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The motte is not an echo chamber. It is a forum with admirable diversity of right wing opinions, which doesn’t quite correspond to the typical diversity of IRL right wingers.
Revleft, back when it was a thing, wasn’t an echo chamber either- it was different kinds of communists screeching at each other for being secret reactionaries, and sûre that’s not the vibe thé motte is going for, but you don’t have to have the conventional representatives of the other side to not be an echo chamber, is my point.
Internal diversity. It's just us weirdos and freaks. But wouldn't it be a more interesting space where left leaning users participate while being held to the same moderation and quality standards so they engage without the usual social shaming dialogue (accusations of bigotry, bad faith, or moral failure)? Let the discussions move beyond status games and purity spirals toward actual arguments. I want the leftists in the conversation. Darwin was one of the few prolific leftist posters around here, though a ragebaiter admittedly. Been two years since he ditched this site and retreated to reddit.
I will note that SJ, as a rule, is not very fond of the idea of talking to racists/sexists. This is one of the defining attributes that distinguished SJ from 90s liberalism. This creates two issues:
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The Motte is what you get when you get arguably decades of selection pressure.
I've noted this before, but let me re-elaborate what my experience has been in forums regarding left/right politics. Most forums that allow for political sub-forums to discuss such things tend to be heavily leftist. As a result, you end up with two things;
One, left-aligned individuals will find themselves in a massive echo-chamber supported by a horde of fellow leftists;
Two, right-aligned invidiuals will find themselves obscenely outnumbered and buried under mass-replies or gish-gallops, or both.
This results in a curious selection pressure; The right-aligned posters that stay and actively discuss politics despite the above conditions end up being a cut or two above normal posters. They are the White Whales, as I personally call them, hardened in debate by scars, able to smash others in one-on-one debate while still behaving well enough that the Admins can't overtly censure them, and they refuse to flame out. (Instead, things will often escalate to the point where such posters just get pushed out for other, made-up reasons, or forum rules forcing them out.)
Now, here's the other side of this; I've seen circumstances where, in another, smaller, seperate, more niche outside forum, still made up of contintuents of the larger forums for one reason or another, allowing for a political sub-forum.
Except, things are changed, now. The White Whale is still the White Whale, but the left-aligned are no longer in whaling ships. They no longer have the echo-chamber or gish-gallop to bring down the larger foe, or atleast drown them out.
Instead, they find themselves in a dinghy, up against a scarred monster, and, as a result, it's now the left-aligned posters having a severe flame out and reduced to bad behavior when, all of a sudden, thier arguements no longer work(from thier PoV) and they find themselves constantly on the backfoot.
...naturally, the sub-forum ends up closed, as the Admins just get sick and tired of having to deal with said left-aligned posters behaving so badly.
I bring up all of the above personal anecedants and observations to get to my points; Left-aligned posters have no reason to get in that dinghy, IE, the Motte. They're perfectly content in thier various echo chambers - indeed, as we've seen, when such places end up turning more neutral(such as Twitter), the left-aligned posters will end up fleeing for more safer waters(Bluesky).
Now, I'm sure there are a host of posters on the Motte thinkings 'But I'm left-aligned and don't think that way/do that'. And yes; You, instead, have made it through another selective pressure where you don't flame out, or behave badly, or expect echo-chamber backup when making your arguement.
The Motte will always have it's selection pressure, and there's never going to be a way to combat against that. Trying to find 'new blood' will always be a fools gambit, as you're never going to be able to lay down the nessecary bait to get the left-aligned posters you want. The only way to do so would be to allow special exceptions for left-aligned posters, and all that would result in would turn the Motte into yet another left-aligned echo chamber as what centric and right-aligned posters shrug and leave, as the unique charachteristics that make up the Motte would no longer exist.
If anything, your example of Darwin is very topical. People were pointing out his bad behavior and special treatment for years, and every time this was brought up, the only real defense that could be mustered was along the lines of 'Well, he had a bunch of quality posts, so...'
Directionally agree, but I have seen a lot of very low-quality right-wing takes heavily upvoted while those who try to respond have from -1 to +4 vote count. I can see how that could be frustrating for someone going against the tide. Not sure why voting feature was even preserved from reddit, it only serves to enforce consensus.
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I don't think that's an issue related to quality of arguments so much as what happens in forums that are heavily slanted but don't actively ban heretics.
For instance, I came from /r/moderatepolitics . It has a similar nature to The Motte, but with a different moderation style. You can argue almost anything if you do it in a very specific way, but the mods are both hypersensitive to and arbitrarily define what is and isn't a personal attack. It leads to things like not being able to accuse someone of being disingenuous even when they do things like repeatedly attribute a belief to you that you've explained is wrong. Even though the sub was created for debate it still ends up with a consensus belief - IMO anti-Trump, somewhat left-leaning but right-leaning on guns and immigration.
That said, in my experience the people in the minority who stayed weren't necessarily better debaters, they were just people who were completely undeterred by downvotes and often just repeated the same argument and ignored reasons why their argument was bad.
Of course I'm sure The Motte would say that about the left-leaning people here. Like I remember in the not too-distant past where magicalkittycat was farming downvotes arguing something, and had to respond to an accusation of ignoring someone with "You know I get 20 responses to every comment right?"
As far as the heretic goes, the experience is "Why are you booing me? I'm right!" Your good arguments will just go ignored and be buried. The difference between a friendly forum and a hostile forum is you can say the same thing but in the latter it feels like you are talking to a wall.
Limiting personal attacks and heat between posters is a good policy, one which I wish the Motte would follow more closely. It's almost never productive to accuse someone of being disingenuous if your goal is test ideas, rather than to "win debates" in some nebulously defined way.
As a first order effect this is true, it is probably not productive to the debate at hand. But at a second order effect it could be good if done appropriately. Because if someone actually is being disingenuous you want them to stop and/or leave. Discouraging and disincentivizing bad behavior increases the quality of contributions over time and prevents things from slipping down the slope of easy farmable engaging content. If done appropriately. If the accusation is false/unwarranted then it just become ad-hominem and that itself is bad behavior we want to discourage.
If it's actual clear trolling then that's something a moderator should deal with. I've rarely seen accusations of "bad faith" or being "disingenuous" from a user debating another user to ever end up going well. It's almost always little more than "I disagree with them strongly". A lot of times it happens from 2 users occupying different information bubbles, this causing them to not really understand each others' arguments, and thus putting words in each others mouths as was often the case when people debated Darwin2500.
This seems like a different issue.
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The Motte and the CWR thread it birthed from, arose at a time when, on Reddit and other social platforms, expressing extreme LW opinions in most places was deemed acceptable or popular, and extreme RW views had a good chance of getting you banned.
The Motte offered a safe space, but one with a value proposition that was more attractive to the disenfranchised. This informed our starting pool, which skewed RW even if it had a large number of centrists or more heterogeneous thinkers.
I agree with netstack below that there are other strong selection effects in terms of openness to ideas, inclination to debate, and ability to be polite. I'll gloss over that.
We skew to the right of /r/SSC, our ancestor, and to the right of the typical subreddit, at least the ones that weren't founded for the purposes of gathering around RW views.
And this is... fine? At least for me. I am an Enlightened Centrist, but the based kind, where the dots on the political compass that represent my individual views form a circle with the center at the intersection point of all quadrants.
I'm the annoying type of person that usually looks at the two polarized sides of a debate and says they both make valid points. From my perspective, the average Mottizen is to my right. But I don't care, I know that the typical liberal or leftist is more eager to burn me at the stake for wrongthink or being some kind of right-wing fanatic. Adversity makes for strange but reasonable bedfellows, the kind you can trust to take out the trash. If I didn't like talking to the mix of people here almost all the time, I'd go find some other place to mentally-masturbate.
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Yes, our users are unusually polite, patient, and so on.
Yes, our users are also rather right-wing.
No, correlation is not causation. The underlying politeness is due to our rules. The political slant owes more to our other users.
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I agree with the overall schema of how forum cultures work but I think you have a blindspot. The motte is the equivalent to the left-wing dominated forum but for right wingers. Lefties here are absolutely dogpilled, mass-replied, gish-galloped, mass reported, or downvoted. Far more than the reverse happens here. So yes the lefties that stick around here do have a selection pressure, but lets not pretend that righties don't stoop to the same left-forum behavior when they are suddenly the majority.
EDIT: This is straight up just human tribal behavior. Attaching a political label to it is just further evidence.
As a lefty (in multiple senses of the word) here, I disagree heavily. The rate at which this happens is orders of magnitude lower than the mirror image in a typical subreddit that has discussion about similar topics as here. By my observations, leftist posters who get treated this way are almost always treated this way in response to particularly careless or bad-faith posts*.
* Aside: these extremely low quality posts often have characteristics which appear to me as posts that would be popular on a typical subreddit; my conjecture is that these commenters are used to calibrating their arguments for the type of scrutiny in those environments and didn't properly re-calibrated for the standards of this forum before commenting.
Actual lefties (of the woke variety) would get absolutely eviscerated here. Darwin was the only person I can think of that was consistently left and who posted for a long time, and his posts were always lightningrods despite him being extremely polite relative to his interlocutors. And people were constantly accusing him of doing something "wrong", of violating the rules somehow, but I kept asking for examples and people could never give me any.
I recall multiple threads where evidence was provided that went nowhere, and I have no interest in going down that path again, so I'll just register that I disagree on your assessment of Darwin and how he was treated.
I was provided one example, and it was not a good one. He was just stating a normal progressive talking point, and was getting flamed by amadan.
EDIT: Actually I retract that statement, as I came across a post I never got around to replying to from FCfromSSC that contained more examples.
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Then we disagree. As a centrist, I witness and have experienced it with my own eyes.
If this is your major point then you are making a point I am not arguing, its not about quantity it's that it happens at all. This place has orders lower magnitudes of people than the mirror image typical subreddit. This is like saying it's safer to be be next to a bear in the woods because bears kill less people then men do. It's bad stats because you interact with an astronomically large amount of men everyday, everywhere. I doubt the Motte has more than 50k-100k active users. Just went and looked at the comparative PurplePillDebate on reddit. It has 121k weekly visitors, and it is very degraded from its heyday.
I'm not really going to weigh into a discussion of "quality". That is highly subjective, to the point, that one could easily just say every post that gets dog-pilled and mass-reported was "low quality". It's a just-so-story.
If this is your interpretation of my point, then you are wrong. The "rate" is on a "per-[leftist/rightist] comment (implicit: that bucks the general popular trends of the forum)", not on a "per-day" or whatever. If the rate of physical injuries during a typical encounter with a bear in the woods was lower than the rate of such during a typical encounter with a man, then it absolutely would be safer to be next to a bear.
If you aren't going to weigh into "quality," then all you're really doing is commenting on the lack of equality of outcomes (as measured by things like responses that amount to dogpiling, Gish Galloping, etc.) based purely on left-right-partisanship. And that's just irrelevant here, because the point of this forum isn't to achieve such equity. Quality is highly subjective, but it's also not infinitely so, and there are certainly qualities which are agnostic to partisanship that this forum specifically demands of the comments both by rule and by norms, and it is a good thing that a comment's quality determines, in a large part, the pushback it gets from other commenters.
The rate would be per-[leftist/rightist] comment / per-captia of comments rather than just raw instances. If 50% time a human interacts with a bear it mauls them but you only interact with a bear 10 times, it has a per captia rate of 5/10. If 27k murders by men occur but 3 million interactions happen, it has a per capita rate of 0.0076. The Human male still murders more people but overall interacting with human men is safer than interacting with a bear.
If 70k out of 100k of comments on a reddit forum are "boo-outgroup" vs 800/1k on the motte, the motte is far more "boo outgroup" despite there being overall less motte "boo-outgroup" comments. The rate is much higher. Your stated ""rate" is per instance or total count. This manipulates statistics to give the lower population forum more grace when per-captia is more honest, because it accounts for the confounding factor of the lower population.
There is something deeply ironic and funny about having to explain "per-capita" to a claimed leftist, defending righties.
Give me a metric about quality that we can agree on. Because if the answer is "it is subjective" then it has nothing to do with "equality of outcome". Pointing out tribal behavior is not an outcome, and I doubt anyone at the motte will be super plus-ed when we implemented a quota system for responding to outgroup comments/posts. This entire argument is me saying "it exists in parallel" and you saying "nuh-uh and if it did all those comments deserved it", which I believe is the The Law of Merited Impossibility, aka gaslighting.
By controlling for the overall population of the forum, you're abstracting away the actual interesting part. If your purpose is to judge the average morality of the users of a forum, as measured by their penchant to dogpile, etc. commenters who try to rock the boat, then sure, you can use that metric. But I'm not sure that's of particular interest to anyone, and I'm certain that that is so abstracted away from the way people interact with online forums that no one can make any sort of meaningful intuitive guesses about such things, especially when comparing numbers that are orders of magnitude apart.
That's why when people talk about places like this/Reddit being unfair or hostile to leftists/rightists, I believe that it tends to be about a typical (boat-rocking) leftist/rightist's experience in using that forum, not about some sort of average of how commenters tend to react to such comments. Perhaps I'm wrong, and most people talking about such things are using your abstract metric; I just don't know what use that metric would be other than for some sort of a virtue-measuring contest between forums.
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To quote Scott:
Your QCs are, like, almost entirely criticisms of progressives. That’s basically catnip for this site. It doesn’t mean you aren’t left-leaning, but it does suggest that you aren’t getting the typical experience.
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Agreed. We could do better. Myself included.
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I'm probably more of a classical liberal than a leftist but I grew up in a very leftist space so I can Steelman a lot of it. I do my best. It's fun bickering with people here.
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You know the story of the Scorpion and the Frog, do you not? Despite the format, it's not one of Aesop's but apparently originated in early 20th Century Russia.
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I don’t mind claims of bigotry (sometimes it is true). But what I dislike is assuming bigotry is always wrong (or at least irrational) and the inability to recognize the lefts own bigotry.
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