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.
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
Unban @DaseindustriesLtd, who is much of the reason I come here.
Existing discussion on this from last week
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.
A lie I get tired of refuting. No one who claims this has ever been able to substantiate it with anything more than vague "You banned someone I like but you didn't ban someone I don't like."
Darwin's behavior was of an entirely different kind. He used disingenuous debate tactics, he played devil's advocate, he would intentionally take positions and phrase things in a way calculated to rile people, but no one post crossed the line (there are many people who I think regularly use disingenuous debate tactics and are here more to stick thumbs in eyes than actually engage in discussion) so back on reddit, he only got banned after a very long accumulation of black marks when his mask slipped. He was sleazy. Yes, it was and is annoying, but Darwin didn't have special privileges. There are people I'd happily ban right now because I think they are sleazy, add negative value, and are extremely annoying, but we don't do that.
Dase, by contrast, very straightforwardly engaged in personal attacks on another poster over a disagreement.
The thing that is true is that some animals are cleverer than others and will game our moderation policy to get away with as much as possible. And it's not like we don't see this, and eventually we'll usually get fed up, but acting as quickly as you might like would not actually make you happy, because we wouldn't only being acting against the Darwins.
sure jan. he was just a devil.
A policy that ultimately made all these forums worse for anyone vaguely on his side, because they were outnumbered and the perception that Darwin got extreme leeway poisoned the well against them; it generated so much guilt-by-association because he was prolific and hated. "Being a baity piece of shit but technically if you squint it's not personal insults" wins the Battle For Free Speech but loses the War For An Interesting Community. "Be creative with your insults" is a bad compromise but maybe an inevitable one given the higher-priority principles at play.
I don't have a solution here, and the hour is too late anyways. So it goes. Sic transit gloria interrete.
The Darwin Question gets brought up over and over, but no one has ever offered concrete policies we should change, just "calibrate your tolerance" or "be quicker to ban people on vibes." There isn't a good solution. You have to think of it as a classification problem: moderation that allows some of the people you want to stay also allows Darwin. Moderation that would ban Darwin is also going to ban the sleazy tacticians, bad faith propositions, and devil's advocates for your side.
To be very explicit, please formalize a concrete policy on what "being antagonistic" means, that is deeper than vibes. Because for darwin specifically, it did look like some people got banned or modhatted, and others not, sometimes in the same thread and for merely pointing Darwin's accusations back at him.
I can offer options -- Viking's old "Stop posting like your account is actually run by multiple people who don't talk to each other." retains a lot of utility -- but I know mine isn't what you want.
Man, I know you love dredging up old shit, but if you want to relitigate threads from eight years ago, talk to the people who were mods then.
Look, we do our best. I can't say anything that hasn't already been said. The next time @guesswho or someone like him goes on a tear, there will probably be discussion about it in the mods channel. There already is frequent discussion along the lines of "This poster is super fucking annoying but he's not reeeeally breaking the rules, what should we do about it?" And usually the consensus is "Let him have his leash." Is that the wrong consensus? Maybe it is. Maybe we should just start dropping banhammers the moment someone becomes super fucking annoying. But be careful what you wish for, as they say.
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