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 -
I think the site is doing OK. From one perspective staying above 1000 comments per week several years after exile is very impressive given how almost every other site on the modern internet has been swallowed up by platforms.
The loss of a few commenters worries me though.
The first is Zorba, the creator of the site, who barely participates at all any more. He's still very active back on Reddit, so it's not like he's taking time off or anything, he just got bored with the site.
The second is Darwin (I think he went by guesswho on this site). Again, he's still very active back on Reddit but was effectively chased out of the site. He was easily the best contrarian to this site's conservative bent, as he was basically pro-woke, or could at least enunciate pro-woke positions. He basically always did so respectfully even while coming under a hail of personal insults.
For a political discussion website, this place is very lenient when it comes to personal insults, accusations of bad faith, ad hominems, etc. Even the moderators join in on it! (One in particular is very bad about it). The mods will generally step in and put an end to things if people start swearing at each other but as long as it doesn't become extreme then it's usually fair game.
There's also an issue with dogpiling as some have mentioned. At first I didn't really get what the big deal was about since I thought implicitly that nobody would think they were ever entitled to a reply, so they could just reply to a couple and then move on when they got tired and it would be fine. But I've since had a few experiences firsthand where not replying to some had them accuse me of bad-faith for ignoring them the last time when the topic came up.
Then there's the issue of leftists getting much more mod scrutiny for a variety of reasons.
With the personal insults and the dogpilling and the disproportionate mod attention, any attempts to recruit opposing viewpoints are going to be futile. In fact the Motte used to have those people, it just chased them away! Without changing many of the things that chased them away in the first place I don't know why anyone would expect anything to change.
The Motte is now mostly just a humdrum conservative forum with an abnormal rate of high quality posters due to its SSC lineage. Occasional debates happen mostly from inter-conservative disagreements or from the centrists having the occasional left-leaning opinion. That status quo is fine for some people including myself, although it's a significant step down from what the community was before.
Darwin was a troll. It's difficult for me to see anything likable about him.
He was not a troll, he was on-par with most conservative commenters here in terms of the strength of his arguments, and an order of magnitude higher in terms of patience when it came to dealing with hostile interlocutors.
AlexanderTurok was not a Darwin alt if that's what you're implying.
I sometimes see him on reddit posting. The fact that he is a troll is easier to spot when he's posting on PCM blatantly trolling.
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I found something likeable: he's a great litmus test. When people argue he wasn't that bad or he was persecuted or whatever, I know I shouldn't take their opinions seriously.
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