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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.
I initially thought this sounds doomed, but thinking it a bit more, I'm not sure. Reddit feels like it has gone from being worse than it used to be but still the incumbent so what are you gonna do, to something that has very little resemblance to what it originally was. A thing like that doesn't really exist now, and it doesn't need to be immediately huge to get going, so maybe there is a chance.
Stuff I'm roughly thinking, how did the original Reddit get to be like that? Why did it go bad? What's different now? The internet circa 2005 still operated on some sort of naive emergent elitism just on account of normies mostly not being there. The optimistic story in my head is that there's still a cohort of the sort of people who populated early Reddit around, but they don't have the internet in general as their watering hole anymore, so if you somehow got a critical mass of them in one place that could actually kickstart things. The optimistic story for Reddit going bad was that the owners sold out and had to grow the site and throw the original values overboard, so a replacement could keep its soul longer by staying a boutique operation.
What's going on now, you have a lot more bad actors around, and AI is likely to make things even worse. I'm pretty sure something is lost from the idealism from 25 years ago when people figured they can solve the software crisis by writing more Lisp. So one angle is defense. You can expect hacking and entryists, and if you get big enough, lawfare. And then you want to get the sorts of people you do want contributing to learn about the site and join. The tricky thing is that you want some kind of elitism filter that gets you smart people writing quality content and keeps you from getting swamped with Reddit normies, but also doesn't get you into the Voat failure mode of pulling in mostly crazy people and bad actors. The Motte had a pretty solid niche during the 2010s culture war, which was pretty visible for a circa 2018 misfit grey tribe university freshman, but I'm not sure how much of a going concern it is today. I guess in 2008 there were still stronger remnants of the US religious right around and free software was more of a scrappy underdog than the infrastructure of the entire Web 2.0, and those were relevant things for the original Redditors. So what's the zeitgeist going to be for a 2028 misfit grey tribe university freshman and what will they be looking to escape from or stand against?
The big thing Motte has going for it is hands-on moderation by people who actually have an idea what the site is about and will engage with users pretty far. A big part of what happened to Reddit is that Reddit moderation absolutely isn't this, and at the size of the site cannot be it. So if you can grow, the question is how the moderation can keep up. I guess ideally you'd have subcommunities around the size of the Motte with their own moderators, and some kind of higher-level system. AI might actually help here, if you know what you're looking for when moderating, you could have AI crunch a large volume of comments and look for patterns and summaries, even when you can't read all the volume by yourself.
Thinking about how people manage their identities and what kind of visibility they can expect is obviously a bigger concern than people thought back in the day. Reddit has the blocking thing, but it also recently added a tag to turn profiles private so you can't read through people's comments. The feature is also around here, apparently inherited from rdrama, and a lot of people are ambivalent about it, since there's the perception that people who turn it on are more likely to be bad actors. I'm of the "assume anything you put on the internet will be there forever because chances are it will be" school here, but aren't really in touch with a lot of modern social media. The whole dark forest theory is another modern thing you probably want to think about when designing a brand new Reddit, and for extra fun we're looking at comments being possibly batch-deanonymizable with AI in the very near future for anyone who hasn't kept all their publicly visible writing pseudonymous.
That front page screenshot looks a lot like Hacker News today. It's also getting worse although still miles ahead of today's Reddit. Or https://lobste.rs, which is more tech and higher quality, but invite-only and strictly left leaning.
Heh, I was about to comment the same thing. Still, I wish there were more sorta-reddits out there, but there just aren't as far as I can tell.
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