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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   7036 thread views

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Please add and pin a bare links repository. Theres things I want to talk about but can't be arsed to make a effortpost about, Im sure others are in that position as well. This would take some traffic off the CWR but I think on net activity will go up because right now its bottlenecked by only the effortposters posting.

I get that this is a popular request, but:

Theres things I want to talk about but can't be arsed to make a effortpost about

this is exactly why we removed the bare links repository in the first place.

Ofcourse you know what you (and the other mods) did better than me.

But as far as I can recall, the primary reason the BLR was removed was that it was eating up too much traffic from the CW thread.

However, now might be a good time to experiment? It might breathe new life into the website, yada yada. I'd wager that it being its own pinned thread instead of its own comment nested within the CW thread might change how people interact with those two threads.

Basically my suggestion/idea is to foster two different communities within the website, one that comes for the BLR, and finds their way into the CW thread. And the current resident CWR posters. The ruleset for the BLR can be slightly relaxed to ease in newcomers. Sort of like a CWR lite to create a pipeline of the type of posters you want, train and vet them before letting them reign free in the CWR.

With admin level control you can limit the comment length in the BLR (max 300-400 words maybe?) to prevent cannibalization, if they REALLY want to talk about it, they can take it to the CWR.

The quality was actually the major problem! This post was what got me convinced that it needed to be solved, and here is where I did the actual removal.

Basically my suggestion/idea is to foster two different communities within the website, one that comes for the BLR, and finds their way into the CW thread.

I think we maybe just don't want the people who come for the BLR? At least, we don't want the people who stay in the BLR, and we don't want people to leave the main thread for the BLR, and we don't want the problems caused by people posting low-quality stuff in the BLR.

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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.

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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If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

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