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Primaprimaprima  Temperance; The Two of Wands; The Hierophant Reversed  8hr ago (text post)   598 thread views

Random Musings on the State of TheMotte

As far as I know, it's been a while since our last meta thread, so let's have a space for the administration of praise and the airing of grievances. Hopefully we can keep the conversation distant enough from first order culture war issues to justify this being a separate thread from the main CW thread.

I've been here on and off over the years since about 2016. To my mind, the two most exciting times to be a part of this community were the period around the first Trump election, and then again in 2022 around the time of the site migration. I don't think it's a coincidence that these time periods coincided with major new social and political issues entering the public consciousness (or at least, entering the consciousness of this community): in 2016, the culture war as we know it was still very fresh and nascent, with battle lines still being drawn and positions still being clarified, and in 2022, DALL-E and ChatGPT introduced machine learning to those of us who had not been feverishly following the LessWrong comments section since the 00s.

Unsurprisingly, discussion is good when there's something new and shiny to discuss. But eventually, you start to run out of things to talk about. People have been complaining about this problem with regards to the "classic" culture war issues for at least a good 3 or 4 years now. In the time period from 2014-2018, there was still a sense that it was all brand new: people were being forced to think about questions and perspectives that they had never thought about before, they were still figuring out how to make sense of their own positions and the positions of others. But now it's all well-trodden ground. You can only rehash the same foundational questions about race and free speech so many times before people on both sides start to think "yes, I've seen it all before, I know how this ends".

Even with AI, despite it still being a very rapidly evolving field, I've been feeling less motivated to participate in AI discussions lately, largely because it feels like such a straightforwardly empirical question. The classic culture war questions are the sorts of evergreen philosophical questions that you could, in principle, go back and forth on endlessly. You can walk away and come back in 10 years and the same questions will still be sitting there. But with AI, it ultimately all boils down to "well we'll just have to wait and see" in the end. Either there will be a singularity and/or the extinction of humanity, or there will not be. Sitting here and talking about it won't change much. We kinda just have to wait to see what happens.

Perhaps these forces have played a role in causing the forum to become less theoretical and abstract over time, leading to the rise of what I like to call "nuts and bolts" type posts: local politics at the city/state level, the minutiae of urban and suburban life, court cases and legal briefings. I don't remember these types of posts being so common in the early years of the forum (probably because, again, the culture war was brand new and people wanted to discuss the hottest culture war questions). I'm glad that at least some people are invested in doing the actual necessary work that makes the world function. But these types of posts generally bore me to tears, so I skip over them. I'm sure many people skip over the dumb shit I like to post about too, so, I understand that it goes both ways and there are no hard feelings. At least I'm still trying to be the change I want to see and I try to balance out the discussion with more philosophical posts.

Something I do lament is the evaporative cooling of interesting characters over time, not only due to bans but also due to natural attrition. At this point in the community's lifespan, it's unlikely that we're going to get another Hlynka, or another TracingWoodgrains. One starts to get the impression that the window for new foundational community narratives has passed.

All complaining aside, I still derive an incredible amount of value from this forum, as evidenced by my return to daily participation, and I would hate to ever see it go. It doesn't remind me of the Old Internet, but it does remind me of the Middle Internet: that time period from roughly 2012-2018 when there was a flourishing of strange ideas and it genuinely seemed like many bold new things were possible. (Maybe it reminds some other people of Usenet, I don't know; that was before my time.) I sincerely hope that this forum can remain roughly stable in its current state for as long as possible.

Anyway, what do you think? What do you think about how TheMotte has evolved over the years, what do you like about it now, what do you want to see changed, etc.

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I wonder if we could attract and retain more contrary views if we made a mechanism that avoided people with unpopular opinions getting dogpiled on. Like, Scott's adversarial collabs, or a debate type of thing. Like each week there is a topic and we find two people who disagree on that topic willing to give a good faith effort towards effortposting and steelmanning their own side against each other. And they debated each other in their own thread and nobody else is allowed to respond (everyone else gets their own like side forum or something where they can talk about the debate, but are not allowed to directly participate or distract between these two people debating each other). This allows the person with the less popular view to focus their attention on one person and not have to split their attention among 10 different people disagreeing with them.

As one of the main resident unpopular opinion havers here, I agree with the problem at least. I'll end up choosing a few replies to talk with, but still once in a while I'll get people mad at me for ignoring them, it creates an issue of following who is saying what if the topic continues on especially when there are similar usernames involved, and I'm also a human being and can't guarantee I'm not being selective or biased in who I choose to reply to!

That being said, I'm not sure about the solution suggested. One annoying thing about the Internet is seeing someone who agrees with your conclusion but not the reasoning.

Like let's say two people dislike a law limiting weed sales past 5pm, except one dislikes it because they want no limits and the other dislikes it cause they don't want it allowed at all. Who should represent the "this law is bad" side?

But even within the former of wanting no limits, what if you think the law is bad and weed should be always legal because of small government values but the person who gets appointed as argument representative is a dumb dudebro type who says weed cures cancer so it needs to be sold in case of emergency cancer treatment as their main point? I'm sure we've all experienced seeing people argue for "our side" of a topic in a way we don't agree with, either from their points or their behavior.

The "contrary" (read: left of center) views will come back when Trump fails or moves off the scene.

For the past four years, I listened to about four Eagles podcasts a week and every game was appointment viewing. If for some reason I couldn't attend the game or watch it on TV, I engineered my day so I could listen to Reese on the radio broadcast, even if that was mildly inconvenient. This year, I watch the games, I'll attend a few, but it's not a priority. I'm not following the podcasts or the back of the roster moves, if I had to miss a game I'd just shrug.

I watched a little sixers basketball last year, likable young guys in VJ-Maxx even if they were tied to the anchor contracts of injured stars, but I didn't worry about them too much because they were ultimately doomed and hopeless in the near term. This year every day there's a game on TV I bring the baby down to watch it with my parents (luckily basketball tipoffs coincide with me getting home from working and taking over newborn care), I'm listening to Rights to Ricky Sanchez, I even picked up the latest from heavyslime.

The difference being that when the Eagles were good, I wanted to talk about them. When the sixers were bad, I didn't want to talk about them. When the sixers are good, I do want to talk about them. My allegiances don't change, but my dedication to them does.

What we need to do is maintain an honest, open forum and just wait until the worm turns. Which inevitably it will. I'm old enough to remember seeing Forty more years* on the shelf at Borders.

If you went on a baseball forum this month, you'd think Milwaukee was the most important baseball town in the country. If you went on in 2014, you'd barely hear about the Brewers. Liberals have been withdrawing from political discussion of all kinds since 2024, after a depressing series of losses that make you go "man this team will never get out of its own way." When their team looks like a contender for a ring, they'll be back.

*Thinking about it, I wonder if the thesis of the book that Barack Obama's election permanently altered American politics isn't more accurate than I give it credit for, in that the post-Obama many Republican beliefs of the past have been left behind and in many ways the party has remade itself in the image of Barack Hussein Obama. Trump has many things in common with Obama, in terms of positions and style, the he does not have in common with Dubya or Reagan. Maybe I'll delve into this as an effortpost.

I agree the AI discussion is boring, because the things being discussed are simply speculations about an empirical and technical question which will be answered for all to see in the coming years.

However I do think there is some potential of a genuine culture war along luddite versus technologist lines, or whatever you want to call the two camps. To be sure, this is a more general question concerning the impact of technology on our lives both individually and societally, but I think the recent developments around AI are bringing this to the fore and it isn't a simple empirical question, but a philosophical and ethical one, i.e. what do we want technology to do and how is the technology currently being built affecting our lives and our culture? This is in principle completely orthogonal to whether you are an AI skeptic or a think AGI is around the door.

It's also something which has the potential to cause some genuine discussion in this place, since I think our members run the full gamut from "modernity was a mistake" to "I can't wait for my transhumanist utopia".

I agree the AI discussion is boring, because the things being discussed are simply speculations

Also riffing off this paragraph in the OP:

Unsurprisingly, discussion is good when there's something new and shiny to discuss. But eventually, you start to run out of things to talk about. People have been complaining about this problem with regards to the "classic" culture war issues for at least a good 3 or 4 years now. In the time period from 2014-2018, there was still a sense that it was all brand new: people were being forced to think about questions and perspectives that they had never thought about before, they were still figuring out how to make sense of their own positions and the positions of others. But now it's all well-trodden ground. You can only rehash the same foundational questions about race and free speech so many times before people on both sides start to think "yes, I've seen it all before, I know how this ends".

There's always room for some new angles. For example, one could say that it's not just speculation. It's prophecy. So let's dig up another old, now boring, too-well-trodden ground from the atheism/religion wars. One of the now boring directions was a striving to find ways to make Christianity falsifiable. Good news! We have a good old fashioned prophet showdown!

In one corner, wearing the red trunks, we have, "If anyone builds it, everyone dies." In the other corner, wearing the blue trunks, we have, "And unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved; but for the elect’s sake those days will be shortened."

Now this is podracing prophecy! We'll finally get to see. Er, well, our robot descendants may finally get to see. All that atheists need to do to prove that Christianity is false is make sure that they manage to kill everyone!

Unban @DaseindustriesLtd, who is much of the reason I come here.

Existing discussion on this from last week

I don't understand why this guy got banned under a thread from AI discussion in 2025, 6 days ago. What's going on?

If he can't follow the rules, he should be banned. It's not rocket surgery. I don't care how interesting someone's posts are (and Dase didn't even make interesting posts IMO), the rules should apply to all.

To play the devil’s advocate, counterpoint: Darwin. Who’s behavior was so egregious that many people assume his lack of posting is due to being banned(he’s not) or accusing people of being Darwin alts to get around said ban.

Irrespective of Dase’s ban, the motte is very much a case of an Animal Farm, and has been so for some time.

Wow this is how I find out he was banned from jousting with RR continuously for a whole year.

Kinda funny how his biggest blowups have been against people who are largely aligned with him on AI issues.

Narcissism of small differences I suppose.

Narcissism of small differences I suppose.

Very much so. He has very strong opinions on the topic. I would liken him to a the zeal of a recent convert.

Seconded!

I'm surprised the forum has kept going as long as it has. If we take the Culture War thread as a barometer, there hasn't even been a significant decline in activity. In early 2024 each thread was getting about 1500 comments, and that's how much the posts are getting today.

I do miss the regular influx of new users that we had when we were on Reddit. I understand why Zorba moved us, as I'm sure it was only a matter of time before the Admins found some pretext to ban the subreddit. Still, I do hope that if activity on this forum declines too much we give Reddit another go. I don't see any other option for attracting fresh blood.

Reddit's gone and dead. Things have gotten WORSE since then, even as the left's censorship powers enjoy less support. I was terrified when we left but I would never trust going back. They could kill the community on a whim.

Still, I do hope that if activity on this forum declines too much we give Reddit another go.

This forum cannot exist on reddit. Maybe a couple years ago when admin actions chilled out, but reddit has implemented their own AI censorship/safety tools to police comments since then. In 2026 these are turbocharged, clearly designed to be dumb keyword enforcers, and it will go around deleting comments or banning users who merely mention bad ideas, i.e. suicide, capital punishment, and anything deemed sensitive. I suspect they still keep badlists of naughty subreddits for extra attention which The Motte would qualify for ten times over.

I had my very old account banned by reddit robots this year allegedly for spam. I post on reddit once every few months and am a more mild commentor by The Motte's standards. Most regulars here would need to use some kind of coded 1337 speak to go back to posting on reddit.

Man I don't even know about the politics of it all, but it seems like Reddit is increasingly just useless and boring. /r/sixers and /r/eagles are boring. /r/classicwowtbc is in a constant state of mutual flame war. It just feels like the perpetual stew that was reddit has gone rotten and it's not easy to revive it. Reddit needs to crater and maybe something worthwhile can revive.

I try to link to this place from twitter / x every now and then. I think that's a good source of traffic if more folks do that.

Well, there were weekly threads back on reddit that were getting 3k comments, so there has been a decline in activity compared to the reddit days.

You can only rehash the same foundational questions about race

Clearly what we need is a new race to worry about.

One of the thoughts I had (very protean) about the evaporative cooling/abstract topic discussion is that in a large part we have lost a bunch big names that went on to write Substack articles for the more populous internet: Tracy, Yassine, Kulak, Dase, etc. If many of those posters engaged in more abstract, or prolific topics and find that engagement on those topics draws interest, power, fame, and status, is it any small wonder that they move offsite to something that benefits them more? It's not something we as the community can really fix.

There is a rumors also that @Cremieux was a frequent contributor.

Yeah, wasn't he TrannyPornO?

This is a tempting hypothesis but there are plenty of reasons to avoid endorsing it. Not that I'm at liberty to go into those, regrettably.

Yep, afaik it has been all but confirmed, he actually changed his handle somewhere directly instead of setting up a new account. Have no link though.

That's what I thought. I forget how I found out myself. But it makes sense. I think he claimed to be a really tall Jew from Lichtenstein with like 7 kids back in /r/TheMotte days, which kind of tracks with what we know about him now. He's actually a goy from Texas who converted if what I read on X can be believed.

I hate Substack because whenever I find an interesting post, start reading it, bam, paywall. Fuck that, I will not give you ten bucks just to see whether you are a good writer or not. I’ve been thinking about creating archive.is for liberated Substack articles

My problem with it is that the UX fucking sucks. They're now the Anglosphere's premier place for long-form political commentary by writers outside of traditional media. It would be nice if they unfucked the UX.

As for paying, I don't see any problem with that. How are we going to get decent long-form political content on a large scale if people can't make a living doing it? Yeah there is the occasional Scott Alexander who has a day job and enjoys writing essays in his free time. But there are limits to that approach. If you want to do some actual in-depth sleuthing, for example, some real investigative journalism, there's only so much you can do in free time while having a day job.

Same. Every blogger has figured out that the way to make money is to put all their most interesting articles behind a paywall. And the new meta is that all articles are behind a loginwall, so you have to subscribe for free to read anything. And Astral Codex Ten is unreadable because the comments take so much compute to render that it makes Crysis look like Pong. And...

Substack ruined the blogosphere.

I've never had any issue reading Astral Codex Ten, but I'm on a PC, so maybe it's different on mobile.

I suppose it has been at least three weeks since our last meta-discussion.

I'll just come in and say what regularly seems to get brought up in these discussions. The site has lasted much longer than many people, including myself, expected. I, for one, am not sure exactly what to do about the evaporative cooling effects. But it's not clear to me there is a much better alternative. Of course, we also face ever-changing ground beneath our feet on the internet. And while others can debate whether or not The Motte is flourishing, the community does seem to be surviving

It helps that I have literally nowhere else to go. I'm not aware of a single other forum where both sides of trans issues can be discussed. As for AI, I occasionally try to make anti-doomer comments on ACT, but Scott and most of his community are true believers in the Cult of Yud and I typically get mobbed. I'm guessing LW would be even worse.

I'm not aware of a single other forum where both sides of trans issues can be discussed.

Technically /lgbt/ on 4chan I guess, but, it’s 4chan, the quality of discourse is nowhere near as good as it is here.

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