not being a high decoupler.
Also, I haven't explored Discord at all so far, I probably should. Am open to suggestions about how to get into some interesting Discords.
Likewise.
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