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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29395 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

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I think Reddit is more important than people realize. It’s long been one of the most valuable datasets on the internet, even before LLMs. I would google a question about health, products, or general interest with a “site:Reddit.com” at the end to get thoughtful commentary from real people. And now that it is LLM fuel, it’s influence will only grow

And it is entirely captured by the left fringe of the Overton window. It is one of the more progressive San Francisco companies. I’ve eaten more bans there than anywhere else on the internet. I’m not a particularly inflammatory poster! But their Overton window doesn’t extend very far to the right.

I’m troubled by this and I am a computer programmer. How to overcome Reddit’s massive network effect? I’ve thought that the Motte would be a good place to build from. We have a high quality audience. Could we start subforums dedicated to special interests and build slowly? It would give mottizens a place to have high quality conversations on issues other than the culture war without having to venture into reddit. But that probably deserves a top-level post of its own

The .win family kinda tried that, branching out from The Donald to some other rightish culture war subreddit bunkers, but it's difficult to call the results a success.

Obviously I think the culture here is much higher quality than .win would be

The one problem for reddit is the quality of those organic searches will continue to plummit. Reddit for probably a decade was an ugly, text-heavy website whereas if you look around many of the users now call it an app since that's how they came across and mostly use it. That was the whole point of creating their own image upload service to replace Imgur which was created for reddit by some kid.

I think that the issue is the network effect and centralization is the problem that attracts the shaping of opinions. Why this place still feels authentic is because of size. Maybe the solution is to have an aggregator of independent smaller forums where the forums are actually independent moderation and actual resource ownership as opposed subreddits that are controlled by reddit.

How to overcome Reddit’s massive network effect?

Convince Elon to buy Reddit and merge it with X. Other than that Reddit-like sites have past their peak and if you wanted to compete with them it would be a viscous fight for a shrinking pie.

Other than that Reddit-like sites have past their peak

What is replacing them?

What is this place?

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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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