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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.
You know, I've also gone back to Reddit a bit recently, and find that even beyond the normal "Redditor complains about Redditors" complaints, AI chatbots have basically killed it for me as a concept
I started playing World of Warcraft Classic recently, which is more videogaming than I've done since, well, I raided on World of Warcraft fifteen years ago. And starting up again, I had a lot of questions about things that I needed answered. Both mechanical questions, like "What stats should I prioritize for a leveling fury warrior, what's a good rule of thumb for comparing the dps from dual wielding 2 1h weapons versus using a single 2h weapon as I level?" and more social questions like "What's good loot etiquette in a leveling PUG 5 man group for needing stuff for a main spec if I'm playing an off-spec for the group?"
These are questions that Reddit is naturally great at answering, but they're also questions that in the late stages of a twenty year old game, nobody wants to answer on Reddit, and Reddit's search function remains intentionally trash for the purpose of avoiding questions being easily answered. If you ask the question, you might get a couple dismissive non-detailed answers ("Just use the standard arms build moron") ("It's a twenty year old game don't you know this already!"), you might get a recurring argument among powerusers that doesn't really answer your question, you most probably get low engagement and nothing at all. Chatbots aren't good at answering these questions on their own, they tend to get lost and make so many mistakes that you would get kicked out of any group if you made mistakes like that ("A lot of Rogues need on Corpsemaker because they want to try out 2h axes for a while!"), and hallucinate things that don't exist ("Hunters should farm Herod in Scarlet Monastery for the Scarlet Rifle rare drop gun").
But combine the two and you have a stew going! Ask ChatGPT or Grok or Deepseek to simulate a /r/classicwowtbc discussion on a scenario like "I was tanking RFK and Corpsemaker dropped, I needed on it because that was the only item I was running for, I won the roll but the Ret Paladin ragequit and tried to wipe the group by pulling adds, was I wrong to do that?" and tell it to simulate it as though there was a lot of engagement, and it will do a good enough job simulating all the replies from different angles and help me understand how players view the question. It's actually a lot of fun, it lets me simulate Reddit if everyone on Reddit cared about what I cared about.
The problem is that whenever I go on Reddit now, DeepSeek does such a good job simulating Reddit comments, that reading Reddit comments, I feel like I'm just reading Deepseek. Even when I write a comment, I feel like I'm just writing Deepseek simulations. What's the point? We're all just going through the motions so predictably, why even bother?
This does present obvious future ecological problems, what are the bots going to simulate if everyone stops going on Reddit because it's too easy to simulate? But that's not really my concern when I'm asking "What are good guidelines for which dungeons to run as a leveling priest?"
You need really weird nonsense to make a forum non-predictable and immune to simulation. Which this place sometimes achieves.
Does WoW not have wikis with guides that cover literally everything?
Also interested in the deepseek simulations, do you have examples and/or prompts?
It does, but largely they're oriented around end game content, and I'm more interested in leveling content. WoW is really at least two, and maybe as many as five or six, separate games packaged as one, leveling is a mostly solo game with occasional group content, PvE end game is entirely group content and involves very specific stat combinations on very specific pieces. So when I look up "Fury warrior stat priority" I'll get answers appropriate for level 70 raiding prep like make sure you have enough hit rating, which you don't even start to get hit rating until level 50 or so, and I'm only at level 30, it isn't that useful for me.
Now, the standard and objectively correct answer to precise stat priority while leveling is something like "don't worry about it too much you're level 30, you'll replace it in like four or five hours." Which, yes that's true, but I like sweating the details just a little, it's fun to me, I'm a gearslut. If I get an axe that's .5dps better but the sword I have is a slower swing speed and has +3str and +5agi over the axe, I want to know which one is precisely better even if it isn't really that big a deal, not knowing bugs me.
There are also, as of this writing, at least four or five different live versions of WoW online and four or five more dead ones, so advice can vary across which expansion you are playing. There's probably a guide somewhere out there for exactly what I want, but I didn't find it. This is something I'd try to find on Reddit, but I didn't find it there either easily.
Since getting back into WoW I have found PUG looting culture fascinating as both a functional and ethical question. There's a whole 'nother thesis to be written about loot distribution in guild raids, where you have the same regular people trying to progress as a team over months and years and there are a number of systems and methods used to balance progressing the group with rewarding high contributors with making sure that everyone has enough buy in that they stay motivated. But I'm playing casually and so entirely dealing with Pick Up Groups (PUGs) in 5 man dungeons. These are a group of 5 players getting together to team up and work on an objective they could not otherwise reach by themselves, typically an instanced dungeons with bosses that drop higher level loot.
If you've never played, the basic mechanic used for loot distribution is that when a good item drops during a group run, you can roll either Need or Greed on it, or Pass on it altogether. Everyone who rolls Need rolls 1-100 against each other highest takes it, if no one rolls Need then everyone who rolled Greed rolls 1-100. There's no situation where a Greed roll beats a Need roll, and Pass never gets it. There are rare scenarios where everyone passes and then it can just be freely looted by anyone who clicks on the corpse, but those are so marginal they don't really matter.
That's the whole of the game mechanics. The rest is cultural interaction. There's no restriction on who can click Need and who can click Greed, you can click Need on something you can't equip or wouldn't benefit from. The only mechanic for punishing someone who needs on something they shouldn't is for the group leader to kick them out of the group, or if the group leader refuses to do that (or the ninja-looter is the group leader) for any offended party members to quit. In most cases, this means ending the run altogether. For the last boss in an instance, the group would break up anyway, so there's no mechanic for punishing them whatsoever. Historically, it was at least a repeated-game situation on smaller servers because you ran into the same people over and over and didn't want to get a bad reputation, but in the classic-revival era the servers are so large and leveling is sped up so that reputation barely matters, I rarely remember running into the same people twice anyway.
It's a basic prisoner's dilemma setup where it always benefits the player to hit Need/Betray if everyone else is hitting Greed/Cooperate, but in order for the group to work everyone has to cooperate most of the time. The rules aren't even really written down anywhere or part of an in-game tutorial tip, they're just transmitted orally from player to player. Amazingly enough for the internet, it actually works, 95%+ of the time it goes off without a hitch and no one does anything weird and there's no arguments and it's fun. I would actually say I see outsize acts of altruism where players pass on a small upgrade for themselves because they think it's a bigger upgrade for another player more often than I see problems, but you do see problems crop up. Because there's no formal rules that anyone wrote or everyone agreed to, just a set of informal heuristics everyone picks up from each other about what is "fair" over the course of years of playing.
The obvious situations are simple and everyone agrees on them: the Mage doesn't get the big battle axe he can't equip, the Warrior does, problem solved. If a Mage needs on an axe, he gets kicked, because he's either a ninja-looter who is just going to sell the item for a minor amount of gold or he's r-slurred and has no idea what he's doing and either way you don't want him in the group. But there are a million variations of gray areas. Warriors and Hunters can both equip bows, but a Hunter benefits orders of magnitude more from a good bow upgrade than the Warrior does, can the Warrior roll against the Hunter for the bow when it drops? An Enhancement (melee) Shaman benefits hugely from an axe upgrade, but a Restoration (healing) Shaman doesn't benefit from it at all for healing but might use it when leveling solo, is it a crime when a Shaman rolls on an axe against a Warrior if they're currently healing? What if they mainly play Enh melee but they went off spec to heal to get the group going? What if it's an item where it's off-spec for both players, but maybe more off-spec for one than the other? What about super minor upgrades for one character versus huge upgrades for another? What if one litigant is a higher level toon carrying the group through lower level content and contributing more to the win, or if one litigant is a lower level toon that barely contributed anything to the group? Those all start to get different answers from different people. So partly just because I find it interesting, and partly out of a sense that I want to act ethically deciding to roll on a sword when I'm healing on my Paladin, I set up a debate on an LLM.
Keep in mind this is buried within the context of pages of random questions about WoW, so there might be some context missing if you tried the same prompt yourself. As I got into playing with it I'd post the same prompt into ChatGPT, Grok, and DeepSeek. Generally it comes from me thinking about a problem I ran into in the game, and thinking what other people would say about it if they were discussing it in the same autistic overthinking mode I do. Generally I use a prompt like:
In addition to Loot Court, I've tried to simulate philosophical debates like "Is the tank-shortage a result of the decline of masculinity?" or "Which class is the dumbest?" or "Which faction is more Red Tribe versus more Blue Tribe?" Deep Seek has become my favorite for all CW questions. Grok is an edgy yes-man, always taking what it thinks is my side, always ready to say "hell yeah man based take way to Notice;" Chatgpt is hard PC guardrailed and won't touch a question about masculine vs feminine values without saying "that's not how it works man;" Deepseek will actually discuss the issue and try to make an interesting conversation out of it.
P.S: If I were an academic working in behavioral econ, I'd want to get Microsoft or a private server for WoW to simulate luck as it impacts life outcomes. There's so much opportunity for study! Does early in-game luck, say winning a roll for a good weapon in an early dungeon, impact later level-outcomes for the same toon? Are warriors who win the roll for Corpsemaker at 28 or Ravager at 35 more likely to reach level 70, or hit a higher gear score when they get there? I could see it having an impact because good gear makes leveling easier and more fun, and might make you more attached to the tune; while bad gear luck makes leveling a slog and might make you more likely to abandon a toon and reroll. Or it might have no impact. Or maybe it even has a reverse impact, because when the game gets hard again you give up. I think it could tell us a lot about people's behavior.
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