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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2898 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 26, 2025

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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Is there any ways to do polls on the motte? I'd really like to do a survey on what people are using and paying for winter heating. Don't know about anyone else, but I hate when people link to external poll sites and never reply.

If there isn't an option currently and you can code, I bet you'd be welcome to design one for the site?

I am lower than a code monkey. I am a code plastic flipflop, worn by America. I just thought it might be one of the features zorba stripped from the /r/drama codebase, like the automatic word replace and such.

Why not just use a third party site for the poll and link to it in the post? Also use the post for discussion of the poll and allow people to make arguments for why they went with their particular option.

Just make comments for each option and tell people to upvote the one they use? That's how the literature subreddit voted on "book of the year/decade/GOAT" 10 years ago.

I suspect vandalism is low enough (and people follow instructions well enough - on most other sides you'd get people voting which they like best) here that this might still work.

Ugh, that sounds even more awkward. Maybe I'll stick to an external poll and see how many people bother to respond. Thanks for the idea though: it's amazing the stuff people come up with to get around crap UIs.

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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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