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Notes -
The Motte’s Declining Audience
Several times this month I have tried to load the site and it’s been very slow, looked weird (with a kind of almost rdrama pink theme and unusual spacing) or failed to load at all.
I’d guess that this is a big reason why, after 5+ years of relative stability, the last few months have seen a huge drop off in culture war thread comments. Posting here for visibility, but this seems like something we should fix or this place is going to die pretty quickly.
Technical issues aside, I've had the thought the place would benefit from some limited grass roots marketing. Once or twice a year mods could pick a week and suggest holding a goodpost for it. When it hits everyone all at once breaks the don't talk about Fight Club rule:
For 5-7 days people are encouraged to blast links into the ether. Twitter, Substack, reddit, or wherever. This results in an influx which results in a period of managed headache. Downsides are this might result in more attacks, unwanted attention, or permanent damage to a fragile ecological system.
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Still loading slow today.
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To be honest, most times I contemplate making a top level post, I just contemplate getting modded for it and go do something else. We don't need to tolerate end to end bare links, but we'd benefit from somewhat reducing the minimum conversion activation energy.
Same. We should bring back the Bare Link Repository.
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Are people overestimating how much effort the mods require? I see OPs either posting 50 words (leading to them getting modded) or writing mini-essays. But usually a solid three paragraphs is enough for mods to leave a toplevel alone.
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I don't think the problem is pageload time. Fewer people are posting high quality toplevel posts. Most people, myself included, just respond to toplevel conversations that strike our fancy. What's causing this, IMO:
So what we have here is not a problem, but a predicament. Even if we invited new friends for fresh voices, our friends are also 30yo+ (#1) and they also live in a world where discourse is dead (#2). The Motte is on its nice, slow decline from here on out.
We can mitigate it by being less lazy and striving to post more middle-effort toplevel content. Responses per toplevel are still healthy. I tried this today, posting something on my mind that I usually wouldn't bother, wouldn't think was "good enough" back in the golden age of The Motte.
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Are you willing to pay for a web-developer's time to fix/maintain it?
Sure, although I think we have plenty of potential volunteers here.
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Is there a repo with tickets that we're tracking ?
I am happy to volunteer 8 hours (1 weekend day) of my time for fixes. I should be able to find 1 day the week after thanksgiving. Could pick up a couple of tickets and make some progress on them if no-one is looking at them.
I mostly do ml/backend work, but have done a little bit of front end too. If it is just profiling and debug cycles, it should be straight forward.
There is a wider question here: discoverability. Some friends have inquired if a space like the theMotte exists. I usually shurg and pretend this place doesn't exist. My policy has been that if you are meant to find it, you will find it. But, after our divorce from Reddit, I'm not so sure anymore.
Please do recommend this place to other people. We’re small enough that we really need the exposure. If they come here and then they don’t like it or can’t follow the rules then you can say well, guess it wasn’t meant to be.
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I do feel extremely bad we leave all the web admin stuff to Zorba.
Would also be willing to contribute one day's work, but wouldn't be able to contribute a dedicated block until after the new year. Unfortunately, I don't do any web/front-end stuff, so would have a decent amount of on-boarding work to get up to speed alone. Further complicated by probably not wanting my public github associated with my notionally pseudonymous motte account.
The real problem though, I suspect, is that we're being effectively periodically DoSed. Either accidentally by various AI scraping tools (not just the one guy). Or intentionally because someone somewhere believes we allow people to say naughty things. The conventional way to deal with this is to pay Cloudflare or Radware to filter the traffic, but then The Motte would be as beholden to Cloudflare as we were to reddit. I'm not aware of a quick fix that bypasses the third-party dependency problem, hopefully someone more familiar with web stuff has an idea though.
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We don't have a pipeline anymore. You should absolutely be recommending The Motte to your friends. If we don't get new members, we are going to die of attrition.
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https://github.com/themotte/rDrama
It's a fork of the rDrama codebase, there have been a moderate amount of changes done to it
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I have been getting 5-10 second page loads and intermittent 504s as well. It isn't completely broken, but it's definitely annoying and I could see it impacting site usage.
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Is Zorba competent?
Yes, extremely, though he is also very busy.
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I think he mentioned a while ago that he does have a job and this website is just a side project.
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1189 comments at the time of this writing, which is close to the all time low but we've had a few other threads in the same neighborhood since the site migration. Around 1500 has been the average for probably over a year now.
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It might be selling out but it also might be time to do cloudflare with maximum protection enabled.
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I haven't seen the rdrama pink theme etc. but have been having loading issues over the last few days. Something somewhere is broken.
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Yes I very much agree. I want this place to live and the issues with loading speed and strange loading issues have been an issue for me as well.
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As someone who mostly consumes and produces content here on quick little breaks from work while in the field, I must say it’s had an impact on me being here.
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Didn’t someone complain about the speed once, Zorba turned up to say he put in a quick fix, and then someone else showed up and asked why his Motte-scraping bot doesn’t work anymore?
Should we find that guy and tell him to knock it off?
I only tried to get an ai to summarize the thread like 5 times, and I haven't tried it since they said there is a blocker in place. Find someone else to scapegoat.
Relax I thought it was funny.
Ah, alright
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Yeah I'm getting "504 Bad Gateway" (or something close to that) errors all the time lately. Thought the site had shut down for a minute.
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It was fixed for a few weeks but the last day or so got bad again
Not really. It comes and goes in waves ever since it was "solved".
idk man just sharing my lived experience , you should check your 504 bad gateway-privilege
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Yes there were a few very brief outages or periods of bad performance over the years, but nothing like what’s happened over the last couple of months.
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Same. I don't want to have to go crawling back to reddit.
Why did we get ejected from Reddit again? Reddit admins let us know we couldn't debate trans stuff?
Discussion of it here.
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Not so much that (although it seemed like would be only a matter of time), but individuals were catching site-wide bans for the triple-brackets (as mentioned below) but also trans stuff -- I seem to remember getting a three day one for something trivial-ish around trans stuff.
What I suspect was happening is bad/motivated actors hanging around using the "report to admins" (as opposed to moderation team) function directly -- which at best would go to some blue-hair for evaluation, or at worst an auto-filter catching things like triple brackets.
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Never was ejected. /r/TheMotte is still there. Every month /u/naraburns bot still posts an (empty) QC thread.
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We were never actually kicked off. However, we'd had several warnings from the "anti-evil" squad, who ignored all our requests for clarification or further dialog. It was generally believed that it was only a matter of time, and Zorba eventually made the decision to pull the trigger. He might or might not have done this before it was necessary, but I doubt we'd have been allowed to remain much longer.
I think it was the right decision. I'm very proud that our little community survived the migration, despite all the nay-sayers at the time!
I think the timing was fine and allowed the migration to proceed with maximum cohesion. Trying to do it while /r/themotte was under administrative sanctions would have lost more users.
The writing was on the wall considering correspondence from the admins. It seemed to be 'You know what you did, no we aren't going to tell you' as a cover for 'we just don't like you, but don't have any specific rule we can point to'. It reminds me of 'Performance Managing' someone out of their job in corporate. Once the process has started, its almost impossible to reverse. They have made their mind up that they are going to get rid of you and that's that.
As it stands, Reddit is completely ruined for any serious political discourse these days. Bots, datamining for AI, making things 'advertiser friendly'.
Yup, which makes it all the more depressing when this place occasionally pulls that same bullshit.
Considering how often I write lengthy explanations of mod decisions (including my own), I consider complaints like yours (still seething over a slap on the wrist two years ago!) to be nothing less than disingenuous. Especially given that you are one of our most irritating serial reporters who reports every post you don't like. So getting a warning two years ago is cause for outrage and lingering resentment, but you want us to warn and/or ban anyone who says anything that chaps your fragile hide?
I'm calling you out here on this where I don't normally make an issue of people who click the report button frivolously because I think the juxtaposition between what you think would be just moderation where you are concerned and what you think would be just moderation where people who are not you are concerned is illustrative.
ROFL. I can't remember the last time I reported a comment. You're off your rocker. (EDIT: I don't think you can claim with a straight face that there hasn't been even one comment in say, even the last two weeks, that I "didn't like".)
It's clear from your response that you still can't point to anything specific. You have literally nothing. You just have another vague accusation. Pure deflection to an unrelated issue, too. Which is exactly the pattern described by the comment I responded to. You keep a bullshit secret list that you vaguely refer to, conveniently preventing the target from being able to show that any particular item on that list is bullshit.
I am not "seething"; I'm simply responding with a specific example of a particular pattern that was described. That's better than you can do.
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I've never had a slap from the mods and I think its very easy to say ruthless words with a razor's edge without getting modded.
You could advocate for Aztec child sacrifice here if you crafted your words in the right way. Anyone getting modded has a skill issue.
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Yup. I already knew it was going to be Amadan before even clicking the link. Most mod work is trivial janitorial duties and some mods should really be forbidden from doing any other type.
But sometimes it's all worth it.
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I believe the straw on the camel's back was when we had a comment removed over someone trying to civilly and factually explain (((parentheses))).
It was just someone using a regular set of [brackets] for a parenthetical statement and the Reddit turbo-jannies jumped on it as a supposedly bannable offense. Which indicated that the jig was probably up and someone higher up on the food chain was hunting for any excuse to start the witch burnings.
@erwgv3g34 @FistfullOfCrows @sarker
Guy A used guillemets. Guy B said Guy A sounded like a Nazi. Guy C said:
Guy C got whacked; other two did not. Hence, it's SoulFire that was correct to begin with.
Probably a Third World sweatshop worker or bot solely working on "does post contain naughty thing".
I was guy C. But it was just the random last straw, other removals happened and they were already preparing to migrate.
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Wasn't it a set of «««guillemets»»»?
Who wants to bet a turbo jannie that had never seen russian quotes just thought it was a fancy new alt-right version of the echo brackets.
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It was, iirc, a single «pair».
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Technically we didn't, but the feeling was that we were close. Because we were willing to let people freely speak their minds on a number of topics (including transgender stuff), we had posts getting removed by site admins. The belief was that it was only a matter of time until the admins closed the sub for refusing to uphold the site-wide rules about what opinions one is allowed to express. Personally I agree with that belief, but we didn't technically get shut down.
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Too many no-no words meant the sub was at risk of deletion, iirc. Much easier to respect the spirit of the community off-site where we could set our own standards for what content needs moderated.
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I don't know about "die", but yeah, poor performance is going to be very bad for user activity.
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Zorba has been looking into the performance issues.
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