site banner
gog  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   5609 thread views

Where are the people smarter than us hanging out?

In Paul Fussell’s book on class (I think), he says that people are really worried about differentiating themselves from the class immediately below them, but largely ignorant of the customs and sometimes even existence of the classes above them. When I found SSC, and then The Motte, and stuff like TLP, I was astonished to find a tier of the internet I had had no idea even existed. The quality of discourse here is . . . usually . . . of the kind that “high brow” (by internet standards) websites THINK they are having, but when you see the best stuff here you realize that those clowns are just flattering themselves. My question is, who is rightly saying the same thing about us? Of what intellectual internet class am I ignorant now? Or does onlineness impose some kind of ceiling on things, and the real galaxy brains are at the equivalent of Davos somewhere?

37
Top New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

It is kind of ironic that for a community of programmers, TM settled for a fork of rDrama. This might be a passion issue but raises some questions nonetheless. TM isn't hackernews but TM isn't /r/redscarepod either. This point is probably not worth thinking much about, I am sure the alternatives/tradeoffs were considered. Ultimately it's an optics thing.

I was around the development group more when the choice was made to settle on rDrama. There are indeed a lot of other forum systems out there, some of which are using more sophisticated technology. But if you really dig into them, virtually all of them are one-person projects that have never had any significant contributions from anyone other than the original creator, have never been proven on a high-traffic site, particularly with mega-threads like we do and probably at least a few active attackers, and have basically no thought put into proper moderator tools or anti-spam. At least a few of them are also actively hostile to anything non-woke - see the Lemmy slur filter scandal.

rDrama may not be the best designed system out there, but it's at least okay, is open-source in the form that actually serves production traffic, is reasonably well-supported, has some decent mod tools that were straightforward to expand, and has been cooperative with us.

my god the lemmy thing was pathetic. Hadn't seen it before.

"We have made our policy clear on this topic, and we are not going to change it. So there is no point arguing about it, fuck off nazibigot!"

"we have changed our policy on this topic, the slur filter is now entirely optional"

Yup. Even though they did eventually make it directly configurable by the forum admins after all, would you really want to be downstream of a team that says things like that? Who knows what they're gonna do next?

Two of the maintainers got Fidel Castro profile pictures.. on Github! You can't make this shit up.

Also, it's so frustrating reading all these texts about why a hardcoded filter doesn't make technical sense when all you really want to say is "motherfucker you don't decide what I can or can't say! technical considerations be damned". It's suffocating really.

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.


New post guidelines

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).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats