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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44948 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?

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.

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.

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The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

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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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