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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Notes -
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.
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:
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.
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.
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