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The board is more right wing but a lot of the most low-quality racist users have also left and/or been banned. There are far fewer slurs and there is far less generic trashy racism than there was on Reddit. I’m surprised people don’t remember what it was like to have constant drive-by posting from people unfamiliar with the subreddit and rules who came over from MDE, Opie and Anthony and other DR shitposting subs.
I pretty much never report anything these days. I’ve literally reported maybe three or four comments in the last couple of years here, whereas on Reddit I’d report regularly. You may remember I was highly opposed to the move from Reddit and predicted it would be the death of the community; I have been pleasantly proven wrong.
Arguing that the CRA was unconstitutional doesn’t mean it was immoral or even a bad idea; I think a lot of federal authority is unconstitutional but agree that it’s in effect necessary for the functioning of America as a modern state. But the CRA should have passed as a constitutional amendment given its sweeping constitutional scope.
I'd argue the same goes for the high quality posters as well, at the very least in terms of engagment.
The quality is just down overall, regardless of topic. Perhaps there are less offensive drive by posters but who cares?
Our overall traffic is down, but I think we lost high-quality users and shitposters in about the same proportion. So I don't agree the overall quality is down; we just have fewer posts overall. And this was pretty much inevitable as a result of moving from a very large platform to a very small one.
I was mildly against the move at the time (I think Zorba might have pulled the trigger too early.) That said, it's important to remember why we moved. It was inevitable that we would have been kicked off of reddit eventually, and probably sooner than later. Many of the conversations happening here simply would not be allowed on reddit today.
Since there is close to no inflow of quality posters it is a problem, especially since we're close to reaching scarcity tipping point of quality posters so as that they have no other quality posters to talk to (or who're willing to engage).
To be clear, I'm not claiming to be a quality poster, I'm just pointing out that we're bleeding quality engagment in general, and have been since almost immediately after the original split from ssc. The liberal/leftwing exodus was easier to notice but we have lost plenty of rightwingers as well, who've not been replaced.
Fundamentally the issue is a lack of quality inflow, of any ideological flavour. It seems to happen to more than this community. Perhaps people are just on substack and twitter now, idk.
I suspect this is part of it. The Motte is just not as rare of a forum as it was a few years ago, before the rise of Substack and Musk buying Twitter. The big woke push to deplatform those who disagreed with them ended up forcing people to actually create their own forums, and they did so successfully.
That is part of the reason why I am significantly less worried by wokism than many of the other people here. From where I sit, it seems to me that wokism has substantially receded from its peak of a few years ago, and there is little danger of it achieving a hegemonic position of dominance in the West's politics.
I think there probably is reason to worry about it capturing institutions, still, because there are many woke people, and things like diversity statements serve to filter out dissenters.
But I agree that he left has lost some of the cultural dominance it once had, and resistance to it is significantly less fringe.
I do worry a little about whether generational change will make things worse.
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What makes The Motte special isn’t its ideological leaning; if you want to discuss HBD, reactionary politics and so on there are (and long have been) many other forums and communities for it. I think what makes it special is the focus on discursive long form writing, which is different in kind both from blogposts on Substack and from microblogging on Twitter/X.
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Yeah, but I think this might be only temporary. I don't think Musk will be able to hold on to Twitter in the long term, and even though it's a lot better now than it was before, Musk's Twitter still seems to favor the woke. The guys running Substack seem to have their heart in the right place, but let's just say I learned not to put my trust in California based companies that profess free speech. Even if they remain devoted to the principle, I don't think centralizing one of the last remaining forms of independent internet media is completely benign.
So what? The receeded level is still miles above the baseline of when people started warning against wokism. If you want to tell yourself to talk yourself down from doomerism, fair enough, but "there is little danger of it achieving a hegemonic position of dominance in the West's politics" sounds more like an excuse to not do anything about it, in which case I have some pretty harsh words for you.
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It is a problem, but really, if y'all want more people here, you have to go recruit them. We (and especially Zorba) can only do so much.
I'm not asking you to. I don't think this can be solved.
People are either writing long form stuff on places like substack or they're in private discord servers/group chats when they want to discuss stuff.
I'm just mourning a bit.
Let’s ask kulak to put a recruitment pitch on his sub stack…
That would be counterproductive
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Probably true, but when you have a group of high-quality users that would fit on a school bus vs an infinite tide of shitposters (who seem to be more inclined to set up alts and get even more shitposty when banned, rather than just saying "fuck those guys" and carrying on with life) this is not a sustainable state of affairs.
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Speaking of traffic, is there anything in the pipes that might get us more new blood?
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I do think that the forum could have scraped by for a couple more years on Reddit, but there was also the risk that the chilling effects of admin threats and mod policies in response to those would have left the forum too weak to execute a move as successfully as it did when the time came.
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This is the big change. When I go back to 2020 /r/themotte threads, I revel in all the glorious paragraphs and long good-faith back-and-forths.
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There has been some churn of high quality users, but go back to 2016/2017 threads and the average writing quality isn’t very high relative to today’s.
It has the great advantage of being interesting though -- "long 'high quality' screeds on boring topics" vs "interesting and often insightful off-the-cuff remarks on hot CW issues" is an easy choice for me, personally.
True, but in part there was also more happening and a lot of topics were not yet overplayed.
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What high quality posters do you think we're missing? Feel free to PM if you think it would cause drama or something.
(imo there's really only one notable poster I can think of who's been conspicuously absent lately, other than that I think the quality is doing ok, maybe even better than it was ~6 months ago.)
@DaseindustriesLtd dropped off on posting, I think. (If you see that, is that a pun on dasein?)
@faul_sname always had high-quality exchanges, but was never as prolific.
Both seem to still be around, but don't say things all the time.
In terms of why I'm not so active it's mostly the "had a kid 2 months ago" thing, not anything to do with Motte quality.
Congratulations, then!
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That was a pun, but also an unfulfilled (except in very narrow personal scope) promise of engineering a Dasein, yes.
I've concluded that discussing American culture war is largely fruitless for a third worlder like myself, on the edge of Singularity to boot.
I find it very sad that the Motte never found a way to maintain activity. Guess Zorba also found things to do.
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