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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.
As an aside: it amuses me greatly that we have so many AI skeptics here, on a forum that is increasingly AI-coded. I'm happy to concede that there are significant benefits to having someone who is a competent programmer running the show, but the jig was up well before the last idiot concedes it's up. May all the monkeys enjoy the last dance.
Case in point, we've got a CLAUDE.md on the github project. Fable claims 61/66 of the commits in the last 6 months as having explicit AI-labeling. 5.6 Sol claims 60/66. Your skepticism, brought to you by Claude. If I had any more irony in my system, they wouldn't let me near an MRI.
With my annoyance expressed into the ether, I'm supportive of this move. After all, it's shown dividends when deployed by rdrama, our uneasy ally with whom we share much of the code-base (or did, at some point, I'm not going to do a diff).
Stagnation is death. We've done better than I expected after our migration away from Reddit, but that is not the same as better than hoped. Reddit offered organic discovery opportunities that being a standalone (niche) forum doesn't.
I'm sure there's an audience. Particularly people who want their own quasi-independent silo but are leery of associating with the shit-flingers at rdrama (I'm fond of those monkeys, in small doses).
More importantly, I don't see much downside in trying. Not every ambitious project achieves what it sets out to achieve, but if the workload is ameliorated by LLMs, and if we're wisely offloading some of the hosting costs to those who care to pay? Bring it on. I will observe with keen interest.
Since I've given up on winning popularity contests, I will suggest something I've idly-floated for years. LLM-moderation.
It's been feasible for a while. More than feasible, in fact. At the risk of tooting my/our own horn: what makes this forum something more interesting than rdrama is a dedicated, hardworking (or hardly working) mod team that keeps the worst of the nonsense away from tender eyes they might tenderize. This is ridiculously rare, and a precious human resource that is easy to exhaust. Where are you going to find entities above room temperature intelligence, with a borderline autistic devotion to interpreting somewhat vague guidelines and what feels like a decade of case law, in the spirit intended?
Ah. Wait.
It would be trivial. It would be easy. More importantly, it would work. Not perfectly, but nobody ever accused us human mods of being perfect. But the Motte is a relatively slow moving, text heavy forum, and API calls wouldn't break the bank. You don't need frontier intelligence. I've tried this experiment years ago, and found adequate results. It's so boringly easy that I won't bother replicating it, unless someone I like asks politely.
The biggest blockers would be radioactively-hot CW-content that provokes a safety classifier or flinch reflex. That is nothing that can't be prompted away.
We don't have to replace humans wholesale. That is not desirable at present. But a lot of the scutwork would cease to be an issue. No more posts lying in the filter. There are implementation details to consider, such as intentional abuse through token-spam, but we're smart people. We'll figure it out. Or set an expenditure cap. Or get fucking Haiku to do it. Our auto-janny can do with an upgrade.
Forgive me. I'm always in a rush to automate away my job before someone does it to me first. That way, I get to put it in my CV, instead of looking for work at a CVS.
I will elide the boring concerns about the payment processing, handling illegal content etc etc. I'm not here to teach you, Granny Zorba, to suck eggs.
You know that all your posts got way more insufferable when you started passing them all through AI, right?
You used to be one of my favorite writers here. It's really a shame.
Are you accusing me of using AI on this post? Hah. No. I considered getting Fable to do the work for me, because that would have been mildly amusing. I didn't succumb to the impulse. Go check Pangram, if you care to.
If not, then all I can say is that I do consider feedback. My decisions are rarely not considered in depth. The unfortunate reality is that I have limited time, limited energy, and that I have good reason to use LLMs the way I do. I'm just more honest about disclosing the usage (limited and scrupulous as it is) when challenged or politely asked. Annoying people has never been an end-goal, but you don't become an Unslop finalist by being bad at what you do.
I am not bad at what I do. If you believe otherwise, I can only shrug.
Well, whatever the reason, there was a noticeable stylistic shift in your writing at some point. You became a more robotic caricature of yourself. Maybe a meds change, maybe life circumstances, idk. I hope everything’s going alright.
I am listening to your opinion. I am also going to point out that I'm an ACX BR finalist. On my first and only entry. It genuinely is too much to expect me to please everyone. I don't have the budget for it.
I can't think of a change in medication that could possibly account for what I will concede is a change. Everyone changes. It's a side effect of living, or at least learning from experience. I have no idea how much of the stylistic drift you've picked up on is due to internal processes, or because of LLM contribution. Which I have always explained has been less than 10% of the total of any given body of work. Usually less than 95%. Often less than 99%.
Incidentally, that book review is personal. I don't have to name which one it is, since it's rather obvious. If someone else can handle being repeatedly, unforgivably failed by the same system he works for better than me? Haven't met them yet. I think someone who had to pull themselves out of a moderately-severe depressive relapse, do what I've done in the last few months without writing about most of it - could get away with being much less kind and much more bitter.
So yes. Life circumstances. It's a miracle that I didn't hand in my resignation at multiple opportunities. Clearly there's something about my job that keeps me going, or my psyche has built a load-bearing pillar called "not giving up." There are worse pillars.
Now that Prima opened this can of worms, I concur. Your writing got more verbose and rambling than necessary around the time you started extolling awesomeness of AI assisted writing. However, as this is not a forum for writing advice but (supposedly) for debate, I don't think you get that much feedback about it. It's not really a great argumentative move to switch rails from topic-level argumentation to unsolicited stylistic opinions.
Let me illustrate. For instance, your comment here has two or possibly three points: Your book review was ACX finalist, so your writing can't be that bad. You claim that a percentage of your writing is not AI. [1] But you concede that you did have a depressive episode, and you found it helpful to write about it. All of which could have been one paragraph, not four.
[1] I find figurative use of percentages unpersuasive in general, but here in particular, what even is the claim stranded here in the weeds of rhetorical grandstanding? "[...] has been less than 10% of the total of any given body of work. Usually less than 95%. Often less than 99%."
Let me explain what is going on.
Apropos of very little, someone comes and tells me that they no longer like me, because I've done something they've disagreed with.
Sure. It's a free country, somewhere. This is a mostly free forum too, or at least a benevolent dictatorship. People are entirely allowed to say they don't like me. All else being equal (which it never is), I'd prefer they did like me, but I sleep easy at night regardless.
I have pointed out that they have the right to say what they wish, a right I'll defend to a sensible extent, if not to the death. I also have the right to disagree right back, and point at a mountain of semi-objective evidence.
From a Bayesian perspective, I would be an absolute idiot to overindex on a small n of people taking offense to what I consider an entirely benign practice, when I quite literally am being amply rewarded - financially, or through feedback - for what I'm doing.
To be blunt, if someone wants me to do something, and feels that strongly about it? Pay me.
An annoying post-hoc hypothesis, regardless of factuality. I regretfully inform you that my posts have always leant towards long and rambly. If you've managed to find some kind of canonical tipping point, ran things before and after to Pangram, or simply did intensive manual textual analysis to demonstrate your point? Then I would reward that with a more in-depth rebuttal. I have provided said rebuttals in the past. I also have work, and the need to sleep before work.
They're not figurative. You can go looking to find me counting, or estimating, at the time of writing.
"Sure."
Or: "I did not have the time to write a shorter letter."
I do not care to debate (very strongly), what I do in my free time, mostly for free.
How much are we talking in order to get you to, say, never consult AI in any fashion (not even editing) for any Motte post for 6 months?
I would pay to have the old you back, yes. I hold your older posts in extremely high regard.
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