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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   7005 thread views

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Suggestion: Make finding new comments easier.

I believe this is by far the biggest potential quality-of-life improvement over reddit while maintaining the single-thread structure. Specific suggestions, without any real degree of certainty about what would be simple/practical:

  1. Add a "collapse all old comments" button that lets you see new comments only.

  2. Add buttons and/or keyboard shortcuts to jump down the page to the next new comment.

  3. Highlight "More comments" buttons if there are new comments deep in a subthread. I can't count the number of times on reddit I either go hunting deep in comment chains for new comments that don't exist, or just miss new comments entirely b/c I don't want to check every deep chain.

  4. Bring over the reddit gold feature of a dropdown "Show comments since visit" menu that lets you select any one of your last few visits to the page to show new comments from. iirc this one was suggested down below, so I'm just seconding/consolidating.

It's very far from perfect but the best way to find new comments to old subthreads ATM seems to be browsing https://www.themotte.org/comments

Yeah, it has its uses. I've never been able to get used to contextless browsing, though. I like seeing new comments in their original contexts.

What is this place?

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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