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Low effort but CW so it goes here. Its the end of the week anyways.
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/115vdud/looking_for_recommendations_on_sources_for_why/
It seems to me the slatestarcodex subreddit has been fully normified. Of all those comments only 1 mention (hint) of group average IQ on why sub saharan Africa is poor??
Then theres the "woah how did you get here, you dont belong here" as a response to the guy who hinted at IQ. Does that guy even know whose blog he is in the subreddit of.
All I am saying is for those of you who still say /r/ssc is "smart", update your priors, this post is not an isolated case.
E: Ill remove if consensus building.
It's Eternal September everywhere, and the SSC modteam barely exists on reddit anymore. Baj hasn't posted on reddit in five months, Cheeze occasionally moderates but was pretty low-participation already by the time I became a moderator, Zorba is busy with this place when he's not busy with life, Scott himself is a token mod to satisfy Bakkot's aesthetic, and Bakkot seems to be one of those people who refuses to ever give up control of anything even when he no longer contributes to its well-being nor even especially pays attention to it. HarryPotter5777 does most of the modding (which is not much) but this appears to be more a small extension of their moderation of other communities.
The topic of exiling the Motte from SSC has been done to death, but I think in retrospect what was exiled was not "the Culture War thread," it was "the spirit of open discourse." Obviously you can't have the CW thread without that spirit, but I am increasingly persuaded that you can't have the spirit of open discourse with topic bans. You can't have Free Speech with an asterisk; the asterisk strangles the life out of the conversation, quickly or slowly. The whole enterprise withers on the vine; if anything does remain, it's mostly just virtue signalling.
It's frankly frustrating, because damned if I'm not tempted to slap some of the more annoying people around here with topic bans, sometimes! And there are still occasionally some good threads that crop up on the SSC sub from time to time, and in other places in the diaspora. But even Astral Codex Ten is a shadow of Scott circa 2015, because he's muzzled himself (or allowed himself to be muzzled) in spite of his increased freedom and wealth (or perhaps because of it--he now has something substantial to lose!). Respectability and stultification seem repeatedly to arrive hand-in-hand.
You specified that it "seems to me" and you didn't say "everyone knows," so I think you're good.
I'm inclining more and more to the notion that what is needed is some of us stickle-backed old dinosaurs with right-wing and conservative views. The Schism was set up to accommodate those who felt they were being dog-piled by the righties, and to be more sympathetic to the left-wingers who were leaving, and it has settled down to being rather flat, in my opinion. Comment threads there don't get to the length as on here. Everyone pretty much murmurs "yes, how true" to the original post. SSC, from the rare times I dip back in, has gone the same way. The Culture War was purged, now it's comfortably leftie-progressive in its views. And stagnating, I regret to say.
(All opinions expressed above are the personal views of the author and are not to be taken as representative of The Motte).
Now, before anyone wants to remind me, I am very well aware of the danger of getting our own little right-wing echo chamber going here, and certainly there are opinions expressed that I do vehemently disagree with. But I think that is the benefit here - for whatever reason, be it that we're accustomed to seeing right-wing/conservative views decried as the most evil of evil, or whatever, I do think that (a) there is a spectrum, not a monolith, of conservative views and (b) right-wingers are a bit more thick-skinned when it comes to debate/argument. So where someone on the left of the centre might flounce off because "you are personally attacking me, this is hate speech and violence", I think someone to right of centre is more inclined to stick around and fight it out. I mean, I know I have views that would get me hanged as a bigot and a transphobe and a racist and I can't remember the entire list of badness, on other places on the Internet where any divergence from the current orthodoxy is pure evil (see Jesse Singal's travails, and he's more liberal than I am).
There is also the benefit that as an off-shoot of the original SSC, Scott's rules about niceness and charity are still being followed. This keeps things from degenerating to the level of just shouting insults at each other. If I want to express my full-flowing bosom about the likes of Felker-Martin, I'll head over to CultureWarRoundup (a very useful safety valve to vent). I'll try and keep on the civil side on here.
This is not at all true, there have been substantive debates where people have made it clear they disagree with a top-level post for a variety of reasons.
It's not "get going here", that echo chamber is already happening. Almost every comment in this whole chain of comments, starting from the very top with OP, is people complaining that leftists are controlling the ssc subreddit because they want to banish any inconvenient truth that clashes with their ideology. We're not getting an echo chamber here, we're literally sitting in one right now.
Anyone who disagrees with those posts can reply with either evidence to the contrary or just their personal opinion. And unlike on reddit it will not lead to <deleted posts> and the mods locking the entire thread because "y'all can't behave. It's basic human decency. Do better"
Sure, that could happen. But you don't see that happen. The amount of pushback against those positions is dwarfed by the amount that agree with those positions.
I think we are slightly more right here. The Schism was for those liberal/lefties who felt they were being persecuted, DSL ended up as the haven of the very right-wing, ACX is a mix of what the old SSC was like, and on here are the more centrist(?) righties. With the mass migration, I think it did shake out that those who remained on SSC behind after the Culture War thread split off on its own were more inclined to be on the left, and the various dispersions since then have only increased that effect.
It's like the sediment jar test, we've all settled into our various layers, though there is still an admixture.
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