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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Notes -
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.
The reason why there aren't more left-wing posters here is because they tend to have trouble playing by the rules. I want a place where we can talk in a reasonable logical way about any topic ranging from video games to genocide, both in terms of the pros and cons. A lot of Leftists seem to have trouble disassociating their emotions from their intellect. The second somebody makes a reasonable point that emotionally disturbs them or makes them feel threatened, they tend to get angry. The solution to this is not to coddle them and indulge their emotional temper tantrums, it is to punish them until they learn that they need to change their behavior, not us.
I agree with you that it would be nice to see more diversity of thought here, but not by giving Leftists a pass to break the rules every time they get emotionally triggered. We simply need to enforce the rules and gather more power until we are the dominant narrative, at which point Leftists will be forced to change their behavior if they want to participate in the dominant online discourse instead of being marginalized in their echo chambers. How is this unfair? We're not shutting them out, we're simply preventing them from shutting down other people's discourse with emotional appeals.
FWIW, in my experience left-wingers and right-wingers are about equally incapable of playing by the rules and regulating their emotions. We have had plenty of righties flame out because they couldn't handle being told that they aren't allowed to just boo, boo, boo the left.
Speaking of which, this post is pretty borderline, with an awful lot of very broad "Theys" referring to the left and lots of loaded language. Less boo, please.
Then why aren't there more left wing posters here?
Because most people put in the amount of work they need to to find a space where they can talk, and no more.
If you're an SJer, you are deluged in places where you can speak your mind. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, SpaceBattles.
If you're not an SJer, but have no particular interest in politics, then again, the deluge.
If you're interested in politics and oppose SJ, then none of those sites are open to you, because they all ban you for criticising SJ (Twitter less than average, I hear, but still somewhat). So you put in more work, find smaller spaces.
It's like the no-name-university-admissions problem: you aren't picking from the whole cohort, you're picking from Harvard's discards.
Any small space is going to get a substantial chunk of its members from the crowd that can't get into the titan sites but can get into the small space. You can pick to some degree what that differential is - allow stalking and you'll get a lot of stalkers; allow heresy and you'll get a lot of heretics. But the titans pick first, so there's an unavoidable hole where people who are (not trolls ∩ polite ∩ not stalkers ∩ not heretics ∩...) will be massively underrepresented because the titans didn't kick them out.
You can get a somewhat-better representation on any one issue by loosening up the tolerances on other issues - if you allow stalkers and allow anti-SJers, then you'll get large populations of SJW stalkers, anti-SJ non-stalkers, and anti-SJ stalkers (giving less bias on each issue than if you'd only allowed that issue). But this cure does, of course, come with its own downsides.
(I didn't use the word "left-wing" here because it really mostly is SJ the cultural phenomenon that's being filtered on; I don't see people being kicked off Twitter because they want lower taxes, and non-SJ left views do get kicked off.)
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Probably for the reason I already mentioned - left-wing posters didn't feel as much of a need to go off reddit to have conversations. As for why there were fewer on TheMotte to begin with, because this place has trended rightward over time, for much the same reason.
We have obviously not collected statistics about warnings and bans, but it's my opinion, based on the warnings and bans I've seen handed out in my time as a mod and all the ban reports I've compiled, that it really does fall pretty evenly, proportionately, on left-wing posters and right-wing posters, and as a corollary to that, if I had to divide regulars into "People who are intelligent and reasonable commenters capable of engaging with their opponents in good faith" and "People who are mostly here to wage culture war and sneer at their outgroup," that also divides pretty much the same among righties and lefties.
Every time (every time) someone from either pole accuses us of favoritism, or makes some grandiose observation about the general conduct of the other side, it's because they notice what they are most interested in noticing. If you think lefties get the stick more, you will vividly recall every time you saw a leftie get modded, while all the righties getting modded are indistinguishable background noise to you. If you think we are biased against righties and let lefties get away with shit, you'll remember every time a rightie got modded and every time a leftie said something you found objectionable and didn't get modded. You aren't counting (or seeing behind the scenes) all the times it goes the other way.
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Socioeconomic factors
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Self-segregation of communities. This one has ongoing spiral into right-side witchery. Many left wing posters ended on forums with left-side death spiral.
No idea how to solve this.
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