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 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.
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.
We'll also probably see more of a resurgence of high-quality right-wing posting (and the disaffected liberals will come back). Don't get me wrong, I thank whichever gods sent us Trump every day, but there's a reason that the peaks of contemporary RW blogging, writing, theory, etc. were 2013-16 and 2021-23. When Trump is in power, he's the symbolic fulcrum of all political discourse, and so everything gets bogged down to the object-level. Whereas a Democratic administration is just the system working as normal, so one wants to start talking about systematic things again.
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