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 -
If this behavior was genuinely rare from you then that would be one thing, because yeah, we all have bad days. But for you like over 50% of your posts have unnecessary condescension and sarcasm to varying degrees. I looked at the most recent page of your replies to people, and there are plenty of examples like a rather goofy "NUh-uuuuuHHHHHHHH!" retort a day or two ago.
I can say that I sincerely try to come with an open mind and am available to be persuaded, but I doubt that would change your view of me on this topic. From my perspective you haven't really engaged with my main points and instead just kinda handwave it and claim I'm being obstinate. IIRC that's what you did last time too though my memory of it is a bit hazy.
This is not my assumption. I absolutely presume the mod team has enough centrists to not make it a totally conservative echo chamber. From what I can tell you're a small-L liberal like me and I think we actually see eye-to-eye on most political topics. But the problem with liberals and conservatives is that they largely see eye-to-eye on CW topics, or at least they see much more eye-to-eye than between centrists and leftists. The difference between liberals and conservatives comes down to smaller things like how great Trump is, how nihilistic we should be, how extreme the reactions to left should be, etc. On a scale encompassing all possible political topics there's a lot of difference between centrist liberals and conservatives, but when it comes to CW stuff that gap is much smaller. And this is a CW forum so.....
For there to be balance, you'd want someone who'd naturally agree with most of the leftist viewpoints when it came to CW topics. I'm not saying make darwin a mod if he ever comes back, but a person or two with his political sensibilities would be good for balancing the mod team.
Again with this.
You should know that most people aren't available to be persuaded on most things. When you post a normal response to a typical CW take that you disagree with, do you expect them to say "oh you've completely changed my opinion"? Probably not, unless it's something like a simple clarification on basic facts of what happened surrounding some current event. Most peoples' conclusions are already baked in from the start, that's just how human psychology works. You could deploy the "you won't change what you belief" point on almost any topic and you'd likely be correct. In fact, I could turn this around on you and say you wouldn't believe there's bias no matter what evidence I brought.
When I can look at a left-leaning poster like Turok getting banned for a borderline post, and I can very easily produce several right-leaning posts going in the other direction and getting no mod action, and then you respond with little but accusations of being obstinate, it seems like you're not even trying.
Well, of course I too think I am open-minded and available to be persuaded, and that you are not, and there we are. But to break this down to the fundamental point of disagreement, I dispute that in order to mod "fairly," one has to share political opinions with the person being modded, and therefore leftists can only fairly be modded by (or in consultation with) other leftists. May I remind you that Darwin got argued with a lot, but was actually rarely modded here?
This may be true, but then why the fuck are we here?
No, nobody gets persuaded in one thread to change their worldview, or even their opinion on one topic. But I do think my opinions on a number of things have changed over time, partly because of my participation here. In some aspects, I have become more liberal; in other cases, much less so.
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