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 -
And I've yet to see a single one of darwin's comments that people could bring up as an example of his supposed poor behavior that rightists don't mimic in the other direction while receiving a free pass.
I highly doubt that's how he would see it. This is not how human psychology and behavior normally works, especially for people with strongly held political ideas like him.
His original account is not banned so I don't see why he'd need an alt. And I haven't seen much leftist posting in the same vein. I have, however, seen more than a few false accusations that any given new left-leaning account is a darwin alt.
See, you correctly identify that the forum has gradually become more ideologically homogeneous. And the problem cannot simply be dismissed by saying that nobody is formally preventing leftists from participating. A forum can be perfectly open in principle while becoming rather inhospitable in practice. If every dissenting opinion attracts six hostile replies, three demands for citations, and a running commentary on the poster's intellectual deficiencies, it shouldn't surprise anyone when the supply of willing dissenters dries up. You're not wrong to recognise the patterns at work.
But your proposed solutions mistake the symptoms for the underlying problem.
There is a selection effect on the participation as Amadan notes below. The Motte did not become disproportionately right-wing in a vacuum. There is simply no incentive for leftists like Darwin to stay here when he could just jump on reddit. It's unreasonable to expect the mods to manufacture ideological diversity when the incentive to participate is weak. They can prevent harassment, enforce standards, and avoid rewarding low-effort sneering. They cannot make people interested in arguing with one another. And some of the forum favourite topics like HBD and black criminality sit so far outside the Overton window for your standard leftist to even dignify with a response.
Darwin is an urban legend here, so much has been written about the guy that I would be shocked if he wasn't hopping back just to get a good chuckle seeing his specter haunt the site years later. He's left his mark, and maybe that's all he really cared about.
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Well, plenty of Darwin's bad behaviour was expressed in comments that received a free pass. The aforementioned crashout over JK Rowling did not incur any mod actions, so far as I can see.
I agree with you that he would claim not to see it that way. Still seems like the most parsimonious explanation.
Simple: to escape the reputation the previous alt (guesswho) had accrued. I don't think he ever created an account under the username "darwin2500", so creating the "guesswho" account wasn't done for reasons of ban evasion.
Sure, but a large portion of commenters think he was a terrible poster who should have been banned.
I doubt he cared enough about nebulous forum reputation to care. He openly said that guesswho was his posting handle on this site. "darwin alts" became something of a boogeyman but despite the many claims of other accounts being such none of them were ever true.
Like, do you think he's continuing to post on this site? Is there a particular account you have in mind.
Do you think I'm him?
Okay. So what? He wasn't.
I do, but I'd rather not say.
No.
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