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 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.
As the "bad mod" (yawn) who "chased Darwin away," let me point out that no one is keeping him away. And I personally have committed to not trying to rub my last post that apparently shamed him into silence in his face if he ever returns, even though I absolutely do not respect how he tucked tail and ghosted when finally pressed on some bullshit he'd been saying for a long time. But I cannot promise others will not.
About liberals: you are right and you are wrong. Leftists do not get extra mod scrutiny. Jesus, how many times do we have to go over this? Once again, in the same thread we're being accused of being extra-strict with leftists and also of giving them too much leeway because we don't want to drive them off. Look, it's a known problem. The site has converged mostly to the right, and leftists get reported more, and the mods are very aware that a leftist is going to show up in the mod queue more often and thus we cannot help but be hyper aware of leftists who are annoying people. And we have to balance "Is this person really out of bounds?" with "Are we just seeing this person more because everyone reports him?" It's... the Darwin problem, basically.
We still have some liberals here (raises hand) and even a few leftists. Yes, I get that it's hard to be a leftist here. I sympathize, but also I don't. This, also, is old ground I'm repeating for the umpteenth time, but the convergence here is not because we drove away all the leftists. It's because leftists drove everyone else off every other site, and we still see the pattern here where sometimes a leftist will show up and participate for a while, and then leave in a huff when they realize they're not allowed to just call people Nazis and that we don't ban leftist-feeling-hurting viewpoints.
That was a ramble, but I feel like a lot of you are just rehashing things we already know. So, like, what are your concrete proposals?
FWIW I'm not accusing you of being the mod who chased darwin away since, yes, he isn't banned. I'm saying the accepted behaviors of the site in general did that. Although yes, you are the user I was talking about when I claimed that some mods like to engage in general hostility towards other users. My brightline is for direct attacks like name calling, insults, etc. which you've never crossed when you've discussed things with me, but your responses are still dripping with contempt with the "(yawn)" and the "Jesus". I have a feeling that if darwin did that to other users then he absolutely would have been told to knock it off by the mods.
We have leftists getting banned for stuff like this. When pressed on what was actually bad about the post, the mod gave an unconvincing answer about misuse of quotation marks. In comparison we have rightists posting stuff like this or this or this and getting a free pass. If anything it's more than a free pass because one of those examples was an AAQC and another was from a moderator (acting as a normal user, but should still be held to a somewhat higher standard).
I sorta buy the argument that leftists generally don't want to debate things with those they perceive as enemies, but darwin and a few others were an obvious exception to that.
If I were to propose changes they would be
Not really. It's true we discourage sarcasm and snippiness, but if you've been paying attention as closely as you claim to, you also know we generally have a pretty high tolerance for it and only mod when it does cross over into obvious antagonism or an attempt to derail threads into "Nuh uhs."
Yes, I will own that sometimes I am sarcastic and jaded. Mostly I keep it in check, but sometimes my exasperation shows. I cannot honestly say I feel much guilt over this, because I do not censure people for things I would not censure myself. Could I be more dispassionate and a model of toneless civility? Yes. I am sorry not to be able to conform to your customer service expectations. The expectation that mods are never allowed to so much as yawn at a tiresome critic is not a reasonable expectation.
Your claims about why leftists are being banned and rightists are not: well, I flatly disagree, I think you are wrong, I think you are arguing that the sky is green and gravity is sideways, and I think nothing I say is going to disabuse you of this because we had almost this exact same exchange a year ago and nothing has changed. Yes, I am being a bit sarcastic and jaded with my "sky is green and gravity is sideways" crack because I am exasperated.
But as per your suggestions:
First of all, I reject your implicit assumption that the mod team is all rightists and we are biased against leftists. You are simply - pardon my exasperation - not just wrong, but fucking wrong. Maybe none of us qualify as "leftists" nowadays, but we are definitely not all rightists. Honestly, I think only one of us identifies as rightist and one another identifies as moderately conservative. Like, that's it, man. So how "leftist" do you think your proposed sensitivity consultant mod needs to be to restore fairness to moderation?
We could do that. Back on reddit, we'd occasionally have periods we tongue-in-cheek called "reigns of terror" where for a week or two, tone moderation became much stricter and bans were handed out more easily. Usually this was when we sensed the temperature going up and an increase in antagonism and low-effort sneering making conversations less pleasant. There was, unsurprisingly, a mixed reaction to this, with some considering it a needed corrective, but most thinking it was just mods going off on a power trip (and of course, always, always, we were persecuting viewpoints we didn't like). We haven't done it since coming here because the community is smaller and we really don't want to hand out bans like candy. But honestly, I just mostly disregard your opinion of the tone here since you're clearly only seeing meanness in one direction and you only care about meanness in one direction. I will say that most of your proposed rules from NeutralPolitics are more or less the rules of the Motte. You are not wrong that we don't enforce them that strictly, and perhaps not as strictly as we used to. So it is worth discussing amongst ourselves. Maybe it is time for a "reign of terror" or at least a "reign of increased strictness."
But here is the problem: none of that would make you happy. Because you are the kind of person who will never believe that we are being fair, no matter how we adjust the dials. So, there is that.
Laughs in still waiting for one, just one concrete example of such a thing. I even just re-read the whole original thread. It's almost comical how milquetoast nearly the whole thing is.
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