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I'm afraid I've been talking on Reddit.
It's goddamn annoying.
I don't know if anyone here is still discussing stuff on Reddit regularly, but Reddit has rolled out a new improved block feature, where someone blocks you and then you can't see them and they can't see you. Of course inevitably this is being used regularly to get the last word in a discussion; that's why our Block feature is specifically designed to make that impossible. But this is happening in straight-up debate subreddits, with some communities slowly polarizing into two parallel communities that can't see each other or talk to each other, talking past each other with everyone else caught in the middle.
Fuckin' sucks.
Let's talk about something else.
One of the very-long-term plans for the Motte that's always kinda been banging around in the back of my mind is trying to expand this community into a serious Reddit competitor. Part of this means opening up community creation in much the same way Reddit has; instead of the mods needing to make every subcommunity, let the community do it. I have a few pages of notes on code architecture and more notes on how to handle site-wide policy and Sketchy Communities.
This has historically been implausible because it's a ton of coding. For . . . reasons I'm not going to describe in detail right now . . . the codebase The Motte currently runs on is a dead-end; by using it, we're in a kind of shaky position, but nobody cares enough about us to shake us, so I've just let it ride. For anything that looks vaguely like "try to become larger" it needs to be nuked and paved, and in the process rewritten to suck less butt (I have opinions on code architecture.) On the other hand . . . AI exists, right? It's really good. A lot of the difficulty of writing something like The Motte is not in the kind of deep architecture decisions that AI is bad at, it's just a shitload of really boring code that AI is great at.
I wrote a video player because there were like three features I wanted. That wasn't even Fable, that was Opus 4.7. Every week, "rewrite the Motte codebase, but less crappy" becomes more viable, and the hardest problems shift away from money and engineering, and towards community management.
Whoops, I ended up talking about the same thing.
Who could have seen that coming.
There's a few problems Reddit has that I feel are kind of knotted up in each other. Be warned, this is going to be long; I don't have time to make it shorter.
Reddit plays these cutesy games with "subreddit ownership" that I've always kinda hated. The mods control a subreddit, completely and unassailably . . . unless the subreddit does something Reddit doesn't like, in which case they replace the owners. But that doesn't mean Reddit condones the subreddits! No, the subreddits are owned by the moderators! It's the moderators to blame if anything bad happens there! Please ignore the points where Reddit interferes. Reddit doesn't interfere because that would make Reddit responsible. That never happens. Except on this subreddit over here, where we have to interfere, but it has never happened before and will never happen again, oh look another one, let's interfere here also.
It's fundamentally dishonest. They're playing both sides of a difficult decision and trying to get the credit for both. Thankfully most people aren't buying into this, but they're still doing it.
This is exacerbated by Reddit's namespacing woes. Subreddits are defined entirely by their subreddit name, which means if you happened to squat on a name, that name is now yours. Sometimes this is funny (hello /r/trees and /r/marijuanaenthusiasts) and sometimes it's actually kind of crappy (/r/worldpolitics, nsfw). (Which admittedly then loops back around into "funny", as per /r/anime_titties, which is surprisingly safe for work.) And then sometimes it's toxic; can you name a community that got taken over by people who seem to exemplify the worst of that community? Or who seem to actively hate the thing it's ostensibly about? If you can't, then I envy you, because you clearly don't use Reddit very often, which is a good decision.
The problem is that Reddit doesn't have the ability to rename subreddits. They never have. So if there's a group doing something questionable - let's say /r/YourIngroup has been taken over by your outgroup, substitute the metasyntactic variables as appropriate - the only levers they can pull are "replace mods", "ban subreddit entirely", or "ignore".
What if "rename" were possible?
What if subreddits had a unique internal ID, but the front-page label was replaceable? So in a world where /r/politics is taken over by your outgroup, an event which I'm sure nobody here has previously considered, it could just be renamed to /r/PoltiicsYourOutgroup and a new neutral politics subreddit formed?
"This subreddit is yours. You can do what you want with it. But the names are ours. Your subreddit has been moved; your subscribers moved along with it; we welcome your success; we just don't welcome your success under that label."
In a hypothetical world where we had this site, what if we were a bit more formal with ownership?
You can just make a submotte and nobody stops you. But at some point the mod interface starts pestering you to make an important decision: is this a community submotte, or a privately-owned submotte? If it's a community submotte, you relinquish ultimate ownership to The Motte; we'll help you define a purpose for the community and then enforce that purpose, in much the same way as corporate ownership works (tl;dr: "you have vast and flexible power as long as you can justify it following the purpose of the company, but the one thing you can't do is violate that purpose or work against the best interests of
the shareholdersthe Motte").Don't want to be ultimately liable to us? Choose Privately Owned; you can pay a reasonable monthly fee and we are happy to keep hosting it. You have full power over it. It's yours! But if you do something that we don't want to host at all, we'll give you a reasonable short warning to export the data and host it yourself, and then kick you off.
I think this sort of relies on federation. Make The Motte a protocol (maybe see if we can twist the Fediverse protocol into working for us, or give up on that and just make our own), provide the sourcecode, and now moving your site off The Motte is easy.
The big problem with the Fediverse is that they treat federation transitively. If you federate the worst community imaginable - which I think we can all agree are the Wet Sock Appreciators, curse those people - then the core Fediverse nodes won't federate you. But we don't have to do that. We can refuse to federate with the Wet Sock Appreciators if we think they're truly unredeemable, but if someone else wants to be a node that federates with both us and them, alright, have at it, we'll allow it.
So if you make a privately-owned Wet Sock Appreciator submotte, and we decide to kick you off (as is obviously deserved for members of such a heinous group), (1) you can just host it elsewhere, (2) your users can just use something capable of seeing it.
I don't think there can be such a thing as truly objective judgement when it comes to something like community dynamics. There's a reason we have the Wildcard Rule, and we don't use it often, but we do use it.
But there are ways to make this better.
One of the best things I did when making The Motte was to write the Foundation. It was meant as the overall north star for the community, so if I had to ask why I was doing this, or if I had to make a hard decision, I could check the Foundation and see if that made it easier. That's why we're here, for the record - when it came down to "move or censor yourselves", I looked at the Foundation and realized that moving was a good chance of death, but self-censorship was death. Maybe The Motte would be a thing that existed, but the Foundation would no longer apply.
I've changed the Foundation once. It used to say "subreddit". When we moved, I changed it to "community". Besides that, it's gone completely unchanged.
So maybe we do the same thing. Maybe we require that communities make a Foundation; basically a community Constitution, similar to the Company Purpose I alluded to earlier. It is what the community is judged on, it is what the moderators are judged on. And if the moderators start violating a community's Foundation, the moderators are removed.
I think it's easy to read this and think "oh gosh zorba is gonna replace everything overnight, everything is going to be destroyed". Nah. That's not happening.
But I've had this box in my brain labeled "Motte plans" for a very long time. That box is full of interlocked gears, and up until lately it was just deadlocked. Now it's feeling like some of the deadlocks are starting to lift, and the gears are slowly turning, and maybe it's time to revisit the box.
This isn't happening today, and this isn't happening tomorrow, and if it happens, it will be very gradual, and with the preservation of this community in the forefront. And let's be honest it's probably not happening at all.
But the word "probably" is doing nonzero work in that sentence.
Do these ideas help?
Would they work?
Would people put up with it?
Do these concepts help enough?
What am I missing?
I have no idea.
Feedback requested.
I'm going to sidestep most of the questions you have posed and just say no, they wouldn't work because attempts to replace reddit (or other established social media sites) never work. When moderators threw a fit a few years ago and some shut down their subreddits, no one moved to new options they tried. Ruqqus, voat are the only other ones I can even remember. A ton of people moved to bluesky from twitter, and now it's still slowly dying, trapped in an extremism cycle. And of course this place and rdrama both appear to have done little but stem the bleeding. Perhaps the stats show differently, but I don't feel like there's ever been any growth.
I think the problem is that a lot of these sites just aren't good. They're trying to beat Reddit by being a worse Reddit but with a better set of people. In terms of community engineering, what is it that Ruqqus or Voat or Bluesky did? I would answer "nothing"; they're just reproducing the existing site and hoping they get the right set of people.
I think community engineering is very strong, but most people either aren't trying it, or are trying it in a hyperauthoritarian way, both of which are sorta doomed.
We are definitely not growing. At the same time, we aren't providing any opportunity for growth; "half as much traffic as we had on Reddit, consistently, without access to any other communities on this site" is a hell of an accomplishment. I admit I read Reddit more than I read this, entirely because all the other communities are on Reddit, but if there were opportunities to start getting them here instead, maybe that could work out?
What if we added our own /m/gaming, /m/technology, and /m/humor, all with politics strictly banned but largely open beyond that, for example?
What exactly are you aiming for - neutrality / culture war banned, or letting people self organize as long as they label themselves clearly? Either one has it's appeal, but your first post seems to be pointing to the latter, and the second the former.
I like the idea of adding sub-communities, but I don't know if we have enough people to fill in 7 zillion niches.
That makes it sound like the bigger concern is going to be technological, not sociological. Do you have a good idea of what you want to do better. How big of a scope we're talking about here (because at first glance it sounds pretty big)?
The latter in the long term, the former in the short term, because . . .
. . . of exactly this reason.
I see communities as something kind of kin to nuclear reactions. If you take a bunch of uranium and spread it out, you have a bunch of uranium on the ground. If you pack it up into a tight little ball you have an infinite energy generator. But in the case of communities, you need to spread it out a little to let it grow.
Walking this tightrope is inevitably the hard part; eventually, a site could get big enough to open up community creation to everyone. But it takes some work to get there.
Practically I think for a while we would be taking nominations, putting them up for vote, and tentatively adding them to see if they got enough traffic.
In terms of server-scaling, I'm going to be hilariously optimistic here and say "the target is eventually reddit-sized".
Buuut . . . it is worth noting that I have been involved in various levels of scalability for a long time. I'm not going to try to start with something Reddit-sized, but I do know roughly how to design the backend architecture so it can scale without horrendous amounts of pain.
(this site isn't it)
And I'm not putting in more than the bare minimum to start with, frankly, if we have an order-of-magnitude of headroom at any given moment we're probably fine.
(we probably do have that right now, honestly)
The thing I really mean by "do better" is the community management part of it.
I was thinking more in terms of work that needs to be done. If this site is as bad as you say, making the switch would necessarily imply having the new platform ready first. On the other hand, you say that we have enough headroom, so maybe not?
Let me put it this way: generally your idea sounds good. The sociological specifics don't sound so important to me, and I'm trying to figure out if / how much I can help from the technical side.
Technically we can do it piecemeal; I'd start by moving non-HTML functionality over (like "upvotes/downvotes"). Some stuff can maybe even be done statistically; shift 1% of upvotes/downvotes to the new platform, look for problems, ramp it up.
I appreciate it!
I'm not totally sure there's much that can be done technically right now; I'm gonna have to sit down and hash out the fundamentals first, and that's going to be a very iterative process of trying things and seeing what I like. This is still extremely in the "mulling it over" stage, note.
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