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The Motte and the future

So the move has been made. Potential shut down by Reddit has been avoided. Huzzah!

But people are still worrying about where new members are going to come from. And things are still being organized in the same terrible way as /r/ssc when they were trying to quarantine the culture war from the rest of the sub. And sprinkles around you have a few small threads for other weekly topics or talking about the new site.

A dedicated site deserves a nu start. Rather than purposely making quality writing harder to find, it should be highlighted. (I know the quality contributions roundup exists, but it certainly isn't exhaustive.) Seriously, have you ever gone back and tried to read an old weekly culture war thread with its thousands, potentially tens of thousands of comments? It is an unnecessary slog if you are looking for something and don't have a link. And sometimes you 'continue reading' and go back only to find that you've lost your place. It just makes you say, "I blue myself."

I do have some suggestions on some of the changes I'd like to see more that there is a dedicated website. First, I'd like to see a webpage highlighting quality contributions and other content from the forum. Something that I can easily link a friend to rather than a nested comment in response to some insane person ranting "There's a man inside me!" Or whatever.

Secondly, I think some editorial prompts for content for the sure would be good. Adversarial collaborations and whatever else. Just easier ways to find good writing from the site.

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I didn't want to make a separate thread for this, so I'll leave it as a comment: I think we have a serious issue with diversity of opinion. This was already pretty bad on Reddit, but there seems to have been a step change for the worse in the few days this new site has been up. I'm not against people sharing reactionary or anti-woke points of view but when there's nothing to counterbalance them it feels less like a forum for debate and more like the world's highest effort Daily Mail comments section. I foresee this being an increasing issue, since now the Motte is moored in the digital equivalent of international waters, there is a far lower chance that progressive voices will chance upon the community by accident. Moreover, lack of diverse perspectives induces a harmful feedback cycle, since if someone sees at least some representation of their viewpoints they are more likely to pitch in, while if they just see a load of right-wingers competing to be the most critical of 'wokeism', in all likelihood, they will leave as quickly as they entered.

I accept that I'm not the first to raise this point (I believe this was a motivating factor for the removal of the bare-links repository) but since this isn't a problem that looks likely to solve itself I feel obliged to raise it again in the hope that we can work towards a solution.

I didn't want to make a separate thread for this, so I'll leave it as a comment: I think we have a serious issue with diversity of opinion.

Let's be clear here, what we mean primarily is that we don't have enough people taking a stance that defends modern left-wing social activism - trying to get certain groups to higher percentages in professional settings, trying to defend race-swapping in media/having inherently diverse movies (based on physical appearance), and declaring that self-identification is the only requirement for society to be obligated to treat you as it would another of your supposed gender. As for economics, the discussions around that are infrequent and not as engaging (or should I say enraging?) for people of different views to interact.

There's a joke on the badeconomics subreddit sideboard along the lines of "Everyone has an opinion on the economy". While that's true, I'd caveat that everyone has three opinions on any social issue. No amount of discussion of inflation will generate as much discussion/heated argument as when something trans-related comes up.

My pessimistic take is there is no solution to increasing diversity of opinion here. This space is now twice removed from its original SSC community, and the evolution has selected for people willing to argue under relatively high standards who felt they couldn't get what they got elsewhere. Its founding father is a man who is critical of modern social progressivism and his audience is thus composed of people who aren't said progressives (because who else is going to stay on a blog/community if you know the main man himself think you're wrong or just outright evil?)

I'm not that right-wing, I think. I count myself among the leftward posters here. But a sense of exhaustion has set into me whenever I see another comment that isn't as charitable as it could be towards a left-wing position. Because no matter how much I argue that assuming the worst of others needs proof, there are always 10 more comments I saw but didn't have the time to respond to.

It gets old and tiresome fast.

Because no matter how much I argue that assuming the worst of others needs proof, there are always 10 more comments I saw but didn't have the time to respond to.

This is the key. Political diversity of opinion and quality of opinion are orthogonal to each other. A discussion place can be a place for learning and intellectual growth without contributors uniformly across the political spectrum to maintain an ideal measure of political diversity. It can't survive a flood of commenters who won't check each other's sources. The moment when there are nobody left but people who congratulate each other for correctness of their opinions is when a forum has become distinctly uninteresting.