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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2667 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for February 21, 2024

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).

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What are your must-have browser extensions?

Mine are the following:

  • Search by Image - Right-click and get a list of multiple reverse image searches to search an image with. I mostly use Yandex, ime it's the best general reverse image search.
  • Vimium - Keyboard-only navigation for browser. It comes with Vim actions as well if you are into that. Using a mouse is a huge impediment if you want to be fast with a computer and my nontech coworkers think I am a wizard.
  • Grammarly. I might get some hate for this. But I just write out some shitty text without regard for punctuation or grammar and just click on all the red words until they are gone. Allows me to spit out passable text FAST. I wrote this comment in around a minute. Including looking up and embedding the URLs.
  • TamperMonkey, to run miscellaneous short JS scripts here and there. For example, turning all www.reddit URLs to old.reddit URLs.

For firefox and not mentioned by others: old reddit redirect.

Man, I just don't understand why everyone likes old reddit so much, maybe because I didn't get into reddit until after old reddit was over and done with. Why do people like it?

It has custom CSS for subreddits, so each of the most popular subs felt like a different site, making “reddit” more of a genre than a free forum.

It has a granular interface with the ability to customize the sorting and time range, and even the depth of replies viewed. I would often set Askreddit to two replies deep for fast browsing of the most interesting replies. Yet if I wanted to dig down in a fascinating thread of replies, I could.

It has massive amounts of info per page, reminiscent of the old web, where you can fill your eyes with as much as you want.

To this day, I use old reddit manually on my iPhone, making up over 80% of my daily web consumption.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

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