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You know, I am very happy that this space exists. It's great. I can voice my righty opinions without being mobbed by the average denizen of Reddit. But it's precisely because I can do this that intellectual left-wingers leave the space. You've seen it. I've seen it. The nice ones that would be pleasant to talk to have genuine emotional distress to arguments that they find distasteful. They don't stick it out to fight it. They leave and never return. So the conversation to expand the Motte might be - how do we keep the people we already have from disengaging from the space we have now?
I... believe, that mods engage in affirmative action, to keep the leftists we do have from leaving. I have no evidence of this. But from observed experience, there seems to be a longer leash for the provocatively left-leaning. But the problem is that the temperament of those that remain are not in the first group. They are either clever trolls or freshly educated zoomers who seem to be unaware of the very basic rightist objections to common leftist beliefs. A policy that is intended to preserve our left-leaning goodposters saves the worst of them, instead.
Is this better than having no leftists at all? Supposedly. As good as mod work is in preserving the character of the Motte, I think the fault of the righty-consensus here - in addition to the usual social media partisanship factor - is exogenous. Namely, the broader leftist intellectual sphere is intolerant. Not to say that righties are any better, but they lack the cultural and academic soft power to abuse ingroup inclinations IRL. There's nothing we can do about it. The academic-NGO complex moderates righty ideas out of the public conversation. You have to go out of your way to even know that such objections exist that do not immediately cast our motives as racist, misogynist, etc.
This has been a long tangent, but to sum it all up... To expand the Motte will inevitably lead to a righty-Motte and a lefty-Motte. A schism, so to speak, that has already happened. I do not believe that the death of lefty-Motte was a coincidence. Ring-fencing the topics of acceptable debate destroyed the entire purpose of the space. The magic (and the witches that casted them) was gone.
I don't know how to solve this partisan self-sorting problem. But it should be something that should be kept in mind. As soon as you create subforums out of the current Big Chum Bucket we have, this will happen. It is inevitable, and I don't think it can be solved with good moderation.
Resident leftist here (at least on some topics: degrowth, veganism, openness to at least reading about things like Marxism). I don't feel like I fit in either of your categories (freshly educated zoomer, troll). I sometimes get dogpiled here, but my most severe dogpile came from a rather rightest view (castrate all chads), and I think that I have both learned quite a bit from this forum, and hopefully also done some enlightening myself.
How is this a rightist view at all? I am not trying to be uncharitable but I broadly view all of leftism as an attempt to castrate all chads. The right is much more tolerant of letting chads be chads.
The idea that we need to regulate the sexual marketplace via tradition is definitely a conservative view. Not a libertarian view mind you, but libertarians arent really rightists.
You fantasize about castrating chads because you will not allow yourself to fantasize about putting women in chains. That doesn't make you a rightist, it makes you an incel.
I do not fantasize about castrating chad anymore. I was shown the errors of my ways.
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I’m pretty right wing but I find a little of Marx’s writings interesting. For example, I think he is right on the alienation of labor. Doesn’t mean his solution makes sense.
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I speak in the most general of terms. I applaud you for sticking around. I admit that my bias towards replying to the comments that annoy me the most has skewed my perceptions. I may have exaggerated in my charactization of the political polarisation but I do not think it is baseless.
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I guess it's worth noting that I'm not thinking about this in terms of "expanding the Motte". Like, yes, I would like that. But the goal is to build a larger spectrum of places that kinda work, not just "more political debate". There's some other subthread here where I mention a few possible starting points, and none of them are political, they are explicitly apolitical, and I do think that's the right approach; add some general-purpose stuff first and intentionally avoid the flamewar topics.
(those can remain here)
I guess it's also worth remembering that The Motte survived on Reddit, with probably more cross-political-side conversation than happens here. I think if we were able to return to Reddit we would probably see the same thing happen again. Yes, "the broader leftist intellectual sphere is intolerant", sure, but there are a lot of people who are left-aligned but still tolerant who would happily be part of a community with active disagreements.
From a pure monetary perspective, someone would say "there's a market there"; from a community-building perspective, I think what we can provide has a significant amount of demand. Not universal demand, absolutely not. But significant.
I do have some ideas for this, for what it's worth. I'm not completely convinced this is inevitable.
I agree it can't be solved with moderation, because moderation is a knife, and what this needs is a tide.
But I think it might be solvable.
I think you just run into network effects. It is hard to take on the incumbent because of network effects even if your replacement is better.
Absolutely true, yep.
But it's easier if the incumbent sucks :V
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The blue tribe has Reddit.com The red tribe has scored.co which grew out of Reddit’s ejected The_Donald sub with 6m members at its high point. The grey tribe has lesswrong.com
There are others, but these are pretty big sites.
We really are about as active as a single subreddit. I’d love to see a philosophy thread here, focused on the abstract and non-culture-war, with these insightful and interesting folks, but I’ve gotten little buy-in on my threads.
However, I do have some ideas for a distributed problem-solving forum which might be integrated into the codebase.
Whatever the place where the grey tribe discusses (non-AI) politics, it is certainly not LW. Politics is the mind-killer and all that. This does not mean that the grey tribe is apolitical (Scott certainly is not), just that they discuss politics elsewhere (e.g. ACX, or here).
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...So long as the prevailing powers that be in the space are ultimately on their side. They're content to be there when they still have the Global Rules they can get you sitebanned by the sympathetic admins under. They're content to be there when they know mama's watchful hand is poised to strike the mod team if they ever allow anything they consider truly contentious. Reddit Motte was not free; that's why it isn't on reddit anymore.
I don't agree with that.
And, like . . . okay I don't bring this up often, mostly because it's not often relevant. But I am one of those left-aligned people. It has been years since I voted for a Republican. My wife's the same way, both in terms of "left" and in terms of "interested in actual discussions".
I am not arguing whether there are people on the left who hate disagreement. We all know there are. But there's a lot of people on the left who are perfectly fine with it as well, and right now they just don't have a good place to live.
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I mean even when the Motte was on Reddit I don't think it's ever formed a meaningful Lefty-Motte. If you want to just get automatic positive feedback for left alignment you've got like 90% of the internet to do that on.
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