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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.
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:
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™?
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:
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!
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.
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