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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'll chime in here that I'm one of the few libs to have stuck it out on TheMotte and, yeah, it does feel like it's taken a bit of an echoey turn with the site switch. I do think it's a mix of people finally being able to go mask off and rdrama folks trolling.

I don't think Joe Average Liberal will have the same experience I'm having, since I've spent most of my life enjoying back and forth with Cons and have my own weird ideosyncretic takes I like to ride around hobby-horse style.

I also don't have a great fix for this. Are there things libs want to say that they can't say on reddit? Abso-goddamn-lutely, but they're also things that left-wing spaces discourage saying as a taboo, so even unleashed in a place like this we hold our tongues.

Are there things libs want to say that they can't say on reddit? Abso-goddamn-lutely, but they're also things that left-wing spaces discourage saying as a taboo

Like what?

Basically any discussion of violence as a political tool, even just like 'yeah, we should probably have some number of liberal gun owners otherwise the Accelerationists will win because they think they're running unopposed.'

That was what I was coyly pointing out, but I'm sure there are other taboos, probably that I've become so good at avoiding I don't even notice.

Huh? Liberal gun owners have their very own subreddit, which, as of now, isn't quarantined. And that's just one subreddit among many.

But the vast majority of libs won't touch it with a ten foot poll.

But they won't touch it primarily because they disagree with it, not because they are suppressing their feelings.

That's hardly something anyone besides themselves can do anything about. As far as I can tell, it's a completely normie-friendly subreddit.