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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Notes -
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.
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.
Comment sections under your local sports team podcast are where you find vital discussions about sports team happenings. Reddit is where the latest narrative is propagated so they're still useful for casual fans.
Since I was banned I went through my subscriptions for the first time in forever. I realized there are only a few subs I still weakly rated. /r/slatestarcodex as a link aggregator since discussion is now pretty bad. /r/supremecourt where mods have made a real effort, as good as it gets which is not great or even reliably worthwhile.
Part of this is aging out in interest. We are an aging breed after all, us highfalutin types who can remember, and a man can only see so many flamewars. I accept that. It is hard not to notice the rest of my former subscriptions look like a boneyard for old, used up machines. Subreddit after subreddit sitting out in a desert victimized by growth and entropy.
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