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Yeah, could be phrased better. I referred not to the evidential superiority of my own opinion, but to the possibility to entertain any opinion you deem better-supported – not just the most plausible thing still allowed by Bakkot. They are explicitly prohibited from discussing HBD to any serious extent, beyond a snarky hint or a perfunctory denunciation. Sure, some of that is community sentiment. Consider such brilliant rationalist logic as:
But not all of it. /u/plowfaster, /u/crowstep, /u/Throwaway6393fbrb, /u/uber_neutrino, /u/Possible-Summer-8508, /u/FDP_666, /u/Therncic, /u/Courier_ttf, and perhaps some of those already removed are more or less /ourguys/, I think at least 1 or 2 aren't here already. Why not offer them a way out of that circus. As for the rest... well, pseudo-erudite midwits can probably stay where they are. But wouldn't hurt showing them the other option.
As an aside, I like that jannies do not remove blank slatism as «culture warring». They've entirely redefined Scott's idea to align with their distaste for witches, now «culturewar» = nonwoke, basically.
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.
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.
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