Many of you probably may remember a great old alternative to this place known as /r/CultureWarRoundup on Reddit. Due to its superior (which is by no means to say perfect), more "hands-off" moderation philosophy, it peeled off a good portion of the most intelligent people from here at one point (some of whom like me have returned a bit at least for the moment, many of whom probably did not) and was quickly gaining momentum, peaking at around 500 - 700 (IIRC, writing off the top of my head about all of this) replies per week to its main CWR thread while this place (back when it was on Reddit) at least once fell below 1K (or at least close to it) replies (again, IIRC) to the same (less than the activity now for the most part, as the moderation here's somewhat toned down its scattershot executions since then, not enough and not half as much as at the beginning of this site when they were trying to attract people by pretending to have reformed more comprehensively, but still somewhat, since those dark days of Hlynka (though a certain Amadan seems to relish the idea of bringing them back at least in part)). The people were speaking, and it wasn't looking good for this place, with the tides firmly turning in CWR's favor, but unfortunately, as jannies often do, CWR's own jannies started making their own very dumb decisions.
As Reddit started cracking down harder on wrongthink, stiffening new account requirements, shadowbanning more accounts without even pretending to respond to appeals from users that they aren't spambots (since of course that's never been the actual only or even main purpose of shadowbanning anyway), and in general making the site more of a pain to use, resulting in many of CWR's regular users getting banned from Reddit as a whole frequently (mostly only if they posted outside of /r/CWR (which most people did sometimes of course), yet occasionally even if not, as /r/CWR itself did suffer a few Reddit admin removals despite being mostly too small of a fish to worry about), exhausting their alt accounts, and finding it harder to make new ones/use the site effectively at all, CWR's jannies still doubled down on sticking with the platform in general, even raising new account length/"karma" requirements to post on the sub (and refusing to waive them for the new accounts of obvious regulars, which I know because I asked multiple times), perhaps due to paranoia about /r/SneerClub type infiltrators intentionally posting vastly incendiary/ToS-violating things to try to get them banned from Reddit (a concern I don't think ever actually materialized, whereas cutting off the earnest posters who actually wanted to post there but literally couldn't did). The great momentum they'd shown in overtaking this place began to crater as their regular users of the sub like me simply disappeared, unable to post because of the restrictions they foolishly chose to enforce in tandem with the Reddit admins in the hopes of avoiding the subreddit ban guillotine (which they've succeeded at so far... at the cost of their actual life anyway).
Though an eventual half-move to Saidit (which suffered from confusion as the Reddit sub stayed open as well, splitting the community, a mistake I do have to credit the mods here for not repeating after) restored some activity, it couldn't reignite the flame. Now both the still open Reddit and Saidit subs are in zombie mode. There was also a Matrix chatroom at some point, but the invite link to it seems to be entirely dead now (and of course nobody sensible wanted to move to a chatroom anyway which is not even close to the same medium).
So does anybody know what happened to these people? Where's the current venue for the continuation of SSC's CWR threads but with less of the crappy overbearing moderation you'll find increasingly more here (much like /r/TheSchism is an alternative but with even worse, crappier/more overbearing moderation)? Where can actual men engage in unrestricted intellectual discussion in a truly properly masculine fashion without effeminate finger-wagging jannies from California all too frequently interfering to whine about "antagonism" (the very essence of the competition of ideas, and therefore impossible to ban from it) or whatever as they do here (again, not as bad as in the past, but still too much)? Any and all info is appreciated. Thank you in advance.
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Short version: CWR is dead, yo.
I was a regular there as well as TheMotte on Reddit. Like it says on the tin, their weekly thread is the "Off-Topic and Low-Effort CW Thread". Mostly for rationalist-aligned or adjacent people who were firmly Red Team to post kind of Motte-ish stuff, but with substantially more low-effort ridicule of Blue Team. Fun place to let the hair down a bit, as they say, and talk a little trash without worrying about needing to coddle the other side. I do miss it a bit, but I also enjoy The Motte for what it is.
A decent number of the regulars moved on to a Matrix chat room. It's invite-only, you'll have to show post history that can convince the regulars that you'd fit in. I haven't posted there in a while; I have limited tolerance for chat rooms with people I don't actually hang out with in-person and drink with regularly. I don't know of anywhere you can find that kind of discussion on a public-ish threaded web forum now.
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