Hey there! For complicated reasons, some of which I will explain later, I'm in the middle of dong a pretty gigantic revamp to the Motte codebase. Right now, this means "fix a bunch of small bugs". Later, other things will be happening.
The immediate goal of this is not to massively transform the site or do a Digg v4/New Reddit thing. Frankly, if the site remained exactly the same (but with fewer bugs) I would be happy.
The long-term goal isn't going to be quite that static, though. The long-term goal is to set things up to allow more subcommunities, similar to how subreddits work. This will be a larger set of changes. These changes will not obsolete The Motte itself; I am absolutely aiming for a site that can comfortably keep holding The Motte. I've talked about this before if you want to go read about it - this is still the same plan, for what it's worth, it's just now being (slowly) executed.
I will be posting more, and asking questions about next steps, when actual site behavioral changes are in the queue. This just isn't that! This is infrastructure work.
tl;dr: The site backend may be a little wonky for a bit, sorry about that, please report any bugs.
(and mods, feel free to unsticky this in a few days if I forget)
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
My apologies for not answering your call earlier. I'd be happy to talk to you about this.
As opposed to now, where nobody is real. When you ask a question in a reality-based forum or Discord chat, a community of 100,000 subscribers will post maybe 10 replies. 9 of those will be wrong or irrelevant. When I ask a question I get no substantive reply; when I post I get no substantive engagement. While I am a fan of doing things that don't scale, my efforts could be put to better use scaling now that the technology to do so has become available, and I'm at a time in my life where I simply need to accept that the early '10s are not coming back, so it's time to ruthlessly distill what was good about them down to their base essence and move on. If being able to ask a question and get decent responses in a reasonable timeframe is something that builds wisdom among those who do not know how to ask, then I am wasting my talents by not scaling.
But if human beings are indistinguishable from artificial intelligences (especially when you consider that a "human being" is, at least to some religions, this software), how best to harness those intelligences to expose intuition that other AIs don't have?
I think the reason for that is that the Internet was actually completely dead by late 2016. I think the warning that the Internet was over occurred when 4chan failed to successfully splinter because of moot's mishandling of Gamergate.
This is because everything that could be written down was, and once that happened, people stopped logging in (but never bothered to unsubscribe) to answer questions. Google was still sophisticated enough to index most of this. After that, Twitter and Facebook (as platforms that were designed from the beginning for tripfagging) ate what little was left of the public square.
You can see this in StackOverflow too, where the site remained strong until AI got good at which point it deserted completely, because it is faster and more efficient (and far less rudely nitpicky) at answering the average coding question than the collective of human beings. And I think this is increasingly happening to other sites that discuss reality as well- why log into the forum if you can just ask the AI, searcher of all forum posts ever written? Just as the personal firearm is the Great Equalizer, AI is the Great Federalizer.
An evolution of /r9k/ is probably instructive as to what the solution should be: if what you're about to type is detected by the robot to be a duplicate of a discussion already happening, or a duplicate of something in the past X days, then you are unable to post that thing, which limits you to posts that at least have a novel theory of mind behind them. It should also be able to cross-reference previous posts that one makes that talked about the same thing to build a reference network for users- I, and the other users who I took that idea from, already practice a form of this. It's not enough to just see sources; you need to be able to see where the AI got its context from so you can check its work.
Ideally, one would be able to not just tag comments, but the thought process behind them, so that if they need to be indexed or referenced later the metadata behind why they were written (and why they were written that way) still exists. This is also (to a point) an anti-AI feature, since thought processes are, if not hidden by AI platforms, long enough that a user needs to actually read them to know them. Obviously this is something present in humans (if there was no thought process behind the comment, then it is meaningless and should be treated accordingly- if it's a meme, it goes in the meme hole, because the reason it was posted was consensus-building; and consensus-building, while a perfectly valid reason for a comment to exist, is also completely useless if you're interested in the nuts and bolts understanding of things).
I disagree. Federation [in the sense that you mean it] is already accomplished at the web browser (or the app store) layer. If you want an instance, you type 'git clone' followed by the repository containing the code and stand it up yourself (or rather, get your AI to do that), then you stick a domain name on there and you're done.
The only thing "federation" enables in this context is bullying. If the forum still functions when all posters are Anonymous, you didn't need the usernames (this is the final solution to 'blocking', by the way- blacklists are for tripfags). Conquest's Second Law clearly states that any forum that is insufficiently focused on reality inevitably devolves into tripfagging, and federation dramatically accelerates this process.
AI moderation tools (and the uncensored models, if you're running a forum that is sufficiently spicy) are now good enough to deal with the spam, untrusted user, and the clinically retarded (they're the same picture).
I disagree with this, 8chan was a very successful splinter. It was an active site with a large, culturally-unique community and ongoing influence on the internet's zeitgeist. My time on 8chan was 'peak internet', for me, in that there was no censorship and a big enough, developed enough community to talk about things beyond what we'd talk about in everyday life.
It had little communities with a few hundred live users here and there that I still think about. I think any of those communities, alone, would count as an abnormally successful splinter site today.
This is something that worries me about the dead internet. There's a lot less motivation to reach out and make connections if you can just ask Claude and get a satisfactory answer on whatever obscure technical thing you want to know. I've encountered this myself - reaching out to people on the fringes on the internet is a lot harder than it was; people put much less effort into networking and community-building. So much could be done if the top dozen or so dissident techfags all logged into the same IRC server now and again and talked.
Federation's value is that it solves the coordination problem. There are (or were) a whole bunch of individually-dead reddit clones out there that were meant to be 'free reddit'. Some of them had communities of a dozen increasingly-inactive users, who stopped coming because there wasn't really anything new to say. The "Network Effect" is how large social media sites stay on top even if nobody likes their leadership, and why upstarts generally fall flat.
With federation, you automatically get an active community of thousands of people that your users can talk to even if only one guy has signed up to start with.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link