Sinity
2yr ago
Honestly, I would tend to cite Thunderf00t's rant about why the Boring Company is ill-advised in its adventures.
He's ridiculously obsessed about Musk tho.
edit2: The markdown parser doubles newlines in the three-backtick code span.
Also lists are possibly broken (plus there's too much spacing between items)
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test
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second
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second level
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sth sth
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Sinity
2yr ago
They do have a tendency to overstate the severity and applicability of issues due to the benefits of publicity in that community.
Not sure if they overstate the severity of issues; If the NSA has been hacking everything, how has nobody seen them coming?
They were playing chess & you were playing checkers;
Not directly applicable here*, but cybersecurity in general is... there's no cybersecurity, really. Intel ME.
* but maybe for Gab / Truth and such?
Sinity
2yr ago
unless this place is crazier then I thought.
Well, there's /r/SneerClub. Probably not a lot of hackers there though.
Sinity
2yr ago
What if they come for us?
Different scale. Same about concerns that Reddit will ban linking to us, I think.
I don't think there's anyone obsessive enough about us (& with proper skillset at the same time) to bother.
A few ideas/suggestions on how to proceed.
Scope
/r/themotte was mainly rat-adjacent civil discourse concerning Culture War. Possibly we could broaden the scope of the new themotte - it could be rat-adjacent civil discourse, period. It was already the case to some degree on subreddit, maybe. General discussion area? Somehow network/collaborate with LessWrong, /r/slatestarcodex, Scott(?), /r/rational maybe. Possibly this space could be a glue between all of the fragmented communities, sort-of?
Organization
/r/themotte was mostly a recurring CW thread, with some extra recurring threads (friday fun thread etc.) and some ad-hoc Posts which didn't get much engagement. Maybe we should lean even more into recurring-threads model? IMO this encourages contributions. I'm thinking of this part, from Beware Trivial Inconveniences:
I was reminded of this recently by Eliezer's Less Wrong Progress Report. He mentioned how surprised he was that so many people were posting so much stuff on Less Wrong, when very few people had ever taken advantage of Overcoming Bias' policy of accepting contributions if you emailed them to a moderator and the moderator approved. Apparently all us folk brimming with ideas for posts didn't want to deal with the aggravation.
Okay, in my case at least it was a bit more than that. There's a sense of going out on a limb and drawing attention to yourself, of arrogantly claiming some sort of equivalence to Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky. But it's still interesting that this potential embarrassment and awkwardness was enough to keep the several dozen people who have blogged on here so far from sending that "I have something I'd like to post..." email.
IMO it'd help to add some features for comments. Collapsible blocks of text, for large comments, or quoting a large amount of text. Make them not count towards character limit (if there's any). Footnotes[1]. Images.
Which recurring threads? Certainly CW one. I think 'Meta' thread would be helpful, especially now. Media thread. Old 'friday fun' and 'small questions' threads could be merged(?) Maybe add 'bare link repository' as a recurring thread? Also Quality Contributions Reports.
Keeping the community from disintegrating
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IMO it'd be a good idea to keep cross-posting some stuff from here to there at least for now, perhaps with comments turned off. Quality Contributions, maybe link posts to threads here.
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Email list. Possibly contact frequent posters, people with QC directly to sign in? If we had a list of people in the old community, then we wouldn't be as time dependent as otherwise. Without contact, if it flatlines...
Also, if the subreddit is basically ending now, it could be a good moment to compile a up-to-date archive. Through now that I checked, pushshift archives are roughly up-to-date, so it shouldn't be an issue.
Misc
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somehow letting user know effectively about new posts in a whole subtree of a thread
- at least specifically if user's comment is at the root - e.g. if I make a comment, user foo replies to it, and then bar replies to foo, I should be notified about both of these comments
- maybe enable & encourage replying to multiple comments at once (same as mentioning users on Reddit, but not limited to 3). But comment still needs exactly 1 parent to not break threading...
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tags, hierarchical tags, community-curated tag tree, subscriptions to discussion about given topic by tags
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Making use of Gwern’s resorter somehow. Possibly in ctx of QCs?
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QCs integrated into UI sensibly
- Maybe it shouldn't be too effortless through.
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realtime chat (or official Discord, but it'd be nice to have chat integrated with the forum)
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voting
- user-normalization: some users might upvote/downvote a lot, others less
- a bit self-referential, but maybe weight up/downvotes based on user karma and activity
- multiple kinds/dimensions of votes. (apparently sth like that is implemented on LW)
(I had a list of suggestions I meant to post few months ago, when it was decided we'll move off Reddit; points below are vague enough I'm not sure exactly what I meant by them, but I figure I'll post them anyway)
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somehow solving perma topic threads defocusing recency bias (that's the vague one...)
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a wiki? Knowledge base?
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maybe something between a wiki and a discussion, somehow.
[1] Linking to them; linking back to the source from them; putting their content in alt-text on mouseover.
Sinity
2yr ago
I think images should be allowed in comments. If we continue organizing the site roughly the same as the subreddit, most of the effortposts are going to be comments in the CW thread. No reason to make them worse than Posts. Just moderate it the same as text content. Kinda related: it'd be nice to have collapsible blocks of text, for larger comments/posts. Make them not count towards character limit (if there's any).
IMO there shouldn't be too many Posts made about specific things. It'd be better to have several recurring topical threads (CW, 'fun thread', 'media thread', meta thread*...).
* especially now; IMO it'd be useful to try to figure out priority things to do/fix here instead of GH. Plus organizational stuff, like the exact set of perma/recurring-threads. And maybe scope of the community? How it fits in with adjacent spaces?
Assuming webfics count, Erogamer. Not sure how to describe it; maybe metaphysics / nature-of-reality porn. Also literal porn (which is why it's behind registration-wall). Here's the first post.
I think it'd be nice to share media-lists (like myanimelist/anilist goodreads etc.). Since I brought this up, here's my anilist[1]. Currently I don't maintain anything else.
can we maintain a Motte book thread?
I'd extend that to 'media' in general. Maybe apart from people sharing stuff individually, we could vote to watch/read specific things and discuss?
[1] Completed contains, generally, one entry per series - no sequels etc.
Sinity
2yr ago
Also the name itself. Through it's definitely too late to change this.
Scott himself, in the post where he introduced (popularised?) the term, said
This is a metaphor that only historians of medieval warfare could love, so maybe we can just call the whole thing “strategic equivocation”, which is perfectly clear without the digression into feudal fortifications.
Maybe bounties on specific issues?
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