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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.
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...'
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.
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.
I hate the centrists label because fundamentally it means you have no beliefs. If the left pushes the left Overton farther left then a centrists moves left, if the right is winning the pushing of the Overton window then you move right.
I feel confident say Trump political core is a ‘90s finance bro in NYC which would be mostly left then. Of course he has some eccentricities but he’s mostly that. A centrists political position over a life time would be like a pinball bouncing around as a npc.
It also strongly encourages Overton window pushing, if 30-40% of voters are just centrists then the best thing you can do as a political operative is push hard on boundaries. If you move the boundaries then a bunch of centrists slide in as your voters.
You can believe this but it would be incorrect. The realistic answer is that political beliefs are multivariate high dimensional vector spaces. And in attempting to project those vector spaces into condensed 2D or 1D projections you condense lots of information. I am a "centrist" in the left vs right 1D projection as the left/right axis has little impact on my political beliefs and values. I am a radical centrist libertarian on a political 2D compass, as can be observed by my very pronounced disagreement with social or governmental authority. On a higher dimensional map, I'm sure there's an even more precise label.
Call it them centrists, call them independents, the terminology is imprecise. Regardless there is a large continent of people, likely even a majority, that don't map cleanly to a right vs left 1D simple axis. They don't have malleable beliefs as you assert, they just aren't binary. You can "hate" them but the only thing you are hating is that the world isn't a simple black vs white one where critical thinking isn't a core element.
Then why don’t you use a word to describe yourself that actually describes yourself. Words have meaning. Centrists has meaning within the American 2-Party system.
It sounds like you are some sort of anarchists libertarian. Like you could use that name and it wouldn’t describe anything within the American 2-party system or be confused with other people who call themselves centrists who tend to have weak political beliefs an sort of just vote based on vibes and whether it feels like America is getting better.
Also initially described yourself as a “centrists” and I said I hate “centrists”. I don’t see how what I said was wrong since you said you were a centrists and I said I hate centrists. But now your a radical libertarian centrists which I guess is something different which maybe I don’t hate but I also don’t know what that entirely means.
The point of describing yourself as a “X” person is so the other person can quickly identify standard point of views you would make. I feel like I accurately described what a “centrists” is.
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