/r/themotte was mainly rat-adjacent civil discourse concerning Culture War. Possibly we could broaden the scope of the new themotte - it could be rat-adjacent civil discourse, period. It was already the case to some degree on subreddit, maybe. General discussion area? Somehow network/collaborate with LessWrong, /r/slatestarcodex, Scott(?), /r/rational maybe. Possibly this space could be a glue between all of the fragmented communities, sort-of?
Organization
/r/themotte was mostly a recurring CW thread, with some extra recurring threads (friday fun thread etc.) and some ad-hoc Posts which didn't get much engagement. Maybe we should lean even more into recurring-threads model? IMO this encourages contributions. I'm thinking of this part, from Beware Trivial Inconveniences:
I was reminded of this recently by Eliezer's Less Wrong Progress Report. He mentioned how surprised he was that so many people were posting so much stuff on Less Wrong, when very few people had ever taken advantage of Overcoming Bias' policy of accepting contributions if you emailed them to a moderator and the moderator approved. Apparently all us folk brimming with ideas for posts didn't want to deal with the aggravation.
Okay, in my case at least it was a bit more than that. There's a sense of going out on a limb and drawing attention to yourself, of arrogantly claiming some sort of equivalence to Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky. But it's still interesting that this potential embarrassment and awkwardness was enough to keep the several dozen people who have blogged on here so far from sending that "I have something I'd like to post..." email.
IMO it'd help to add some features for comments. Collapsible blocks of text, for large comments, or quoting a large amount of text. Make them not count towards character limit (if there's any). Footnotes[1]. Images.
Which recurring threads? Certainly CW one. I think 'Meta' thread would be helpful, especially now. Media thread. Old 'friday fun' and 'small questions' threads could be merged(?) Maybe add 'bare link repository' as a recurring thread? Also Quality Contributions Reports.
Keeping the community from disintegrating
IMO it'd be a good idea to keep cross-posting some stuff from here to there at least for now, perhaps with comments turned off. Quality Contributions, maybe link posts to threads here.
Email list. Possibly contact frequent posters, people with QC directly to sign in? If we had a list of people in the old community, then we wouldn't be as time dependent as otherwise. Without contact, if it flatlines...
Also, if the subreddit is basically ending now, it could be a good moment to compile a up-to-date archive. Through now that I checked, pushshift archives are roughly up-to-date, so it shouldn't be an issue.
Misc
somehow letting user know effectively about new posts in a whole subtree of a thread
- at least specifically if user's comment is at the root - e.g. if I make a comment, user foo replies to it, and then bar replies to foo, I should be notified about both of these comments
- maybe enable & encourage replying to multiple comments at once (same as mentioning users on Reddit, but not limited to 3). But comment still needs exactly 1 parent to not break threading...
tags, hierarchical tags, community-curated tag tree, subscriptions to discussion about given topic by tags
Making use of Gwern’s resorter somehow. Possibly in ctx of QCs?
QCs integrated into UI sensibly
- Maybe it shouldn't be too effortless through.
realtime chat (or official Discord, but it'd be nice to have chat integrated with the forum)
voting
- user-normalization: some users might upvote/downvote a lot, others less
- a bit self-referential, but maybe weight up/downvotes based on user karma and activity
(I had a list of suggestions I meant to post few months ago, when it was decided we'll move off Reddit; points below are vague enough I'm not sure exactly what I meant by them, but I figure I'll post them anyway)
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
Sinity 2yr ago·Edited 2yr ago
we could broaden the scope of the new themotte - it could be rat-adjacent civil discourse, period
Part of the benefit of this community to me is that things are primarily focused on the culture war. It's something which can almost never be talked about even semi objectively in other places.
Also separating it from the general rationalist and effective altruism movements is a good movie in my opinion because it means they can distance themselves from tribal politics, and hopefully you get something done.
realtime chat (or official Discord, but it'd be nice to have chat integrated with the forum)
I second this, but we should start small and maybe have a quarterly or monthly meetups instead of constant voice chat. I've tried this in other communities and it can drag things down hill and crate a lot of drama unless it's inconsistent.
images
Yes to footnotes, no to images! I have seen far too many forums killed by memes.
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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
A few ideas/suggestions on how to proceed.
Scope
/r/themotte was mainly rat-adjacent civil discourse concerning Culture War. Possibly we could broaden the scope of the new themotte - it could be rat-adjacent civil discourse, period. It was already the case to some degree on subreddit, maybe. General discussion area? Somehow network/collaborate with LessWrong, /r/slatestarcodex, Scott(?), /r/rational maybe. Possibly this space could be a glue between all of the fragmented communities, sort-of?
Organization
/r/themotte was mostly a recurring CW thread, with some extra recurring threads (friday fun thread etc.) and some ad-hoc Posts which didn't get much engagement. Maybe we should lean even more into recurring-threads model? IMO this encourages contributions. I'm thinking of this part, from Beware Trivial Inconveniences:
IMO it'd help to add some features for comments. Collapsible blocks of text, for large comments, or quoting a large amount of text. Make them not count towards character limit (if there's any). Footnotes[1]. Images.
Which recurring threads? Certainly CW one. I think 'Meta' thread would be helpful, especially now. Media thread. Old 'friday fun' and 'small questions' threads could be merged(?) Maybe add 'bare link repository' as a recurring thread? Also Quality Contributions Reports.
Keeping the community from disintegrating
IMO it'd be a good idea to keep cross-posting some stuff from here to there at least for now, perhaps with comments turned off. Quality Contributions, maybe link posts to threads here.
Email list. Possibly contact frequent posters, people with QC directly to sign in? If we had a list of people in the old community, then we wouldn't be as time dependent as otherwise. Without contact, if it flatlines...
Also, if the subreddit is basically ending now, it could be a good moment to compile a up-to-date archive. Through now that I checked, pushshift archives are roughly up-to-date, so it shouldn't be an issue.
Misc
somehow letting user know effectively about new posts in a whole subtree of a thread
- at least specifically if user's comment is at the root - e.g. if I make a comment, user foo replies to it, and then bar replies to foo, I should be notified about both of these comments
- maybe enable & encourage replying to multiple comments at once (same as mentioning users on Reddit, but not limited to 3). But comment still needs exactly 1 parent to not break threading...
tags, hierarchical tags, community-curated tag tree, subscriptions to discussion about given topic by tags
Making use of Gwern’s resorter somehow. Possibly in ctx of QCs?
QCs integrated into UI sensibly
- Maybe it shouldn't be too effortless through.
realtime chat (or official Discord, but it'd be nice to have chat integrated with the forum)
voting
- user-normalization: some users might upvote/downvote a lot, others less
- a bit self-referential, but maybe weight up/downvotes based on user karma and activity
- multiple kinds/dimensions of votes. (apparently sth like that is implemented on LW)
(I had a list of suggestions I meant to post few months ago, when it was decided we'll move off Reddit; points below are vague enough I'm not sure exactly what I meant by them, but I figure I'll post them anyway)
somehow solving perma topic threads defocusing recency bias (that's the vague one...)
a wiki? Knowledge base?
maybe something between a wiki and a discussion, somehow.
[1] Linking to them; linking back to the source from them; putting their content in alt-text on mouseover.
Part of the benefit of this community to me is that things are primarily focused on the culture war. It's something which can almost never be talked about even semi objectively in other places.
Also separating it from the general rationalist and effective altruism movements is a good movie in my opinion because it means they can distance themselves from tribal politics, and hopefully you get something done.
I second this, but we should start small and maybe have a quarterly or monthly meetups instead of constant voice chat. I've tried this in other communities and it can drag things down hill and crate a lot of drama unless it's inconsistent.
Yes to footnotes, no to images! I have seen far too many forums killed by memes.
Plan to add more later as I read.
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