Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
How long have you been around rationalist-adjacent spaces?
I found Scott in 2013 or 2014, possibly via LJ. I remember discussing "Universal Love Said the Cactus Person" with a friend IRL who brought it up and he previously had never mentioned reading SSC. Somewhere in there I found /r/SSC because in 2016 I saw a notice for a meetup taking place 5 minutes away from my house and didn't go because I found many people active in /r/SSC off-putting. I stopped paying close attention to Scott after the 2017 Kolmogorov entry. I remember /r/theMotte being created and then /r/SneerClub with the latter being distilled perfection of what I didn't like about so many /r/SSC posters to start with plus reddit overall. I guess that's about where I stopped paying close attention because it was only much later that I became aware of this site starting separately to escape reddit, the TW/schism hullaballo, and some other subsequent happenings.
Because I have a strong memory that works in strange ways, it's a bizarre feeling to recognize a few user names from ancient /r/SSC days (Zorba, Hlynka, gattsuru, etc.), or look into /r/SSC now and see a few users I dislike still plugging away, and realize I've been paying attention (or at least mildly aware) of their written output for a decade.
I think 2013 is a fair shout in my case, that was probably when I was in high school and accidentally stumbled onto LW or SSC. Can't recall which one came first, but the other must have followed shortly thereafter.
I imagine my initial encounter with The Motte would have been after 2015, since I don't seem to recall engaging in the Culture War threads on the SSC subreddit. I'm confident that I was a regular participant by 2017 when I was a few years into med school.
The greatest melancholy I feel is when I see the upvote or comment counts in the old CWR threads: you can tell we had a lot more people around. To this day, I'm not sure if the migration off of Reddit was entirely warranted, or if we could have managed to avoid the gaze of the Reddit Admins till the political climate changed. While the Motte is definitely in a healthy state, and the fears that we'd collapse to an unsustainably low population didn't materialize, Reddit did make it easier. We had plenty of people stumble across us following a link, or by checking someone's profile.
Are you suggesting a RETVRN?
I am unsure of whether or not that's warranted.
I think the reasons for Zorba planning an exodus were based in clear merit. We did attract the wrong kind of attention. It was better to leave on our own terms than scramble after the subreddit ended up quarantined.
I wouldn't be averse to us re-activating the sub, but I think that's an option best used in extremis. We're here, we're functional. The moderation tools are so much better. The Reddit experience, in general, is so much worse.
If we end up in a state where we don't have the active user base to justify our existence, that's about the only situation where I think dusting off /r/TheMotte truly becomes the obviously correct procedure.
The political situation was never bad enough to warrant an exodus, the admins were most upset about discussion of the trans thing which was comparatively minor.
I do think we should return. It was good for discoverability. At the same time I am of course grateful to Zorba and the others who created this place.
There go 80% of my AAQCs...
That’s because it’s the easiest topic to grandstand on because it gets almost no opposition. Even our few trans posters have had very heterodox opinions on the subject, and everyone else (again, including the liberals and leftists) tends to be opposed to the standard libleft position on the subject.
If you don't care about the issue, feel free to not care about it, but your insistence that others shouldn't care about it either is bizarre. Throughout my time on here the discussion went from me always feeling like I'm on the back foot, to feeling like I've some chinks in the pro-trans side armor, to the current state where I can kind of understand how one might call it "almost no opposition" (it's not true, but I can understand). I'd imagine that chronicling the rise and fall of the trans movement might be worth it as a matter of historical social commentary, if nothing else, but for you the issue is not only "minor", it "was played out by the end of the last Bush administration". No matter the state we're currently in, we apparently always have been pre-ordained to be in it.
That's all beside the point anyway. The whole point of this place is to have civil conversations even when they aren't allowed on mainstream forums, and you're telling me I should just shrug off a gag order on my hobby horse, and accept it as not a big deal.
Admins constricting the Overton window are one thing, but the real value here is that you can speak without being shoved into a box by the other commenters the moment you open your mouth:
I’m exaggerating, but only slightly. If there’s another space where people don’t instantly go for your throat the moment they spot "outgroup", I’d love to know. The Motte lets me post long comments that people actually read and respond to. Here, charity is the norm. On Reddit, it’s a punishable offense from all sides. Twitter is just a cesspool. Substack is dividing the community even more.
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