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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   26410 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 18, 2024

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Sick of the bots and echo chamber that X has become, I decided to visit Bluesky. Nothing serious- just a hope that the algorithm would be more curated toward centrism in a way that would prove refreshing compared to the assault on reality that X has become.

Agree with Hanania on the topic of not giving up on existing institutions, and that it is increasingly impossible to deny that X is deleterious to being anchored to earth, and wondering if perhaps Bluesky would be better?

Think again, motherfucker! For, immediately, on the front page (no account) you are assaulted with the culture war and the assumption that you've not just picked a side, but you've picked the woke side. Instead of re-anchoring and toning it down, the social media justice warriors are still out in force.

Within 10 posts, I counted 3 about trans issues, 2 about billionaires, one about gaetz, and another about hegseth. (Gabbard remains unimpeachable, it seems)

It took a bit of scrolling before actual breaks, like discussion of Disney soundtracks, or nasa space pictures, started to appear. If bluesky is to be the twitter alternative, then retreating entirely from internet social spaces is the likely path forward for those that don't wish to be swept up in the torrent.

In conclusion, for the moderates and centrists: Your signal is jammed, and only extremism will be boosted on either twitter or bluesky.

If you think Bluesky is Twitter inverted, you are mistaken. Bluesky is just MSNBC extreme as a social media. Twitter is not right wing, it is just lacking in censorship of people right of center.

Modern day twitter basically forces right wing stuff on you the moment you go there. I want to read interesting material regardless of political valence (tell me about the history of cookbooks etc.), not see the libs get owned (eventually one gets tired of that sort of stuff) but that's what Twitter has as its "default meal" these days.

That is just what happens if you don't censor the right. Progressives have been coddled so long they cant win fair fights. As JD showed in the debate, they cant win 3v1 debates.

That's all well and good but the default is going to be what most people click on, not your specific niche preference.

You need to train the algorithm by not clicking on the political stuff if you don't want political discourse. But it's going to be there by default because most heavy twitter users use it for this (among other things).

Sick of the bots and echo chamber that X has become

It's very easy to make your X feed not like this. block or mute a dozen or so accounts and the algorithm mostly takes care of you. You get more of what you interact with so if you're arguing with right wingers you'll see more right wingers. Every time I look at the profile of someone who complains about this sort of thing I always find pages and pages of arguments with the people they're complaining about also that they're following tons of people with pages and pages of arguments with the people they're talking about. It's so obvious to see too, go on X and reply to one of the China shill accounts, you will very quickly start seeing tons of them. I'm convinced most of the calls of people who think X has changed since Musk took over are really just seeing that the algorithm is no longer suppressing right wing accounts that they were used to "dunking" on and are getting the adjustments that were normal to suck you into any other group on X.

Bluesky is just the left-wing version of Truth Social. I thought that was intentionally obvious, with "Blue" right there in the name.

This mirrors issues in Bill Bishops 2009 The Big Sort - Why the Clustering of Like-Minded American is Tearing Us Apart. Worth a read or re-read. Its been visible online for as long as I can remember. Outrage and polarization maximize quarterly metrics. In the long run, people mostly want to hear news that confirms their priors.

Twitter (assuming its a business) has the lead and should allow seamless experience filters: default, left wing, right wing, no mod, heavy mod, institutional truth, conspiracy truth, puppies, etc. It wont solve the problem of information siloing, but it would keep people on platform while maintaining neutrality.

Hey I got the Disney soundtrack one too … 5th post!

Uh, normie Twitter is very much a thing. Sports and pop culture and local news that isn’t about politics is pretty easy to come by.

In conclusion, for the moderates and centrists: Your signal is jammed, and only extremism will be boosted on either twitter or bluesky.

So why use it at all? Why use any social media aside from linkedin and a facebook/whatsapp account for messaging? There seems to be a broad agreement in the rat-diaspora that social media is a plague that wrecks attention spans, leads to skyrocketing teenage mental health issues and erodes any kind of political discourse, yet people still seem to use it.

Just read books and build community in meatspace instead of using Twitter/Bluesky. Whatever benefit you derive probably isn't worth the exposure to memes and toxic ragebait.

I find a healthy bunch of Substacks scratches the same itch as social media while being less corrosive to the mind and soul.

I use Twitter basically for Cremieux content exclusively.

I only know Cremieux as a private label fashion brand at Dillards … what is yours?

He’s basically gwern but seems more interested in taboo and political stuff than gwern is

Also, suspected former CWRer.

He likes data, and is good at stats. Here's his substack: https://www.cremieux.xyz

Why use any social media aside from linkedin and a facebook/whatsapp account for messaging?

Conversely, I've never understood people who ragequit Facebook completely and then try to demand others to use some niche service to contact them. Just stop reading the feed (install a browser extension if you have to) but keep the messenger.

Facebook messenger? That sounds like some niche service that you want me to get to contact you. Don't you have, like, SMS on your phone?

The advantage of Facebook messenger is that it allows you to send private messages to people you either don't know or don't know well enough to have their phone number, enhanced by the fact that the large user base makes it pretty easy to find people. This was at least the case ten years ago when practically everyone of a certain age was on Facebook and used it regularly, and when you'd get a friend request from practically everyone you met. Now it seems like most people, especially younger people, either don't have profiles or don't look at them. I seldom look at mine, and it seems like most of my friends who used to post frequently have slowed down over the past several years. So these days it doesn't work as well as it used to because there's less likelihood that you'll even be able to find someone on Facebook, and even if you can there's a decent chance they won't see the message.

SMS is horrible for group messaging. You can't take yourself out of a group, and you can't edit the recipients without starting a whole new message. You also can't type longer messages efficiently since you don't have a real keyboard. It's fine for certain things but ongoing group texts about nothing in particular should really be on another app. I was able to switch a couple of mine over to Discord and it's been a 100% improvement. I'd like to get my ski group on there but that's going to be a tough sell.

Known better as just the messages tab om facebook. Which a lot of people my age use. Also works seamlessly on laptop & tablets unlike sms or whatsapp.

But really the #1 killer feature of FB messages is that they’re tied to your name, not to your arbitrary phone number. Want to send someone a message? Just send one. No need to try to hunt their phone number.

It does require a separate app install on mobile though, right?

You can use it via the mobile website, too.

I think it was several years ago now that they made messages impossible to use from the mobile web site so that they could pressure you to install the messenger application.

I can't. I use the mobile website for Facebook itself but I had to install the Messenger app to send messages.

I have come to despise the proliferation of messaging apps with slightly different functionality, and each one tries to justify itself somewhat differently but end of the day the features anyone cares about are identical.

"Meta" missed a huge chance to live up to their name and build up interoperability with every major messaging app so that Facebook users could end up having a single account on one app that allows them to chat with everyone on every other app through one interface.

I think its more that they erred horribly by trying to make Messenger standalone instead of keeping Facebook messages effortless and having messages by a draw to keep young people on facebook.

This is basically the long form of my somewhat pithy/sarcastic comment. Sorry, but we just live in a world where messaging apps have already proliferated. They will all have their defenders that prefer this thing or that thing (see the other responses to my comment). Probably the only thing that grinds my gears more than the people who are just defending this feature or that aspect of whatever messaging service is when they do like the comment I responded to and say that it's mostly about everyone else being there. If that's the criteria, we already have that; it's called SMS. Everybody has that. But of course, it's not really about everyone being there; it's about this feature or that feature. Names, numbers, privacy, temporary names, group functionality, extra gizmos, etc. Once you realize that it AlwaysHasBeenMeme about a cluster of features, only one of which is "lots of people have it", then there just isn't any natural "default" that everyone "should" just use.

I'm shocked that you thought even for a second that Bluesky would be better than Twitter - it's purpose is to be a new home for people who are upset that moderates and conservatives are being given a voice, any early adoption is going to be centered around that. Yes some of the media are trying to take mostly apolitical stuff over (like football) but its purpose is still "fuck Musk for platforming people we hate."

I wonder how many of them ever un-ironically used that line about those accustomed to privilege perceiving equality as oppression....

it's purpose is to be a new home for people who are upset that moderates and conservatives are being given a voice, any early adoption is going to be centered around that.

Ditto for Mastodon. It is an absolute cesspool because it's primarily used by people who couldn't stand the idea that Elon might not let them bully people with politics they didn't like (and this was before he bought Twitter no less). It is exactly as bad as you might expect based on that.

Mastodon is also used by people who believe you can create technological solutions to social problems, and people who believe "decentralization" means "has the ability to cultivate an echo chamber of exact proportions." With a helping of "why would anyone ever want to delete a post from the internet?"

I suppose if Mastodon had come into existence in the 90s, it would have been used by libertarians a la crypto. But of course we had decentralized social media in the 90s, they were just called IMs and message boards.

The internet is the real decentralized social media, we don't need fancy algorithms or federation protocols: we have the protocols at home, and they're called the Internet Protocol, the Transmission Control Protocol, and the Hypertext Transfer Protocol.

I still don't understand why such an absurdly-overengineered technological solution has been adopted by such censorious people. The ethos of software engineers has changed so much in the last 20 years.

You can try Threads, which rarely shows me political content but is entirely full of engagement bait about various other things. I do follow some adorable baby animal accounts and some interesting economics people, but otherwise it’s basically the instagram algorithm transplanted into.a text space.

The Instagram algorithm and general Zucksphere of platforms don't really appeal. The ideal platform is one which enables and promotes complexity. Either by promoting thinkers and posters of complexity or simply bruteforcing complexity by making the feed truly ideologically-diverse.

An intractable problem, but I'd at the very least like to avoid platforms that cave to foreign interests

I have never used Twitter. Mostly, because I have read Amusing Ourselves to Death. I knew that absolutely no good could come of engaging in 140 characters.

As the platform evolved (threads! 280 characters!), I was occasionally tempted, but never tempted enough. It sometimes seemed like a place where interesting people were having interesting conversations--but with the caveat that, in terms of depth, insight, and "popularity contest" dynamics, Twitter is like attending a very large, very angry high school. Sure, you have some wild conversations at your lunch table, but is it really worth the cacophony? The kibbitzing? The sophomores?

The amount of coordinated astroturfing and, admittedly, occasional not-just-astroturfing I've seen for Bluesky in the last week is quite sufficient to ensure that I will not even dip a toe into it. I think their current marketing is clearly intended to capitalize on the current perception that it is Truth Social for Leftists.

Further strengthening everyone's filter bubble will surely have no negative knock-on effects whatsoever.

Social media is an interesting case-study in "This is a thing everyone knows is bad, its structures are bad, and yet we do it anyway". A perfect example of a coordination problem, where due to competing interests no one actually exits the game, because there's just too much social consequence to exiting.

While most readers of my comment would assume I ascribe the detachment from reality that X is to Elon, it's not entirely true. Having watched Twitter's degradation from the early days, it was a blue-coded firehose of shit that went from being able to traverse in a sensible way to randomly interspersing bullshit regardless of how recent it is, to get you to click and spend more time on it.

So yeah, your ability to stay away from Twitter/X is to be lauded, and I make no excuse for my own bad social media habits, even if they amount mostly to browsing various hobby groups.

I think it is also rage against Elon because Trump won and Elon obviously played a role in it. I think democrats hate Elon more than Trump.

Elon infuriates a certain sort of blue. I don't know that it's worse than Trump but it's pretty strange to see seemingly smart people go rabid.

I think it's just that we don't notice anymore when people claim they're superior to Trump and would do better with his daddy's money. It's been said for so long.

People who harp on about this with Elon come across like Thunderf00t; just pathetic and bitter. He presses all sorts of ideological buttons too what with being a billionaire who influences politics (filling the Koch bros. niche for leftists) and constantly signal boosting DR stuff with "!!" but, like Trump, I think it's impossible to psychologically digest that this juvenile-posting piece of shit is actually influencing the country.

I think the hate of Elon is definitely fresher than that of Trump. I'm not sure it's necessarily greater in intensity.

In conclusion, for the moderates and centrists: Your signal is jammed, and only extremism will be boosted on either twitter or bluesky.

Musk is pretty much the platonic idea of a centrist, no ?

Sick of the bots and echo chamber that X has become

The Indians are annoying, but to me the bots are just noise. I tune it out. Big accounts are pointless, but .. echo chamber? Go somewhere outside of your immediate circle and you find entirely different people.

Musk is an eccentric right winger in todays spectrum.

"Littlepeople shouldn't be allowed to get in the way of their Randian overlords" seems to be both a core driver of Musk's politics and a conventional aspect of right-wingery.

Musk is right-wing, and he is eccentric, but the way he is right-wing is entirely conventional. On economic issues he is anti-spending, anti-regulation, and anti-union. On social issues, the views he expresses on X are whatever the right-wing version of the current thing is (even if it is obvious bullshit).

In other words, the "they left me" meme is super true for former centrists who became "right wing".

Another way to put it is that the definition of "right wing" has expanded to contain even people like Musk, Rogan and Gabbard.

Musk and Rogan have legitimately embraced some conservative views, even if mostly on the libertarian end.

Doubtless. But I think a big part of how that happened is them being labeled "right wing" and cast out by their erstwhile compatriots on the left. From personal experience, being "thrown in the pit" invites a lot of reflection and re-evaluation about one's views.

I mean, trying to pull permits for a literal rocket launch would do they anyways.

Uh, no. He’s jumped pretty hard on whatever populist-right memes are floating around Twitter.

Musk is by no means a centrist, he has actively campaigned as a partisan this election in order to secure a position for himself in the Trump ecosystem. He may have some kooky ideas that do not align with the rest of the Republican base but he has entirely abandoned the 'centre' position one could have argued he held years ago in favour of one side of the political spectrum.

By centrist I don't mean someone who is in the political centre as party politics are concerned, just someone with no firm ideology or agenda.

Apart from his opposition to transgender issues, what politics does he have?

Wanting an efficient government that obeys the law and preferences of citizens and that isn't getting in the way is pretty much a non ideological.

Nobody but certain very narrow segments of political class desire infinity migration.

... because the other side called him a doge before they had a cause; if he is a doge, beware his fanges. (wow. very revenge plot. which caskete choose? argument much clever.)

I don't understand at all what you're trying to convey with this comment other than the first part.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merchant_of_Venice#Plot_summary

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/doge

https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/insights/from-dogecoin-to-the-department-of-government-efficiency-elon-musks-history-with-the-doge-meme

Just an aside and nothing personal against you, but I really dislike:

  1. the use of embedded links as glosses of esoteric terms.

Why: I dislike the continual minimizing/maximizing of windows and the break in flow of thought

  1. linking to a website instead of simply explaining in words what it is you yourself have intended in your post. (You intended as the hypothetical you, not necessarily you.

Why: it seems dismissive and rude, like when someone asks where the restroom is and you just point at a sign instead of speaking. Sometimes one might intend to be dismissive and rude, and sure, maybe this is just me clinging to more traditional mores. Could be.

I realize people are sometimes short of time or impatient but damn.

I dislike the continual minimizing/maximizing of windows and the break in flow of thought

I forgot that not everyone here is using a desktop browser. Would footnotes¹ be a better alternative?

linking to a website instead of simply explaining in words what it is you yourself have intended in your post.

OK, I will try to explain it in words. "wow. very revenge plot. which caskete choose? argument much clever." is a description of the plot of The Merchant of Venice in the dialect associated with the 'doge' meme, for which Elon Musk has a particular fondness.

The Merchant of Venice is a play by William Shakespeare, containing the line "Thou calledst me dog before thou hadst a cause. But since I am a dog, beware my fangs.", meaning that Shylock was treated as villainous before he had done anything questionable, and therefore was not incentivised to be forgiving. (Act III, scene 3.) I was alluding to that line in the first part of my comment, in that Mr Musk was also treated as deplorable by the chattering classes prior to having thrown in his lot with the Trump campaign²; the spelling of 'doge' and 'fange' was an allusion to the same meme.

¹Like these.

²A comparison can also be made to the Dazexiang Uprising in late-3rd-century China, in which two officials realised three things:

  1. The then-ruling dynasty imposed the death penalty for being late.

  2. The then-ruling dynasty imposed the death penalty for rebellion.

  3. The roads being impassable due to rain, they had no chance of arriving on time.

Much clearer now that this is a set of allusions that not unsurprisingly flew over my head. Thanks. The Motte really does keep me on my toes.

More comments

So the Doge of Venice wasn't part of the pun?

More comments

After carefully curating my feed and lists I pretty much never see any content I find completely distasteful and I also get a smattering of opposing views that aren't stark raving mad.

I kind of hate the site as a general rule, but it's less bad than virtually all the competing options. Facebook is boomers and slop, LinkedIn is strivers, grifters, and awkward corporate copy, Instagram is distilled narcissism. Reddit is... reddit. Twitter is, I think, the closest to the ideal of the public square where large scale discourse actually happens.

Pick your poison.

You asserted that X is an echo chamber. What is your evidence for that?

Also why would you assume blue sky wouldn’t be an echo chamber given that the media types specifically left X in reaction to losing an election.

Also why would you assume blue sky wouldn’t be an echo chamber

It won't be echo chamber, it will be the singularity in a black hole. The circular firing squads already started.

Think again, motherfucker! For, immediately, on the front page (no account)

How does that actually compare to Twitter at this point in time? There's no "front page (no account)" on Twitter anymore, you have to log in to do just about anything and once you're logged in, it's your personalized feed.

And I think this question goes a bit deeper than it might look. Bluesky does try to show you a representative slice of the overall community there. Sure it's probably tuned or curated or whatever, but it's clearly designed to look like it's representative. Twitter, on the other hand, takes effort to not let you know what the userbase in general is like. And it was one of the first things implemented after Elon took over.

and wondering if perhaps Bluesky would be better?

It sure can be different. My feed is something like 90% German right now /s

Now that Twitter is 50/50 left and right, and the left isn't allowed free hand to censor, it's an "echo chamber".

Seems like there's something being missed.

Source for Twitter being 50/50? I assume it’d lean one way or the other.

Pew seems to think it's just about even

CNN, citing Pew (I can't find that specific set of figures and can't dig in now*) it used to be heavily Democratic and now is more or less even

* Maybe it was a bad idea to shift to "X"

Twitter really isn’t 50/50 left/right if you’re a random new user who creates an account today. Of course there are both liberal/centrist and progressive (and hardcore leftist) spaces, but you have to find them whereas you get conservative messaging pretty much immediately and universally, often even if you don’t follow any politics or CW-related accounts.

So it’s the opposite of reddit circa 2016 then? Okay, so turn about is fair play

I just signed up (never really having used Twitter) to see for myself. Scrolling the default feed as a new user was mostly normie stuff, sports, pop culture and such, however with a heavy overrepresentation of ghetto black content. This was third and this was the fourth post on my feed. Two of the first ten posts were from conservative pro-Trump types and a third was from Elon himself, but it was not related to politics. Scrolling a bit further basically confirms that: 20% conservative, 20% ghetto, 60% normie pop culture/sports.

Best case outcome = Bluesky becomes a Tumblr replacement rather a twitter replacement.

Erstwhile twitter was louder, but boring. Tumblr was where the real stuff was cooked. Autistic wokes have been homeless since Tumblr collapsed, Twitter got taken over, Reels are brain-rotten (it's great) and tiktok has normiefied.

Worst case outcome = It's turns into a threads style bot-o-calypse.

I created an account to verify what you said. Damn it's bad. I avoided politics as a point of interest. I followed we mens wear guy. Still, it was all vacuous nonsense. /r/politics tier. As of now, it's surely headed towards bot-o-calypse.

Where did all the funny liberals go? There were plenty of them on pre-Trump Reddit. Say what you want, but 4chan autistic trans degenerates were funny as fuck too. Tumblr was good shit. Surely all these furries, twinks, trans girls etc. must be around somewhere. Hell, just the wierd porn artists (very left-tumblr coded) created enough engagement for 1 social platform just on their own.

Wonder if they all just grew up, and the woke-censorship era destroyed the pipeline for new degenerates to replace them. Maybe they're deep on Tiktok somewhere.

We should have a different word than collapsed for "lost 90% of its users" or whatever happened to Tumblr. It still works fine and is the only social media that I read. I just read people's archives, but I understand even the feeds mostly just follow in chronological order. It would be my first recommendation for what you're looking for, but you would have to, at first, find your own blogs to follow there - perhaps shieldfoss and morlock-holmes and who they interact with would be a good place to start, perhaps not. YMMV. The whole point is that you can decide there

They're on discord, if my hobby servers are anything to go by.

Do you have any recommendations for finding good hobby discords for, I dunno, underwater basket weaving? I see a decent number of active Facebook groups for such things, but Discord seems to have poor discoverability.

Probably not, the way I joined most of my discords is "you're on a more public platform like a subreddit and they have a link to their discord".

This. Discord is their domain.

Turns out more than one side has the "7 zillion witches" problem.

In conclusion, for the moderates and centrists: Your signal is jammed, and only extremism will be boosted on either twitter or bluesky.

Back when SocMeds were only taking off, and some blue-tribers of the FOSS variety were getting creeped out by the potential power megacorps could wield with control of recommendation algorithms, someone came up with the idea of letting each user customize their algorithm on each platform. Technically speaking it wouldn't be that much of a problem to implement it, but the SocMeds have no incentive to do so, so it would require government regulation. Sadly it turned out that stopping Trump / the anti-woke backlash became a higher priority than controlling corporate power. Such a shame. The "it's a private company, they can do whatever they want" crowd can now enjoy the world they created.

The "it's a private company, they can do whatever they want" crowd can now enjoy the world they created.

This is me, unironically. And yes I am enjoying the world. Though I don't take credit for creating it.

The secrets to enjoyment:

  1. Longer time horizons. The transitions of various social media companies has often sucked, or been annoying. But I do find myself happy now almost a decade or more after some of those slow transitions began.
  2. Social media is a fundamentally toxic relationship. You give them your blood sweat and tears poured endlessly into content. They give you eyeballs and people to see it. These things are not equivalent, and their main lever for getting people to make more content for them, is just to feed them more attention. I've found that in my personal life toxic and unbalanced relationships can be fun and exciting for a little bit, but they all crash and burn.
  3. The only product you are owed is the one you pay for. I don't trust free products.
  4. Social media is a cheap and second rate alternative to real life connections. We've now all had a chance to run the experiment ourselves during Covid.

Everyone went on a weird social media bender for a few years, but I think a lot of people are waking up from the haze. The companies got to do what they wanted with their product, and they gave us the drugs so good and hard that now a bunch of us get sick at just seeing the drugs again. This is personally how I prefer to deal with additctions. I like to burn them out of my system hard and fast.

The secrets to enjoyment:

That's like saying that you don't care about people in church saying that the Jews eat babies, because as a Jew you don't go to church anyway.

Social media power is a problem because it can affect things that happen off of social media.

This is a problem with all life. Government is worse at this.

You still need to think about your marginal impact of getting involved. If I can do nothing about a problem whether I get involved or not then it makes no sense to worry about it.

To be honest I think it’s the way most social media is set up. Unless you set up pretty hard limits on minimal content quality, you’ll quickly find that everyone is going pretty low hanging fruit of one liners and hard core factionalism. Nuance just doesn’t work in an environment where the currency is engagements. Long from content is not viral in the same way that a one line dig at outside enemies can be. Memes, gross images, crass wording, and anger are the things that nature has somehow engineered our brains to notice and spread. A long form nuanced article that steel mans the other side and treats the issue fairly is only plausible in environments where such content is a minimal expectation.

I do go on Twitter for the lols, but not much else. It’s kinda funny to snark and mock the pious Palestine-free stuff simply because I find it naive and uncritical of its own side. People who under other circumstances would oppose rape, murder, and terrorism are taking the side of people who do exactly that and celebrate it happening. The Israelis, particularly the settlers, are not completely innocent here, but after months of hearing about how this is one sided and anyone who isn’t actively opposed is evil, some part of my brain gets excited about posting a guy eating a hamburger under a tweet about McDonald’s supporting Israel. Downside being that Twitter thinks I’m Jewish or something.

...Bluesky has exactly that: https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds

Sweet! Shame they ban / remove content they don't like. It's even harder to justify all the censorship if you can make your own feed algorithm.

When was this, specifically? Do you have any links or something to evidence this?

The idea for letting individual users customize their algorithms? It was ages ago. Early 2010's, or even late aughties. I read it on some blog. I can try to look for traces of it, but the blog might be long gone, and search engines have gotten terrible so I hope you understand this is a tall order.

On the flip side, are you actually saying this is something strange for blue-tribers of that era to recommend? What are you basing your opinion on? This was standard politics of the Stallman-Torvalds techie faction.

They didn't talk in terms of "users customizing the algorithm" back then, but Usenet certainly supported user/client controlled presentation order/selection of articles since even before the development of the Usenet network protocol NNTP in RFC 977 in 1986. Usenet clients/servers had this as working technology even before there was a world-wide-web (HTTP didn't start till 1989 or so).

I guess I'm mostly just surprised that people had the "customizable algorithms" idea that far back.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

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.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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