The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Hey Wellness Wednesday, I've completely lost faith in the motte this week. See I've used "I think I fucked up my niece/nephew by playing a single song/tv show/movie" as a premise about a dozen times over the course of my life, and the only time it was taken seriously was with a group of college freshmen. Everyone else immediately understood that it was a premise, because you would have to be totally disconnected from reality to think a single piece of media reshaped someone's entire worldview. 100% disconnected, Being There disconnected.
But the thing is, I know the motte isn't full of freshmen, it's full of gen xers and millenials. And yet posting here was the second time my ridiculous premise was taken seriously. I used to make jokes 10 times as convoluted on /r/cwr and everyone got them, and when I'd do one on the motte I'd get accused of going for cheap laughs!
So it brought to mind a lot of other things I have noticed over the past few months, which can be summed up like this - I no longer believe I am stupider than the average motter. But, and this is the important part - I still know I'm a fucking idiot. Half of the cwr threads might as well be written by markov bots these days, there are still quite a few insightful comments every week, but so much of the rest is just rote bullshit. Just everyone talking down to each other, using passive aggressive laziness to evade the modhats - but not even making it entertaining, it's just talking points vs talking points.
I want to feel stupid again. I want to have to bring my a-game again. I don't know how to make that happen.
I disagree. If anything, the mean writing quality of the weekly thread has undoubtedly improved since we left Reddit, and I say that as someone who was extremely skeptical of that move and argued against it consistently.
Go back to the CW threads from 2020 or 2019 and they’re stuffed full of low effort drive-by posting from default redditors (of all political persuasions). Low quality writing, bad argumentation, random schizoposting, autism, baiting, boring incelposting, /pol/ trolling, all the usual stuff was commonplace. Seriously, go back and check! (Some was surely moderated, but not all.)
At that time, while the board was still very high quality compared to other Internet forums in general, I’d say it was probably still substantially below a good LW or SSC comments section, perhaps even a good HN comments section. Today the above three have all declined, but The Motte has at least held its ground. As I said last time this was brought up, there is nowhere better on the public internet. Yeah, perhaps you have access to Moldbug’s secret elite discord server populated solely by intellectual titans, but I’m gonna say it - a lot of people here write better than Yarvin does, so I’m not sure I’d frequent it even if I had access to it, and I very much doubt it has better moderators than we do.
I’ve been here since something like 2015 or 2016, almost a third of my life. In that time I have yet to find a superior online locale for English-language politics and current affairs discussion. Believe me I’ve tried and There Is Nothing. So I guess I’ll be here until the end.
I mean over the past few months. What it feels like to me, is that everyone is afraid of a) looking stupid and b) getting modded, so they pull back, and like @f3zinker said only engage with the barest surface reading of the posts. And so every second thread devolves into arguments over semantics - I'm half afraid someone's going to pull me up here and show me three threads in a row with no semantics, like that means anything. I'll get dinged for not "speaking plainly".
I don't want to go anywhere, I had hoped I could maybe wake people up to the fact that it kind of looks like we're all retreating into autism to avoid our humanity.
Edit: accidentally hit post. To continue: I have professed my love for this community many times, and I always try to encourage good writing when I see it in posts, I think there's only one or two users who encourage others more than I do in fact. I haven't been here as long as you, but it is special to me too. Like I said, I don't know how to fix the problem.
The mods here are very light touch, really (how many times have Hlynka and Count been modded now? They’re still here) and nobody cares about you looking stupid as long as you own up to mistakes. When I get schooled here (which is often) I usually say ‘thanks, fair enough’, either directly or by DM, and/or change my view. Everyone’s been embarrassed here before, I can’t think of one regular who hasn’t written-before-researching and come up against a quality rebuttal at least a few times.
But the line is mockery. Nobody likes to get made fun of, certainly not relentlessly, it’s a respectful environment.
Is that what I do, relentlessly mock people? I am asking genuinely. Also you have never thanked me for an argument.
No, you don’t, but I think you got some pushback because people did think you were making fun of them. It’s not a big deal! Sorry that I’ve never thanked you for an argument, I enjoy a lot of your posts.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link