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This got me thinking if a place is sufficiently woke (not sure if it generalizes to all ideological conformity), then most of the modded/removed content won't be by people breaking non-political rules but by people who say something unwoke.
Thus writing a bot that scrapes the usernames off the red comments from unddit.com and sending them an automated message along the lines of
Might work as an excellent recruiting tool.
Lack of self-awareness is a hell of a drug. So is confusing aesthetics and morality.
Exactly my point.
Well, @ZorbaTHut, how's that for a recruiting pipeline? I gather you still haven't decided what to do. I foresee your objections along the lines of diversity, but people who still hang around captured subs might well be the closest thing to a leftie you can get.
Sounds like a pretty bad approach honestly :V
Right now recruiting is not the biggest issue I see. Honestly, this thread itself is kind of a bigger problem; note that it's already been mod-warned, but it's entirely "wow, such normie, very woke, what a problem". The thing I'm most concerned about right now is . . .
. . . okay right now it's dealing with the employment tangle I'm dealing with. But after that, the thing I'm most concerned about is tweaking moderation and figuring out a better way to gently-but-firmly shove the tone around, and that's what the volunteer-janitor stuff is for.
Once I've handled that, I plan to go back to recruiting efforts. However, right now the traffic honestly isn't bad - it's lower than it used to be but nowhere near lower enough that I think it's an immediate existential threat.
And I think, if I were going to recruit people, "people who got removed from a community for not reading the room" is not the group I'd be targeting. Especially people in that situation who would push the balance of this community further away from diverse-opinions.
Well this went poorly. You look like you are going hard into your bonsai-trimming power trip. Do you plan to monetize this place of what?
Well, what else could we say – that it was a mistake to commit a stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast? I believe such regrets are expressed as silent evaporation.
Are you impressed with the intellectual culture Bakkot et al. have built? Get a load of those mod notes. Be honest. It is objectively a normie culture, a culture of shaming and shooing and unquestionable sanctified priors instead of rational discussion. When the choice is between scholarly epicycles in the manner of Marxist theory and a possibly more parsimonious explanation, they are being told to praise the amazing complexity of the former or shut up and «go elsewhere». Elsewhere where if not here?
I realize that «normie» is just a psychologically healthy normal
Hajnalihuman, and as one of those you too might have a hard time distinguishing between very consistent «shame on you, cringe, do better, imagine your mom reading that, we do not need this, removed» etc. signals and a reason to value one's opinion less. But those are still different things and the former is still poison for any serious rationalist-ish place, and is still far less desirable than «dogpiling» in the form of tonally correct objections. At least that's how I see our value function.Really? You would prefer people who «read the room» over people who can't – as in, who believe that «no culture war» should apply fairly and not privilege a side in it? The mods implicitly precommit to a culture war position that requires righteous combat, under the justification of «no culture war». This is a deceptive signal, and a profanation of all that the sub stood for. Are you saying you endorse that? If even we pick people who are adept in reading the room over autistics irritated with inconsistencies and double standards, where are people who are bad at that supposed to go – straight to nazi imageboards?
It's not so much the traffic problem as diversity problem. And I do not mean political compass distribution but even just topic distribution. More people means less banding. For example, nobody has mentioned Turkish earthquake (okay, here) – a NATO state has suffered a major disaster, tens of thousands dead, possibly immense geopolitical ramifications, partially because Erdogan has appointed his fellow right-wing theologian grifters throughout the system. I might do a writeup as a community service and as the resident Turk, but more people could help with such stuff.
Have you not understood my argument? People uncomfortable with /r/slatestarcodex modding are leftier than the median user here, and realistically as far left as you will get now, barring a complete reinvention of this place. You will never again get the «diversity» we had on Reddit by virtue of dipping into Scott's captive leftwing audience, unless you ruin TheMotte in the manner not much different from Bakkot's – and then, you'll probably just chase everyone away, like you've repeatedly threatened to do.
It is inevitable that the discussion evolves and some opinions disappear, while others emerge. This is what it means to have a honest non-compelled discussion. If you fetishize access to the frozen equivalent of Scott's captive audience from 2010's, with their particular distribution of opinion, over the value of this community where genuinely all hypotheses can be discussed and the worst that could happen is «dogpiling» – then you, like many people, are a rigid old fart fixed on the object level, unable to recognize the worth of your creation, and should stop wasting our time, much less soliciting our help and money. Pull the plug ASAP.
For a start, if that means the likes of vintologi showing up again, no thank you very much. That's someone who can't read the room as in "gee, I wonder why my sexually sadistic fantasies of teenage forced impregnation get me into trouble? it can't be me, it must be them".
As @Amadan notes, vintologi was removed for violating generic rules we have, not because his beliefs are considered morally noxious. It isn't even clear he's uniquely bad. We have a self-identifying pedofascist here, if you haven't noticed – but he's not an obsessed manifestoposting troll, so he is tolerated.
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He wasn't banned for having weird sadistic fetishes, though. He was banned for being unable to interact with people civilly.
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Well the motte has to ask itself, does it really want diversity then. We cant reap the benfits of higher variance (more nuggets of gold) without paying the cost (more fringe and shitty ideas).
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He did, in fact, muse about that idea on the developer discord. Also wants to drop all the AGPL code and take it proprietary.
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I'm sure the approach is bad for a thousand reasons but if applied very judiciously to very specific places (NOT /r/politics and other stupid places) I don't see how it would run afoul of your concern. E.g users from that ssc thread.
The Motte is not on Reddit because they couldn't read the room. Don't you think that ship has sailed?
I respect your vision and desire to attract "diverse-opinions", but that has never happened. It's not ever going to happen for various reasons.
Not until you fix (not saying you should);
"diverse opinion" haver joins Motte -> expresses opinion -> gets dogpiled -> leaves (after flaming out and letting us know that we are nazi shitlords)
If I thought the ship had sailed, I would just shut this place down. The entire goal is to not do that.
Yep, one step at a time here.
We clearly are not on Reddit, so some ships have sailed.
Aren't those who decide not to speak the truth out of social desirability the exact people you don't want in a place that aims to.. find the truth? Because that's what reading the room in our example is.
What can you/anyone even do about that?
Some ships sail all the time. As long as the important ones are still around, we're good.
Every mod action (or lack thereof) is a small shift towards community tone. And community tone is a [positive-feedback machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_feedback), so even slight changes in input can cause massive changes.
I really think we should stop talking in metaphors and get to the meat.
What kind of people do you really want to bring over to the motte? What do you even mean by "diverse" people? What are you going to do about all the failure modes that you couldn't fix in Reddit no here in a much worse environment?
It is jarring that you insist on getting people who can read the room when you more or less have a community of people who chose not to do that intentionally. Is the Motte what you want it to be?
I think you are dodging the problem again.
The primary reason ideological outliers of the motte don't survive here is not because they get ridiculed but because they are outnumbered. People will REALLY have to moderate their tone to not make a dogpile seem hostile.
And as Illforte pointed out, a lack of diversity of topics is a much more pressing issue than a diversity of politics. I get tired of certain talking points that I agree with because I saw them 1000 times. One easy way to tackle this is to simply just allow in a large number of users from targetted communities via some sort of consistent pipeline.
I really don't think you should be complacent about traffic and new user recruiting. Remember the housing market before 2008? Good visible metrics != Good invisible fundamentals.
I mean a variety of opinions on stuff. "Diversity" can't be measured person-by-person, it has to be measured community-wise. If the community becomes a monoculture, that's a failure case.
Try to fix 'em! We have more tools available here and there's stuff we can do that was never possible on Reddit; in addition, we're not fighting a hostile admin team. We're certainly not guaranteed success, but we were guaranteed failure over there.
True. It's a hard problem to solve. Let me know if you come up with something good; I haven't yet. I'm not convinced this is the problem, though, because there's a lot of discussion that doesn't end in a dogpile.
Yeah, and I'd like to do that . . . but community choice is crucial here, because we'd want to focus on communities containing people that don't contribute to the monoculture. And the proposed solution here seems like it'd do the opposite.
In the end, we have many issues to deal with and limited time with which to deal with them. New user recruiting is important but right now it's not my primary concern. I'll rotate back to it, hopefully not too late.
If you want to propose a better solution I'm all ears, but I've explained why I don't think this solution is a good one.
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