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.
Efforts that look like affirmative action probably won't be popular with existing users, and probably won't be popular with the mods since it would create more work and they've been accused of AA for protected posters well before we moved here (perhaps most infamously, Darwin).
Speaking of, contrarians in these spaces tend to be... abrasive. Forcing people to not respond to them does not a good situation make.
For those that aren't abrasive, what's the point? Would it be fun to be a polite token advocate, where people are restricted in replying to you, where you know they can't reply because your position is unpopular? Or would you rather go spend time where everyone likes you and agrees with you?
I think you misunderstood what I wrote. I'm saying we do something like, in addition to the regular discussion where they are regular people, we occasionally host a 1v1 debate forum where they get put up with someone and have a 1v1 discussion with that person, who responds to them regularly, while everyone else takes a backseat and watches. Then they go back to being normal. I don't see how that runs into any of the issues you bring up here.
I got what you meant, I probably didn't make that clear enough, sorry. Like a siloed thread and an observer's thread.
The catch is the rest of the time! Like- at the risk of consensus building, take blank slate ideology as quite unpopular here.
The kind of person that earnestly believes and wants to defend that is unlikely to participate long enough to even be asked to do a debate thread. They're not going to want to stick around long enough to be treated like regular people, because they'll get dogpiled when they bring up the topic of disagreement. Blank slate people have historically showed up briefly and either nope out because they dislike too many people and don't want to deal, or they flame out and get banned because they start insulting everyone.
I can imagine a more complex system where people could submit their controversial positions privately, and rarely talk about them (avoiding dogpiles), and occasionally one of the mods picks a pair of controversies to do the 1v1?
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