site banner
ymeskhout  1yr ago (text post)   1360 thread views

RSS Support?

You know it's really me because who else would care about RSS. Although Reddit was originally built with explicit RSS support the nested nature of the weekly culture war thread required a slight bit of jury-rigging to show only top-level comments. So the RSS URL for the last thread looked like this: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/wulqxp.rss?depth=1

I tried adding the culture war thread from here into Feedly but it doesn't seem to recognize the format, and instead prompts me to use a paywalled feature to build custom RSS feeds. Can the rdrama code base support RSS?

6
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

There's https://www.themotte.org/rss but as near as I can tell that's it. In theory we absolutely could add any RSS thread you want, but right now we're pretty crushed on time; if you can either implement it yourself or convince a friendly coder to do it, we're happy to merge it in, but it's gonna take a while otherwise.

That said, if you can write up the exact thing you want - "all top-level comments for the culture war threads"? - I'll toss it into our long-term plans.

"all top-level comments for the culture war threads" is accurate. I attached what the RSS feed I made looked like in Feedly.

The way we have this implicitly organized is a relic of how Reddit was built, and it doesn't necessarily have to continue the same way. We use the weekly CWR thread as a sort of "sub-forum" with each top-level comment functionally the same as a forum thread. I remember you saying how part of that is intentional, because you want people to accidently meander into a topic they might not have otherwise read. RSS feeds don't interfere with that, and in fact make me pay attention to each post much more.

With RSS feeds, I just plug it into Feedly and everything is delivered straight to my front door, and I don't have to worry about keeping track of what is and isn't read/unread. I'm actually very curious to know how people browsed the Motte without RSS, because the only alternative is "maybe I'll see if something is new at the Motte"

/images/16624790183664687.webp

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