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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Notes -
Probably for the reason I already mentioned - left-wing posters didn't feel as much of a need to go off reddit to have conversations. As for why there were fewer on TheMotte to begin with, because this place has trended rightward over time, for much the same reason.
We have obviously not collected statistics about warnings and bans, but it's my opinion, based on the warnings and bans I've seen handed out in my time as a mod and all the ban reports I've compiled, that it really does fall pretty evenly, proportionately, on left-wing posters and right-wing posters, and as a corollary to that, if I had to divide regulars into "People who are intelligent and reasonable commenters capable of engaging with their opponents in good faith" and "People who are mostly here to wage culture war and sneer at their outgroup," that also divides pretty much the same among righties and lefties.
Every time (every time) someone from either pole accuses us of favoritism, or makes some grandiose observation about the general conduct of the other side, it's because they notice what they are most interested in noticing. If you think lefties get the stick more, you will vividly recall every time you saw a leftie get modded, while all the righties getting modded are indistinguishable background noise to you. If you think we are biased against righties and let lefties get away with shit, you'll remember every time a rightie got modded and every time a leftie said something you found objectionable and didn't get modded. You aren't counting (or seeing behind the scenes) all the times it goes the other way.
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