Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Is everyone satisfied with the moderation here? For me, it’s getting to unacceptably high levels. For some reason, they recently felt the need to almost double the mods to take care of the shrinking userbase.
Our old charitable custom was to treat strangers as if they were worthy of good faith. Increasingly the mods treat those whose good faith has already been established (such as the recently modded Kulak, Hlynka, Burdensomecount) as if they were strangers.
Like reddit, you can start off as a bastion of free speech, but inevitably mods identify with their function and see mod action as an end in itself, until they become more prison guards than janitors.
So are there good alternatives to the motte out there?
Oh, to actually answer your questions:
I don't think the moderation is a significant issue. Maybe lower activity is an issue, maybe post quality is an issue (but there are more than enough good posts still), maybe the 'high barrier to entry for toplevel posts so so many topics are left undiscussed' thing is an issue, but I just don't think the amount of moderation that happens is enough to affect the place's activity.
No. ACX comments are, honestly, not that bad if you're able to weed out the 9/10 posts that are terrible quickly by scanning and clicking the minimize button on the side. Various (almost entirely private) discords have good discussion. I think it'd be interesting to have a discord with the same people as here.
Substack comments are not entirely awful, but still quite subpar for debate. I honestly think the only proper solution is something like a Reddit (and thus its clones, like us), with nested comments and easy to parse chains, as well as an obvious reputation/karma system.
There are internal tradeoffs, like sort by new allowing every comment to get equal screen time instead of encouraging feedback effects, but in general it beats everything else I've seen.
There is a Motte discord. It is also quite dead, and if there are any of the regulars there, they're not obvious. Plus all the disadvantages of using discord for anything but shooting the shit really.
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