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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1507 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 10, 2025

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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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.

the admins were most upset about discussion of the trans thing which was comparatively minor.

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.

The whole time the subreddit was up, it is categorically true that places like /r/politicalcompassmemes, /r/4chan and /r/redscarepod had much more objectionable (to the admins) content than we had. The admins were most concerned about slurs and they have always been a bannable offense here when used against someone else.

The mods even confirmed directly that there was no ban coming immediately down the pipeline, it was purely theoretically pre-emptive in case things got worse, and in fact they didn’t, first because of the general anti-woke backlash and then because of Trump’s reelection.

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).

There were times when there were more pro-trans voices here, sure, but most people are clearly of the same opinion now as they were then (“it’s not real but it’s reasonable to be individually nice to trans people in your life”).

People were getting their accounts slapped with some regularity though -- not sure whether anyone got a site-wide perma, but there were a lot of site-wide temp bans being eaten due to drive-by report-to-admins of tranny stuff. That makes meaningful discussion of these issues difficult even if it weren't the case that admins were warming up to kick the sub itself. (which I doubt they would have thought twice about if it came to their attention)

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