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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   22550 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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Thanks! That fleshes out my memory, but I'm still lost as to what the mods knew regarding the need to move. Was it "safteyism"? Did they say 'we wont elaborate further at this time' or am I hallucinating that?

I'm interested in that because at the time I thought the move could be plausible, but was leaning paranoic. However, there is a lot I didn't know as a casual reader. I'm trying to put context around OPs claim that JD Vance allusion to a Scott Alexander article threatens the motte. Is this a pattern of persecutorial complexion, or am I off my rocker.

The Reddit admins were in contact with the mods, consistently threatening them.

Nobody wanted to move here man lol. We lost a solid chunk of the community and now Zorba has to maintain the site.

I was wondering about that. I bailed on Reddit years ago and just chalked up 'The Motte' (the only sub I really participated in) as a sad victim to my need to keep the ol' media filters clean. I was glad to re-join when I found the site, but I couldn't tell if there was still some component that touched Reddit. Very interesting!

Specifically, did we ever see these threats? I hit bedrock here

On reddit Zorba:

Alright, so the admins are paying attention to us now. Not going into details, they aren't relevant and I don't want to draw their attention more; ask me again once this is done and I'll vent.

Poster:

Ok, it's a year later. Spill. I'm really curious about the fucked-up internal politics of Reddit.

Zorba

I am confused why this is coming up so often, you're the second in the last two days and I'd totally forgotten about it for months before that.

But anyway, out of a possible overabundance of caution, I'll PM it to you.

AFAICT, the threats were never discussed openly. I could be wrong. I only ask because this new threat rang some bells. Lots of arguably paranoid cloak and dagger stuff in the Meta: the motte is dead thread. I'm still grateful for all the hard work that goes into this place. Its the kind of place I can ask: does this place exist here because of a persecutorial complex; or was the move, like, justified...

From memory... for a long time concerns about the CW thread being targeted by admins were elated through security through obscurity wisdom. Once the admin notices came -- and enough examples of subs of similar/smaller size being whacked or castrated -- that was a confidence shot. I do recall one point was that admins wouldn't clarify certain things for the mod team.

Reddit shuts down subs they don't like. Reddit admins gut and replace subreddit moderation teams they don't like. Subreddits change rules, like "don't mention trans issues at all", and similar requests at the behest of admin interactions. As I recall in one of those meta threads there was a mod from /r/PoliticalCompassMemes that chimed in with his dealings with admins and the moderation changes he had to make because of admin requests. Or maybe it was the /r/drama mods, because I remember they offered to host The Motte.

I don't recall Zorba or mods claiming TheMotte was being especially targeted or persecuted. Being targeted wasn't necessary to get dunked on or ordered to change. Somewhere back there it is explicitly said that the decision to move included the fact that Zorba would rather the project end than have to do something like censor all discussions on Topic X. Plenty of people said don't bother or not a big deal to censor whatever as I imagine you've seen from looking through the old threads.

The CW thread hosts holocaust deniers, HBD autists, and that one time that guy candidly admitted he was a (non-offending) pedophile. It's not a reddit friendly space-- which polices content and not just tone. It's not that strange to consider its time on reddit is limited by how long its controversy remains unknown. Even without the details of the admin correspondence or principles, when a place like the gendercritical sub gets booted off the site there's not a lot of confidence that a place like The Motte is secure. Maybe they're less heavy handed now, but there was lots of overt admin actions in that time period on reddit.

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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."

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