Does the Culture War Thread still make sense as the primary place for Motte discussion now that the community has its own dedicated website?
I think the answer is probably "yes, we should stay with the Thread as-is," but only because of inertia. If we could have created a culture shift away from the thread and towards individual posts, I think there may have been some benefits, as I'll discuss below. However, this is a relatively small community, and so we probably want to avoid alienating the current members as much as possible with radical changes.
While I'm sure I'm missing things, or getting things completely wrong, here's some problems I see with the current Culture War Thread format. (I also want to note that none of this is meant as a criticism of the mods or anyone else who put in a ton of work to get this site going; I think it's great and I really enjoy having a censorship-free place to get my culture war fix and read interesting comments from intelligent people.)
- Comments and the Thread receive differing amounts of engagement depending on the day of the week, with weekends disfavored
For me, this is probably my biggest gripe with the Culture War Thread. Because a new Thread gets posted every Monday, it seems to make little sense to post on a Sunday (or even Saturday) if you want to get a decent amount of engagement. This is unfortunate, because the weekend is one of the times when people probably have the most time to write up a post and engage with it. While it's true you could write something up over the weekend and wait till Monday to post, this adds a bit of friction, a bit of "I'll do it later," which, for me at least, reduces my desire to post at all. Moreover, even if you do wait till Monday to post, if you have a fulltime Monday - Friday job, you probably have less time to respond to comments, etc., during the day during the week than you would on the weekend, further weakening engagement.
- High engagement posts dying out faster
The nature of the Culture War Thread, especially given that the default view setting here is "new" (a good thing!), is that older posts get less engagement as the week goes on and new posts push them out. Of course, this will be true of any post, including front-page posts, and maybe it would be equally true of front-page posts, rendering this point meaningless. But I don't think so. For one thing, a front-page post allows for more top-level comments on that post, which I think potentially allows for more wide ranging and extensive discussion and which (I believe) keeps a post farther up on the front page. This is partially due simply to the UI; the more nested a comment is, the more quickly it gets relegated to "click here to see rest of thread" oblivion, where far fewer people see them (see below). I also get the sense that the algorithm works a little different for front-page posts than for comments, and that it allows a well-engaged front page post to stay higher up on the page than a well-engaged comment, though I could be wrong about this.
- By shifting to front-page posts, we would get a whole extra level of viewable comments!
Due to how a reddit-style UI works, relegating our major posts to the Culture War Thread means that we shift the entire discussion one step "over" (or "deeper"?), which in turn means that comments become unviewable without clicking "see more," which definitely decreases viewership and thus discussion. If people's responses to comments/posts were top-level, instead of second level, we could have more wide-ranging conversations and perhaps a little bit more engagement (which adds up) on interesting posts.
- It may be confusing to new users
I'm not sure about this one, since I was lucky enough to find the Motte before the move, but intuitively it seems right to me. Imagine you have no idea what "the Motte" is, and have no idea about its history as a spin off of the Culture War Thread from the SSC subreddit, etc., etc. Assume also that like many visitors, you don't bother clicking on the FAQ on anything like that, but instead simply start scrolling through the site's posts. You'll notice that there aren't actually that many front-page posts, and that many of those posts don't get very much engagement at all. If you don't notice that the Culture War Threads get thousands of comments (especially likely if you come on a Monday or Tuesday, see above), you might then conclude that this is a relatively "dead" website, and move on. I'd like the site to keep getting new blood, so this worries me, although I have no idea how big a problem this might be in reality. (Also it seems possible that the kind of person who can't figure out about the Culture War Thread, etc., might be the kind of person we're not particularly interested in attracting in the first place, but I don't know that for sure.)
Any other thoughts on this? Reasons you like the Culture War Thread vs. a front-page post format? Ways the Culture War Thread could be improved? Other ways in which the current format creates problems?
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Notes -
The extra click is crucial for participation and being exposed to ideas you would normally avoid. In threads the title so important and half the time that title seems either like clickbait or something I'm not interested in or indecipherable without clicking to clarify. Going in and out of threads I may be interested in seems just like a worse version of what's done now. As someone else said when this was brought up before you end up reading things you never would before because they're all in one thread as top level comments. And I also think it promotes participation because it ends up taking the heat off of a top-level comment rather than a top level thread there might not be any real distinction but being buried in a 1000 other comments when people tear your ideas apart is a lot more comfortable than that failure existing on its own. I think burying old ideas weekly helps everyone, the deeper comments go the more angry and snipey they get and forcing a new topic is a great cooling method for that, I think the weekend and switching off to the friday fun thread then small scale questions thread helps with that as well.
The idea also segregates all topics. Some people might see that as a good thing but it's just an exercise in people radicalizing themselves. I can see dissenters becoming fewer and fewer as each separate single-interest topic is dominated by those that have a lot of interest in something. People will start avoiding threads started by users they don't like and it'll become even more about people who just agree with each other. And you lose that "there's someone wrong on the internet! this won't stand." drive where you see something that you think or know is wrong and feel compelled to correct them. A top level thread usually presents no facts or real ideas in its title and you lose that possible drive. Every new topic about people's specific bugbears will just be dominated by those people and become a "HBD general" or "AI threat general" or "Immigration general" if people think that the majority opinion dominates and destroys minority opinions now then it would only get worse.
It also creates an idea of staying-on-topic that limits conversation. You can go into a top level comment about the economy and then have people start talking about AI safety two comments deep and it feels normal and fine to switch to that and even if it would be alright otherwise you limit how many people are going to participate in that topic-switch or even know its there.
I do agree that it sucks if you want to post and respond to serious topics on the weekend but that could be fixed by staggering the thread's replacement every few weeks or so but otherwise I think thread level topics will just end up in worse quality probably worse engagement and more personally it would "fuck my shit up" with regard to how I consume what's on this site with all the extra navigation and clicking that it would require.
This all seems right. Well said and thanks for the post.
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