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I think there's a pretty big unquestioned assumption underlying this post, which is that it is desirable in the first place to expand the scope and popularity of whatever project you are engaged in. The greatest rebuttal to this is this classic essay. I have watched the lifecycle outlined in this essay play out in pretty much everything I have ever liked. If you like something, the absolute worst thing you can do for it is try to make it more popular. I can't think of anything that would be worse for The Motte than for it to become more relevant to normies.
This is exactly the thing that happened to Reddit - It didn't start off as the Wet Sock Appreciator hellhole that it is today. Its culture starting out was very much the techno-libertarianism that was pervasive throughout the internet of that era. The "moderators own the subreddit" dynamic was the attempt by the founders of the site, who like most people in tech at the time were very libertarian, to create a structure that would absolve them of responsibility for the content posted to the site, in the hopes of being able to plausibly preserve it as a place for free speech. The problem is that Reddit became popular, and popular web sites cost money to operate, and advertisers are skittish about associating their brand with "that website with an entire section devoted to jailbait photos." So /r/jailbait had to go. And then once that door opened, Reddit's content policy became, in effect, "we will delete anything that causes PR problems for Reddit," with predictable results when the Wet Sock Appreciators became sufficiently powerful as to be able to turn anything they disliked into a PR problem for anyone associated with it.
The other problem is that popular things attract entryists, and also, Reddit is located in San Francisco, which means as the company expands their hiring pool consists of people who live in San Francisco or are willing to move there. In retrospect it was inevitable that as Reddit expanded it would fall victim to the same long march through the institutions as every other powerful and influential organization.
The biggest and most important questions you need to ask and answer, if you seek to expand the scope of The Motte, are not technical, they are social. How do you intend to keep The Motte from suffering the same fate as Reddit, Wikipedia, Google, open source, academia, journalism, science fiction fandom, or any of the other countless formerly neutral and now totally ideologically captured institutions? The only example I can find of a reversal of this trend is Twitter, which required it to be forcibly taken over by a billionaire and most of its staff unceremoniously fired. Honorable mention to Coinbase and 37signals, who famously managed to deal with their respective entryism problems by paying them to go away. This is expensive and probably can't work for everything for that reason.
My vote is that The Motte stays fundamentally what it is rather than trying to expand its scope.
I don't buy this. Sure this might be part of the censorship of obscene topics, but it doesn't really have anything to do with their political activism. You have to remember that the original and still-CEO of Reddit is a deranged trump hater, went on a personal crusade to smear conservatives, and even went as far as editing other people's posts.
I don't think that's too inconsistent, I think the strain of techno-libertarianism that defined the internet of the '00s was adjacent enough to progressivism for most of those people to end up with rabid TDS in the late '10s to '20s. Seems like very very few of the old school techies did not fall into this... ESR, DHH, a few others. Notably, the people who run nearlyfreespeech.net, a web host who pride themselves on their willingness to host anything that is legal to host in the United States (a very '00s internet attitude), including literal swastika-wielding nazis, now have a blog full of various progressivisms that give me the feeling that the only reason they continue to have a permissive content policy is because they understand that changing it would utterly destroy the value of their service.
Total side note that has nothing to do with this but I used to moderate a subreddit (I know, boo, hiss) and one year, Reddit hosted some events for moderators to get together and meet various Reddit employees, and Spez showed up to the one that I went to. I'm not sure how wealthy he was at the time but going by current net worth he would be the wealthiest person, and only billionaire, I have ever been face to face with. I think this would have been before the scandal where he was hand-editing comments.
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Seconded. Normies ruin everything.
Rest in power.
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