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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   4097 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 9, 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 think the move off Reddit will come to be seen as a big mistake.

Why--because the forum will die? That's a possibility, however (1) the number of CW thread weekly posts hasn't noticeably dropped since the move and (2) Zorba was pretty explicit that "keep our commitment to open discourse and die" was a preferred outcome to "capitulate to limiting discourse on especially difficult topics and live." Plenty of people predicted we'd die after splitting of from the SSC sub, too. We frequently had users point out ways in which they regarded the sub as "dying." But several years later, well... maybe we're still dying? Very slowly?

the main thing that drew admin attention was a few trans activists reporting gender-critical posting

While there was certainly some of that, the co-founder of TheSchism explicitly owned up to drawing the Eye of Sauron to the sub in the first place, because he uncharitably interpreted some conflict theory posting as "calls to violence." And there were other things that AEO didn't like, for example (((parenthesis))). You may be right that radical trans advocates seeking to shut down open discourse were the main problem, but the list of problems was not short, either.

The main pipeline for new and interesting users is now cut off.

Eh. Striking the balance between Eternal September and Eternal Silence is tricky, ongoing, and probably not indefinitely maintainable regardless. I will continue to post our AAQCs in the subreddit until someone stops us, probably. The barrier to participation is a little higher, now, maybe, but in some ways that can be as much a feature as a bug.

owned up to drawing the Eye of Sauron to the sub in the first place, because he uncharitably interpreted some conflict theory posting as "calls to violence."

Where or at least when he he admit this?

Here:

On September 7, 2020, this post was made on /r/themotte and got +20 upvotes:

As the poem goes, sooner or later the Saxon begins to hate. And I have more than just begun.

[...]

The truth is that I fucking hate them. [...] I don't want a compromise anymore. I don't want to go our separate ways in peace. I want to hurt them and I want to win.

[...]

I would rather die and fail and men say 'at least he tried' than to throw my own flesh and blood to the wolves that swim in Cthulhu's wake.

[...]

I doubt we are in for a short victorious war but I think the right will come out well in any civil conflict.

I reported this to the mods, who did nothing. After waiting some time, I reported it to the reddit admins, and the AEO promptly deleted it. To my knowledge, this was the first AEO action against /r/themotte. The mods discussed it via modmail but issued no warnings or ban to the user in question.

Where are new users going to come from?

Where do new users ever come from? Why did people go to the SSC sub in the first place? Why did they follow Zorba over to the Motte sub--but perhaps more importantly, why did they follow Zorba over to the Motte sub, instead of going to the CWR sub, or later to the Schism sub? Why have so many people actually come over here onto Zorba's server?

We have a community, and we have an ethos (the "foundation"). On reddit, it was easier to keep the community churning, but hard to preserve the ethos--and getting harder every month. Here, it may very well be harder to keep the community churning! But the ethos will remain intact. Neither the current SSC sub nor the ACX comments section handle culture war discussions as well as we do (it seems to me). I don't think any of your concerns are wrong in any obvious way. I just feel like you are overlooking (ignoring?) the very public justification Zorba has been giving all along: better the community die on its own terms than live with a compromised foundation. I hope the community does not die for quite some time--if ever! But if we'd stayed on reddit, death would have been at least as inevitable--it just would have been a death of our ethos rather than a dissolution of our userbase.

Why did they follow Zorba over to the Motte sub--but perhaps more importantly, why did they follow Zorba over to the Motte sub, instead of going to the CWR sub, or later to the Schism sub? Why have so many people actually come over here onto Zorba's server?

No one has followed Zorba; they've followed the community, which has whittled down over time but consistently been the same people over the years. CWR and The Schism aren't the dominant forums because they came after in response to specific complaints. Had it been CWR that opened first after the Culture War got booted off of SSC, it'd be the big dog.

CWR and The Schism aren't the dominant forums because they came after in response to specific complaints. Had it been CWR that opened first after the Culture War got booted off of SSC, it'd be the big dog.

That's an interesting claim. Are you aware that /r/CultureWarRoundup was created five years ago, while /r/TheMotte was only created three years ago? Perhaps more importantly, the earliest thread on /r/CultureWarRoundup is dated to the "Week of November 19, 2018." I am less sure about this, but as far as I can tell the earliest CW thread on /r/TheMotte is dated to the "Week of February 11, 2019."

In other words, the calendar says your explanation fails. What do you suppose explains your mistake?

I agree that the community matters, network effects matter, and not everyone followed Zorba (or baj, or Cheeze) specifically--but the community clearly had the choice between CWR and TheMotte from the inception of the Motte at latest, and the community mostly chose the one with Zorba at the helm. The Schism is... something else, really, but if we treat it as the post to CWR's pre, then the Zorba-maintained Motte is neither the oldest nor the newest iteration of the post-r/SSC culture war community. It's just the biggest.

In other words, the calendar says your explanation fails. What do you suppose explains your mistake?

You're misremembering the origins of the forums. It's not the subreddit creation dates that matter, it's when the community breakaways and migrations actually happened.

I'm not "remembering" anything, much less misremembering--I literally just went and checked, because your claim seemed plausible to me, but proved on examination to be wrong. You said:

Had it been CWR that opened first after the Culture War got booted off of SSC, it'd be the big dog.

My first thought was to check the subreddit creation dates. But as you suggest, it occurred to me that a subreddit may be created but not "opened." So I went looking for the original roundup dates, and CWR "opened" and was running CW threads basically immediately when SSC started having conversations about the split. It opened first, several months before TheMotte. When the roundup was "booted," CWR was already open and running, for the express purpose of being the new location. Everyone could have gone there.

Everyone didn't. The vast majority followed Zorba's team.

And it doesn't really matter very much to me who was first, or why people ultimately moved, beyond the claims I've already made and against which you have presented no counterevidence (only speculation). But it does seriously damage your credibility, in my view, to maintain your position here, in the face of strictly factual evidence against your claim. It's okay to be wrong, everyone's wrong sometimes. But not everyone is rational enough to update their beliefs in the light of contradictory evidence.

I'm not "remembering" anything, much less misremembering--I literally just went and checked, because your claim seemed plausible to me, but proved on examination to be wrong. You said:

No, you're still not understanding. CWR is a schism sub. TheMotte, though it came later, is a direct continuation of SSC. It's not about the opening dates, that's irrelevant -- people didn't go to CWR because when CWR opened SSC was still the space. The community migration happened only when SSC forced it, at which point the community moved. They weren't following Zorba, they were following the community. The community that did not go to CWR because SSC was still being used.

It's SSC -> /r/TheMotte -> themotte.org

CWR and The_Schism are branches off that. That's why they're smaller. They've only ever been where the minority of people who can't tolerate the main sub go.

The process of 'have reddit account, find new sub, comment on it' is so much easier and so much more natural than that of 'find new site, make new account on new site, comment there'. There's a reason all these centralized platforms take off.

Well, yes, but do you see from what I wrote why that is entirely beside the point?

Without, I think, entirely meaning to, @ZorbaTHut once upon a time took the weight of the SSC sub's "Roundup" culture almost entirely on his back, and has been carving out refuges for it, to greater or lesser extent, ever since. Some things have fallen off, other things have been added on. But something Zorba has been repeatedly clear about from the beginning through today is that growth and life are not the primary objectives. Would we like to see fresh insights from new users on a regular basis? Yes. Are we willing to give up on the foundation to make that happen? No.

This is unusual for an organization, even an informal and largely ad hoc organization like the Motte. Virtually all organizations hold, as a stated or unstated assumption, that any of their principles may be abandoned in order to preserve the functioning and existence of the organization itself. This is a big idea in wartime jurisprudence, of course. But also consider Google's abandonment of "Don't Be Evil." Or watch the ACLU bail on free speech, or watch Methodists approve gay marriage, that's two consequential examples from a single month in 2021. Something I admire a lot about Zorba is his willingness to act on the idea that, no--we're not going to worry about survival, we're going to do what the foundation suggests, and if we die, we die! I'm far more conservative; I opposed the Motte's exile from SSC, I accepted an invitation to moderate without having much faith in the longevity of the sub, and I would not have initiated the move offsite without much stronger censure from the reddit admins.

But here we are, and we didn't die immediately, or even see a substantial dropoff in posting. That violates my nervous expectations, again. We may yet die! But if we die--we die. And while that's not the conclusion we're aiming for, it is a conclusion I think we are all able to accept.

Just wanted to say hear-hear to this sentiment. I'm not sure what the practical solution is to trying to maintain a stream of fresh blood, but I think this community exists to fill a real need; as long as that need exists, people will find their way here.

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