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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44937 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Press S to spit on Reddit's stinking corpse

Other than AEO, I like reddit. It has great mobile app support, and most of my interests are aggregated in one place for convenient lunch-time viewing. This migration will definitely increase the friction of participation of existing mottizens (at least for me personally) and attracting new ones, but I understand it had to be done, eventually. I hope it succeeds!

The mobile apps are great, that's fair. I'll miss RIF. It's hard to give Reddit much credit for that since all the decent apps weren't made by Reddit, but at least they didn't destroy them like Twitter did. old reddit is still a decent design, though it's slowly breaking down due to changes by new reddit.

So that's the good side. On the bad side... I have nothing good to say about new reddit. And the very core of the design, up/downvotes, was probably cursed from the beginning. I honestly think the single big thread is the only reason TheMotte even survived as long as it did, because it largely prevented up and down votes from being meaningful. If sabotaging Reddit's design is necessary like that it's not a great sign for the whole idea.

And on the ugly side: just take a look at /r/popular if you want to see the "true state" of the website... as someone who stayed off of all for a long time I was honestly shocked to see how far the place fell. It's as good a sign as anything that not only is Eternal September still going, there is no bottom.

They destroyed alien lol

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This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

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Why are you called The Motte?

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."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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