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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44988 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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If we are no longer on Reddit, is a "Culture War" thread really the best way to contain these topics? What about two tabs at the top of the Home screen: Culture War and Regular, with the Culture War than just having a list of posts that can be their own top level posts?

I think keeping everything in one place prevents the fracturing of the community into subcultures, who can then evolve independently of each other and then start to fight. Some people might only open threads on one topic, others on others, and eventually one group may get a bad reputation among the others. Keeping us all on the same page literally keeps us all on the same page metaphorically.

At that point, why even bother with a reddit-like design? We might as well have migrated to DSL and just become a regular old forum

I can't speak for everyone but I really like the reddit style branching comment/post structure.

Reddit's style of branching comments is the worst, because discussions get buried and harder to find. 4chan style where replies have direct links to the post they're replying to (and the ability to preview the previous/next post in the chain by hovering) is the best forum style I've ever experienced.

I strongly disagree, Reddit lets you follow specific conversation threads much more easily and collapse/skip threads you aren't interested in. That being said what you ask for is available at https://www.themotte.org/comments albeit not segregated into topic threads.

edit: I will say I do find the /comments version useful as the thread matures and I'm just looking for updates on certain discussions. Early on I like the reddit style structure because it keeps everything in context but it does become harder to keep up with where the new posts are towards the end of the week.

Yeah, I also prefer the free-form style of the chans where you can reference whichever post you like without tumbling ever further down some tree structure. But then again, would that stand up to the thousands of posts a megathread often gets?

I think reddit style discussion works much better when discussions are very large, with many participants. Forums are much better when it's smaller in scale, and you're not constantly producing these monstrous chained quotes. If you get rid of the megathread approach, small scale discussions would dominate I believe

At that point you might as well be on discord then.

Small forum threads are nice because they're easy to keep track of. Discord is just about the opposite of that.

I don't think it was a great system even on Reddit, tbh. I definitely would be in support of ditching the megathread here. However, Zorba mentioned (in another thread) that he wants to keep things the same for now, as moving off-site is already quite a shakeup.

Nah single thread is better, I can mindlessly scroll through dozens of different topics without opening new links

I like the thread system, I'm used to it.

I'm confused about the purpose of non -CW things pre-move. If something isn't CW-radioactive, why post it on TheMotte?

Of course now, I suppose we may develop a unique community that wants to discuss all matter of things.

Compare the book recommendations on the Friday Fun threads vs. /r/books, the relationship advice in Wellness Wednesday vs. /r/relationships, or anything about Small Question Sundays.

I won't say the /r/themotte was better at everything than the dedicated communities, but it at least gave a distinct perspective on things.

I'd like for this place to be a community, not just a war ring. We survive by making people want to come back; in an ideal world I'd like for this place to grow to cover quite a few more subjects, with people who simply never bother to click the Culture War Thread.

One of the more popular subforums on Something Awful was Pet Island, where you chatted about your pets. Something Awful turned pretty bad, but in its heyday it was a thing of beauty.

Amen.

Things like e.g. the Wellness Wednesday thread shouldn't really be CW.

And there can be interesting things to discuss with The Motte-style regulations that are not CW and could be disrupted by CW topics.

Discussing noncontroversial things is good training for discussing controversial things, because it's a lot easier to discuss dispassionately.

It also provides opportunity for positive, low-stress interaction, which help remind you that you're talking to actual people, not just evil other-tribe defect-bots.

Sounds like a lot of development effort and there's a lot of higher priority issues currently.

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