Maximum_Publius
No bio...
User ID: 780
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?
The move from Reddit to a dedicated forum is a huge opportunity to mix things up. We should take advantage. Never let a crisis go to waste, etc.
One thing I would suggest (if technical limitations allow) would be the addition of a two-tiered voting system, somewhat like what LessWrong has implemented, where users can vote both on the quality of a post, and separately on whether or not they agree with it. I think this could have really positive effects for the kind of community and discussion the Motte was created to promote. The Motte's raison d'etre is to promote discussion and debate with people you disagree with. Separating voting on quality from voting on agreement would promote that goal in a couple different ways. Fundamentally, there is a tension between upvoting a post you think is well-done, and downvoting that same post because you disagree with its content. I think the Motte wants to be a place that encourages outsider or minority views, and separating the "quality" vote from the "agreement" vote would help promote this. From what I have noticed in this community, despite our commitments to encouraging debate and discussion with people you disagree with, posts coming from a more liberal/left-wing/social justice/woke viewpoint tend to get downvoted, even when their quality is equivalent or superior to other posts.
I'll also quote from the reasons given on the above LessWrong post about this feature, because I think the reasons given are good ones.:
I personally feel much more comfortable upvoting good comments that I disagree with or whose truth value I am highly uncertain about, because I don’t feel that my vote will be mistaken as setting the social reality of what is true.
I also feel very comfortable strong-agreeing with things while not up/downvoting on them, so as to indicate which side of an argument seems true to me without my voting being read as “this person gets to keep accruing more and more social status for just repeating a common position at length”.
Similarly to the first bullet, I think that many writers have interesting and valuable ideas but whose truth-value I am quite unsure about or even disagree with. This split allows voters to repeatedly signal that a given writer's comments are of high value, without building a false-consensus that LessWrong has high confidence that the ideas are true. (For example, many people have incompatible but valuable ideas about how AGI development will go, and I want authors to get lots of karma and visibility for excellent contributions without this ambiguity.)
There are many comments I think are bad but am averse to downvoting, because I feel that it is ambiguous whether the person is being downvoted because everyone thinks their take is unfashionable or whether it's because the person is wasting the commons with their behavior (e.g. belittling, starting bravery debates, not doing basic reading comprehension, etc). With this split I feel more comfortable downvoting bad comments without worrying that everyone else who states the position will worry if they'll also be downvoted.
I have seen some comments that previously would have been "downvoted to hell" are now on positive karma, and are instead "disagreed to hell". I won't point them out to avoid focusing on individuals, but this seems like an obvious improvement in communication ability.
Would this be a doable change? And would it be a good one? I am strongly in favor, but open to reasons why I'm wrong.