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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026

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It's like showing up to a zoo, which advertises itself with animals, and then complaining to the zookeepers: "I think animal-keeping is unethical. Why don't you get rid of them?" A Motte without the chuds and the HBDers and the holocaust deniers already exists: it's called the SCC reddit/comment page.

Admittedly, 1 and 3 are quite similar, but one is more emotionally manipulative than the other which I found annoying enough to warrant its own entry.

The subreddit is nice, albeit too quiet for my taste. The actual comment section on the ACX Substack? Pure sensory hell for me, in the sense that the terrible UI and UX makes me never quite feel like writing there. I could and should, in the sense that's a good way for me to get a boost in popularity in exchange for effort, but it's just that bad. And I'm the kind of person who begrudgingly uses the reddit mobile app, even if it's a hacked and modified version.

I wonder how soon LLMs will become cheap and fast enough that all websites can be rewritten on-the-fly to match whatever UI style and format the user wants. I feel like the tech is pretty much there in browsers, but no human has the time to write a bespoke algorithm for each site they use, which also could change at any time. A sufficiently fast AI could fill that role and do it realtime, adapting to any changes by the website devs.

Because I too dislike the substack comment UI and wish Reddit (and Twitter too, for that matter) hadn't killed all competitor apps and forced us to use theirs.

I guess it depends which action you're criticizing. I don't ask for anybody to be banned for instance. It's quite easy to simply not respond to the people I find odious.

But it is easy to notice that bad comments that agree with the Motte consensus end up fairly highly upvoted even as they get a modhat response, and if you go against said consensus you will often end up in the negative regardless of the evidence you bring. I would be pleasantly surprised if I changed even one person's mind, but usually you either get downvotes and no response or some response that boils down to belief that a nebulous outgroup is evil and acting out of malice. Not exactly intellectually stimulating debate.

but usually you either get downvotes and no response

You gotta change your frame of mind. I get so happy now when I rip a large comment with some linked support and then don't get a response back.

I used to get a dopamine hit when I saw the little red bell was lit up, now I get one when I make a good comment and then check back and it's empty.

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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.


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