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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   4789 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 04, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I am split on whether I should delete all my posts, because fuck reddit, or leaving them there, because the communities deserve to have archives.

I've just copypasted all my Reddit posts (well, almost all, not the most recent ones) to a doc file, and am planning to categorize them and use them as grist for blog posts.

Why not just request a full export from Reddit directly? You get a link to an archive which contains comments.csv file; it's exhaustive.

@Devonshire

Is there a tool for doing this? I do have a database of reddit posts, mostly as an exercise for myself, but I never ran it against my whole profile.

You can use https://camas.unddit.com/ to do a lot of queried searches, and "your username, on The Motte" would be an easy task for it. If you're handy with a scripting language you can use it to dump JSON files containing everything you're looking for.

Yeah, should add that I used camas.unddit to fetch my posts.

Probably? I'm just going through them one by one, though. It's kind of relaxing.

I have a strong urge to use my 10 years of archived comments to train a GPT-3 bot and just set a few loose to keep commenting on a regular basis.

It could only raise the level of discourse over there.

I am very pro this.

Back them up and provide them here somehow.

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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.


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