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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2233 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 5, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Happy birthday to the Motte! If nothing else, it is a good time to remind myself that I am bad at predictions and should never play the prediction markets, because I didn't think we'd last this long. But here were are today, entering year four!

Just like last year, I will point out that the server costs continue to be borne by about 25 patrons, making us the Internet's leading (possibly only?) independent user-funded (ad-free!) open political speech forum.

As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.

(Proverbs 27:17)

Are server costs really ~$3750 a month?

The amount of money listed on Patreon isn't per patron, it's the combined total given by all Patrons per month.

Got it, that makes a lot more sense.

Happy birthday to the Motte! If nothing else, it is a good time to remind myself that I am bad at predictions and should never play the prediction markets, because I didn't think we'd last this long. But here were are today, entering year four!

Any takes on what made our lifeboat more successful than other Reddit pilgrim colonies throughout the internet? The lifecycle of every other I've seen is:

  1. One month of elevated activity, with everyone criticizing Reddit and celebrating their new home
  2. A purity spiral towards the far right starts
  3. Ghost town

I'm certain a few departed/banned left-leaning posters will accuse us of going through #2. But it's nothing like what happened to Ruqqus, for example, and #3 never arrived. We've been stable at 1000-2000 comments/week for years now. Subjectively I'd say quality is down, but eh.

Perhaps mottizens are just built different™?

Any takes on what made our lifeboat more successful than other Reddit pilgrim colonies throughout the internet?

I'm sure the emergent property of "success" in this context arises in several ways. For one, we do just have a great userbase. But one important aspect, I think, is probably that there is a real demand for spaces like this, and very little plausible competition.

It has been interesting, to me, to watch the SSC subreddit really struggle with CW posts lately. It's clear that a lot of people posting there want to talk about CW issues in a rationalist-adjacent way, and the most active moderators joined post-split and are a lot more tolerant of CW content (often going so far as to make tortured arguments for why this or that post isn't really CW, even though, uh, it clearly is). The CW thread was originally a pressure release valve, basically, keeping CW out of the rest of the sub (usually!). It improved the quality of the rest of the sub--but by being a part of the sub, the quality of the CW thread was itself increased.

But this only works if the mod team is genuinely committed to a "tone not content" moderation policy. In committing themselves to advancing one certain approach to American politics, Reddit admins made this increasingly difficult to achieve. Some of our own spinoffs, right and left (CWR and TheSchism, respectively), never really went anywhere, because they abandoned the one thing that people actually want from this space: content-neutral moderation.

And I say that, knowing full well how often we moderators are accused of thumbing the scales for the right, or the left, or whatever. But even those accusations are a reaffirmation from the userbase that it is content-neutral moderation that is desired, even if people don't always agree on how that looks in practice.

In short, what makes this place as successful as it is, remains the foundation of the space:

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.

People actually want that, but almost everyone out there promising such a thing are actually trying to build a "neutral" space where they can prove that their particular views are the actually neutral ones. Literally millions of dollars in grant money have flowed to university research projects promising to "improve political discourse" and yet we do more to accomplish that here every single day, on a Patreon shoestring, than every single one of those universities combined.

I think that counts for something!

because they abandoned the one thing that people actually want from this space: content-neutral moderation.

Possibly a nitpick, possibly this is what you meant, but CWR was pretty content-neutral, though it was probably a bit too loose on the "moderation" part.

Yeah that place got squeezed to death I think more directly from being in the eye of Sauron, its users just got systematically purged over time I imagine and the ranks never got refilled.

In all serious, I think it's mostly down to goodish users and robust moderation, especially in avoiding #2.

thank you 25 patrons

That makes us what, three years old in our latest incarnation? Very lindy by niche internet fora standards. I look forward to many more.

independent user-funded (ad-free!) open political speech forum

Not for us mods, I have some of the spam messages seared into my retina, haha.

Very lindy by niche internet fora standards.

I was a member (and for a while, the only active moderator) of Yandere^2 Forum, which lasted IIRC a bit over 9 years*, although it was much, much less active than here.

*Eventually our host found out that we'd been sodomising their terms of service with a rusty fork, and nuked the entire site from orbit. We'd probably not have lasted nearly as long had we been Motte-sized; there's a long list of sites in the same vein - many actually crossing less lines than we did - that got killed by enemy action (r/yandere has survived, but only by amputating absolutely anything to do with RL).

Spam posters are guaranteed one set of eyeballs on this site. At least that Russian guy asking about who owns the website seems to have given up. Or I just haven't been the first to spot him in a while.

I literally didn’t know we had a Patreon.

The “Profile Views” button says “this page is only available to patrons”, can I actually view that if I become a patron?

To the best of my understanding, that is not actually a function of the site--maybe leftover code from rDrama? I would need @ZorbaTHut to say more about that.

Just like last year, I will point out that the server costs continue to be borne by about 25 patrons, making us the Internet's leading (possibly only?) independent user-funded (ad-free!) open political speech forum.

Petiton to pimp up Quincy, change the caption to "bitch better have my money", and equip him with that patreon link.

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.

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!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


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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