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Judging by the reports, this is not going over well. It does kind of read like a bit of trolling and dunking on your outgroup.
First of all, as much as I appreciate the (no doubt totally sincere and not at all tongue-in-cheek) flattery, I do not "rage" and I am not sure why you are they/theming me. My pronouns are "He" and "Go away."
More seriously, we have seen some of the rage-quitters and "I can't even" flouncers you mention, but really, not that many. And not all of them have been outraged leftists. For the most part, the leftists who can't stand to share space with HBDers and misogynists have already left. We do have a couple of very persistent mentally ill obsessives who keep screeching at us in filtered comments you never see, but again... not all of those are leftists.
Unfortunately, I do think evaporative cooling is leaving us with fewer and fewer posters who aren't one-note culture warriors, and very heavily skewed towards the right. I wish there was a way to recruit more people of diverse viewpoints, but even the SSC/LessWrong forums now think the Motte is a hive of scum and villainy because of who we don't ban. There really is a longer point to be made here, about how rightists have become the more ideologically "tolerant" faction. Not to say I don't get the sense that a lot of rightists are very eager to put leftists (and moderates) up against the wall - but they will at least talk to the other side while it's mostly liberals who now act like even engaging in dialog with a MAGA is starting down the dangerous path of seeing them as human beings.
The Motte regularly disheartens me and there still isn't any other place like it.
I guess jettisoning the ideology of rationalism would be a start? Just thinking out loud.
I would rather hang myself, or take some of you guys with me (this is a joke, and not just for legal reasons).
What I like/love about this place is that it hasn't divorced itself from its rationalist roots entirely. Sure, it's drifted to the point where I'd personally label the Motte as rat-adjacent; yet it retains the important things - like, the popularity of clear arguments and good epistemics makes it one of the few places I care to interact with the internet. Minus any pretense of Standard Rationalist Rules For Discourse, this place would become indistinguishable from 4chan or X in a week.
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I think there's also the issue that intra-maga disputes are illegible to anti-maga people, intra-right disputes are illegible to anti-right people, intra-non-left disputes are often illegible to progressives, etc. There's some equivalence for the right looking left, but mostly in bad faith on the part of right-wingers, because we get the left-wing stuff megaphoned into our brains by the prevailing culture whereas the right is, in Scott's words, "dark matter". So themotte looks to some like a place of spirited debate over important questions and to others like an echo chamber of right-wing circlejerk. I happen to be of the former view, but opinions naturally vary.
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It reads incredibly lame and like he's doing a victory lap. It amuses me people reported this, but it definitely brought down the average quality of this weekly culture war thread by a small amount.
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Should we make a try at returning to Reddit in search of new blood?
The environment is different now over there.
Please no.
Reddit is a publicly-traded company led by spez. They could add ID verification, kill old.reddit (and insert more ads), take over the subreddit and do whatever. They've already killed third-party apps. Enshittification is real and they're undergoing it.
Even a few days ago they banned r/theadamfriedlandshow (supposedly for a meme about Israelis dine-and-dashing, but I couldn't find confirmation).
I trust Zorba more.
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we must retake our homeland, yes
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I don't think it's the worst idea, but from a moderator perspective: Jesus Christ their tooling is awful. And as a mere user, the current reddit mobile experience is obnoxious.
I would reserve/endorse a return for very specific circumstances, such as if this community is truly dying (it's not). Or perhaps we could start posting things that aren't just the monthly AAQCs there, maybe smaller discussion threads that show evidence of life and are a springboard to the site.
We genuinely are doing pretty fine, even if we don't have the activity that the sub had at its peak. If I had the opportunity to meet Scott in person as planned, I'd have begged for him to give us even a small shout-out in a relevant Open Thread.
I don't think we are dying but I do think we are losing interesting people and shrinking in variety.
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I had the masculine pronouns in place, before I realized I actually didn't know your pronouns and asking you what they were for a bit of servile flattery would probably annoy you more.
The reason why there's a partisan tilt to my observation, and that's because righties do not go 'this forum is full of feminists/progressives/liberals, and I'm leaving' because A) no one says that and B) such a conservative would have already been preemptively banned a long time before they could get exasperated. I tried to be as nonpartisan as I could, but there really is a difference between righty and lefty crashouts: the former have personal animus against the mods and the latter are disgusted by the community itself.
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I don’t know what the ideological leanings of this place even here except that on occasion it’s a decent place for me to express an opinion and get feedback on it. People that are highly invested in any topic or community will typically overanalyze and read with much greater intensity every letter in the words someone writes. Some of my comments draw in consensus, others get blasted, but that’s part of any community.
I also agree with him somewhat about the way you ‘seem’ to moderate, Amadan. I’ve replied in kind to other posters in the past where logic has clearly left the building and ran out of gas on their part, obliged them and been every bit as much the condescending prick they come across. Strangely the finger wagging did seem to be somewhat one-sided in my case when the abuse of the rules were far more concentrated on the other side. On my last ban I didn’t even know I’d been banned at all, let alone for several months. I just voluntarily went on an extended hiatus and miraculously chose to visit the site on the exact same day the ban had been lifted.
Posters on the regular need to keep their emotions in check and ask themselves what they’re looking to get out of these conversations. And if you get little to no value out of them, then it’s better to leave the platform. Moderators on the other hand need to be somewhat charitable when someone comes along and sarcastically delivers a counter argument against someone else’s point. It’s difficult to interpret where someone is coming from through text when that’s all you have to go off of, but either be strict and apply it consistently across the board, of it there’s ambiguity, step in to clarify or otherwise let it slide.
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