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AnotherSiteAnotherName  2yr ago (text post)   3888 thread views

The Motte and the future

So the move has been made. Potential shut down by Reddit has been avoided. Huzzah!

But people are still worrying about where new members are going to come from. And things are still being organized in the same terrible way as /r/ssc when they were trying to quarantine the culture war from the rest of the sub. And sprinkles around you have a few small threads for other weekly topics or talking about the new site.

A dedicated site deserves a nu start. Rather than purposely making quality writing harder to find, it should be highlighted. (I know the quality contributions roundup exists, but it certainly isn't exhaustive.) Seriously, have you ever gone back and tried to read an old weekly culture war thread with its thousands, potentially tens of thousands of comments? It is an unnecessary slog if you are looking for something and don't have a link. And sometimes you 'continue reading' and go back only to find that you've lost your place. It just makes you say, "I blue myself."

I do have some suggestions on some of the changes I'd like to see more that there is a dedicated website. First, I'd like to see a webpage highlighting quality contributions and other content from the forum. Something that I can easily link a friend to rather than a nested comment in response to some insane person ranting "There's a man inside me!" Or whatever.

Secondly, I think some editorial prompts for content for the sure would be good. Adversarial collaborations and whatever else. Just easier ways to find good writing from the site.

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Yeah, I'm definitely interested in any ideas that people have to amp up ideological diversity. It's a hard problem.

Once the visual revamp is done I plan to start reaching out to other communities and see if we can get crosslinks going, and maybe that'll help. (Right now I'm sick, so that's getting delayed a bit.) But I'm not sure that'll do it, even if I can convince people to crosslink.

If you insist on diversity for diversity's sake, can you at least make it interesting and try to recruit off-compass weirdos, and various high-quality schizos?

If diversity is when more hegemonic ideology supporters, I'll jump off a cliff.

If you can figure out a good place to get them, yeah, I'd love to have 'em here. Seriously, suggestions welcomed.

You could have two separate CWR threads: one specifically about woke vs anti woke, and another for everything else.

Consider proselytizing at /r/stupidpol. They're anti-woke Marxists.

PoliticalCompassMemes is probably your best bet, though half of it is trolling.

PCM was already given their own independent website on the exact same rdrama/ruqqus base as this one yet almost their entire community refused to move across. If they wont bother to have discussions on their own website then I highly doubt they'd ever give this one a chance. Last time I checked their site it was completely taken over by the ip2 community.

yet almost their entire community refused to move across.

This is unsurprising for people who refuse to close the original site. Gotta do that to actually move.

If they wont bother to have discussions on their own website then I highly doubt they'd ever give this one a chance.

The goal here isn't "get the politicalcompassmemes community moving over", it would be "find the people within that community who want to have more serious discussions and make them aware of a place where that can happen". It'd be a subset of that community and that's totally fine.

Gotta do that to actually move.

Fair.

find the people within that community who want to have more serious discussions and make them aware of a place where that can happen

I was initially going to say I'm skeptical of finding users compatible with the motte since the main point of their community is misrepresenting other views, but I suppose doing that for laughs doesn't necessarily mean some users wouldn't be willing to talk srs bsns in a more serious community like ours.

It's worth noting that we actually picked up a few new users from rDrama. I suspect just about every major community has some people who would like to be here, it's just a matter of signal and noise, and of being able to make a big enough splash to actually find those users.

There is also at least one person who wanted to join theMotte for years but wasn't willing to break his "no large social media platforms" rule over it. Hi!

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.

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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.


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