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Notes -
I don't know how I could make it clearer that I'm not trying to consensus-build - should I add in another couple disclaimers that this is just one old-timer's opinion? Why, when I was a boy, this town was a great place, we all used to go down to the soda fountain...
As for magicalkittycat, people shouldn't call him retarded, and I should think the mods will get to whoever did once they see the reports. But he is a very bad poster even at making the arguments he wants to make. While themotte is supposed to show charity to people who make arguments against the prevailing winds, they still have to be good arguments, and you can't ask people here not to tear apart bad ones, and particularly not bad ones made in bad faith. Dogpiling a bad post has nothing to do with building consensus when it's being done to magicalkittycat any more than when it was done to securesignals.
The other thing I have noticed is a consistent decline in the quality of non-RW posters (some honourable mentions excepted) - RW posters have declined in quality somewhat, but not nearly as sharply. We started off with some great non-RW posters, some of whom were driven off by the ickiness of the HBD debate (rip yodats), more by the continuing success of HBD arguments against the strong environmentalist thesis, more of whom were lost due to 2020 covid/blm/election fedposting, and more of whom have since evaporatively cooled off, or flamed out over some particularly emotional point and gotten banned. There are a couple reasons for this, some better and some worse, though I suspect a major one is that there's just a deep incompatibility between the discourse norms of themotte and those of liberal/leftist spaces, such that somebody who is a high-quality poster in those spaces is unlikely to be able to transition to themotte, and that there will always be a certain psychic friction for people who are on themotte to debate in good faith but are otherwise marinated in those spaces (there's also an incompatibility with people who are totally in the jug of hard right-wing spaces, but they usually get themselves banned pretty quickly).
Your assessment of themotte as an echo chamber does bring up my assessment of the stage of decline we're currently at. I've seen this happen on many 4chan boards, for instance - it's the stage of forum decline where people come in specifically in order to argue with the forum. Incels on /fit/ are the purest example, but also just about everything on /pol/ post-2020 or so (and /pol/'s decline into that started much earlier). Both low-quality liberal posters and low-quality Hananian contrarians like kittycat/Turok all see this place as a featureless Outgroup blob and want to come here to Argue With The Forum. I'm not sure where we get new blood at this point; I see every non-RW poster with the intellectual subtlety and emotional stability to hang here as a minor miracle.
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