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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.
Nice to see you outside the Morlock tunnels!
I think one reason we get so much interest in being expanded to a "reddit alternative" is specifically because people want to have a discussion website that isn't hopelessly overrun by ads, AI, and low-effort engagement. The closest thing I'm aware of is StackExchange, but the focus there seems to be clear answers on particular topics rather than discussion (and also for some reason the whole design of that space just seems cluttered to me). Also they are apparently mostly existing to reap profits from AI now? I'm not a coder, y'all probably know more about this than I do.
Anyway my point is that one thing to seriously consider from the outset is organizational structure. Where the data is hosted and who controls it is something that will always matter. Right now the site is functionally a sole proprietorship run on an open codebase (to the best of my understanding) and I think everyone is basically fine with that--as the saying goes, Julius Caesar was a much beloved tyrant. But expanding the community might open you up to publicity that could be easier to navigate if the Motte was e.g. a full-fledged 501(c)(3) with a board of trustees and an explicit mission.
Another thing to seriously consider, on my view, is images. Maybe don't host/display them? Ever, or beyond avatars or something? Many of us can remember the rise and... slump?... of Imgur, which basically came into existence because reddit did such a terrible job handling that sort of thing, but then realized it had a business interest in not sending the bulk of its low-effort engagement off to a different website. If the goal of the Motte is not specifically profit, then someone finding a way to profit from hosting images for the Motte does not represent a threat (the way it did to reddit), but rather an opportunity.
I also think that the CW thread was a great innovation as a pressure valve for the old SSC sub and it would be good to have genuinely non-political subs that could say "hey, here's a link to the irradiated zone if you want to peddle that shit." Defining the CW and clearly cordoning CW communities (but for real, not in the "we just ban rightoid/leftoid causes" way) would be a vast improvement.
But broadly speaking, I am in favor of the site developing in this direction.
I've actually been wondering how long until people bring this up :) And . . . while it's tempting, I'm not sure this has the effect we want.
so okay this is going to be long sorry
A lot of people think the head of a company is the CEO. This is incorrect. The CEO is the current centralized leader. The head of a company is its shareholders; they are the ones who have the power to control where the company goes. There is no greater authority. They literally own the company, they control everything about it.
But practically, very few people want a company to vote on every single thing. They want someone in charge to make decisions unilaterally, and that's the CEO. (Dictatorships are very effective if you have a good dictator!)
And to make this even more complicated, very few people want to choose the CEO, nor do they want to have to watch the CEO's actions. They want someone trusted to do it for them. That ends up being the Board of Directors.
So, conceptually, the shareholders choose the board (usually with advice from the current board, but not necessarily), the board chooses and regulates the CEO, the CEO runs the company.
You can kinda model nonprofits in the same way. Nonprofits often have a CEO. Nonprofits often have a board. And nonprofits also, arguably, have shareholders.
The shareholders for a nonprofit are "the citizens of the country".
And this means things are already extra-complicated. As annoying as "choose the board" is, that's nothing compared to every citizen in the country being asked to choose the board for every single nonprofit in the country.
In practice, the government ends up being the middleman here. The citizens choose the government; the government chooses the board; the board chooses the CEO; the CEO makes the actual decisions. Which technically means that every nonprofit is being managed by the government.
You can probably see the issue I have here.
I don't want the government to have oversight over us. I don't want to be liable for each individual Presidency to decide they don't like our behavior. I also don't want to deal with a board. A non-profit's board is mandatory and must not be half-or-more members of the same family.
So as long as we're not a non-profit, it's me; I'm in charge. I'm the guy who decides what happens. Whereas if we were a non-profit, we would have to get a board of directors, and I would inevitably be a minority in it, and the government would have ultimate oversight over us, and I am just not a huge fan of that arrangement.
If people disagree, I am happy to entertain disagreement, though - tell me if you think this would work out!
I am not a lawyer, but my limited understanding is that 501(c)(3) and like grant tax exemptions to certain organizations that operate for the particular kinds of "public good", which is a nebulously defined concept, and that's why the government gets to insert itself as a representative of the public
Having a separate for-profit legal entity solely owned by you may still be beneficial if the Motte goes big.
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This all sounds basically correct, I think (I haven't really studied "business associations" since I was a law student, though). Provided you're up for taking some individually-directed heat (and I have no reason to think you're not up for this) then by all means: be our beloved tyrant! It just seemed like an option worth mentioning.
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