Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
How long do you think The Motte will continue? Will we still be here in thirty years?
I still think this site has strong potential for growth that just hasn’t really been activated. You just have to create an iceberg meme titled obscure and high iq discussion sites and place it in a conspicuously high or low position, and then just post about that in whatever userbase “market” you’re interested in recruiting from. There are like a dozen such gorilla marketing things you can do to 100x the userbase in months, were this desired by the mods / community. That and making the front page more intuitive. You can even select with precision the demographic you want using keywords , going old fashion with magazine ads in top university newspapers… can even market it as a “retro” forum which would work… there’s a lot of unused opportunities tbh. A lot of intelligent people would like to participate in a forum better than Reddit and X!
t. wants the site to be flooded by seven zillion witches
Do you see Scott’s own example image for these supposedly hyper-problematic witches that must be eradicated from all civil discourse? It’s three links: a program that tells you if the entertainment you buy is injected with SJW themes; a video on the frequency of economic schemes in Africa and the risk of their migration to the EU; a black serial killer who targetted only white children. What witchcraft!
that Scott was proven wrong, horrifically so. Scott’s idea (or rather those in agreement with it) paved the way for the BLM hysteria and the largest amount of ineffectively-altruistic charitable giving ever. Were these witches allowed to discourse freely, maybe the public would have double-checked the reports on racial homicide / police stats, and maybe the leaders of Minnesota wouldn’t feel pressured hide the report on billion-dollar Somali schemes, etc. What is so wrong with these witches? They made Scott too uncomfortable? Or is he just not aware that, at the same time, the top stories on Reddit were on all inverses of this supposed witchcraft — a list of the most inclusive games, a story of a successful African immigrant family, a white serial killer who targeted only blacks — these sorts of stories were allowed to proliferate without any counterweights for years.
I digress. Undesirables are now all on x and short form video content; few now have the bandwidth to read two paragraphs.
Did you see the video? I couldn't find a link (Voat's shut down, and a low-res thumbnail plus headline wasn't sufficient for my Google-fu), but I'd have guessed it would be anecdata rather than anything with which we could hope to calculate a frequency.
That third headline was easy enough to find the context for, though. It's on the witchiest-looking website you could imagine, and it's a little hyperbolic (house arrest with an electronic monitor isn't quite "roaming" "freely"), but it's hard to say that it was too hyperbolic, with at least a couple years of hindsight:
It’s anecdotal but so was most of what you’d see for these issues on Reddit in the mid-late 10s. You’d routinely see stories like “this black immigrant student got into every college”, “this person was jailed for racist violence”, “this person was a victim of racist violence”, “TIL about Black Wall Street”, “this person was the recipient of anti-immigrant violence”. Selectively positive and negative anecdota have a big impact on opinion because a normal person simply assumes that they represent reality, like how a person who watches K-Dramas might unconsciously develop a positive image of South Korea. And many of the anecdotes on Reddit were never really verified anyway.
The story of deprave cultural practices in Africa is the balance to the curated stories of positive cultural practices in Africa or negative cultural practices of colonists in Africa. There’s not really rational grounds to consider one witchy and the other run of the mill
Where amusingly, sometimes you'd see some pesky wrong-thinker ask something like "would have an Asian or white applicant experienced a similar result?" and get dogpiled and downvoted into the shadow realm.
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The last time I was on Voat, the comments were basically people, if they can be called that, daring each other to commit violence, endlessly on repeat. Perhaps I visited on a particularly bad day, but I doubt it improved any before it shut down.
Still, re-reading Scott's essay, it is remarkable that his basic example of a place full of witches is Fox News. Seems like a serious epistemological problem, a failure to recognize that while Glenn Beck might have triggered people back in the day, fundamentally he wasn't and isn't a threat to human decency. If Fox and Limbaugh are one's starting point, maybe there's another reason why the number of alleged witches visible in public keeps growing.
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I am referring to witches who overwhelm the moderators with low-quality posting and thereby indirectly force the moderators to increase and dilute their own ranks (assuming that the moderators are the true defining core of the community), not witches who are racist.
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