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Maximum_Publius  1yr ago (text post)   1799 thread views

Does the Culture War Thread still make sense?

Does the Culture War Thread still make sense as the primary place for Motte discussion now that the community has its own dedicated website?

I think the answer is probably "yes, we should stay with the Thread as-is," but only because of inertia. If we could have created a culture shift away from the thread and towards individual posts, I think there may have been some benefits, as I'll discuss below. However, this is a relatively small community, and so we probably want to avoid alienating the current members as much as possible with radical changes.

While I'm sure I'm missing things, or getting things completely wrong, here's some problems I see with the current Culture War Thread format. (I also want to note that none of this is meant as a criticism of the mods or anyone else who put in a ton of work to get this site going; I think it's great and I really enjoy having a censorship-free place to get my culture war fix and read interesting comments from intelligent people.)

  • Comments and the Thread receive differing amounts of engagement depending on the day of the week, with weekends disfavored

For me, this is probably my biggest gripe with the Culture War Thread. Because a new Thread gets posted every Monday, it seems to make little sense to post on a Sunday (or even Saturday) if you want to get a decent amount of engagement. This is unfortunate, because the weekend is one of the times when people probably have the most time to write up a post and engage with it. While it's true you could write something up over the weekend and wait till Monday to post, this adds a bit of friction, a bit of "I'll do it later," which, for me at least, reduces my desire to post at all. Moreover, even if you do wait till Monday to post, if you have a fulltime Monday - Friday job, you probably have less time to respond to comments, etc., during the day during the week than you would on the weekend, further weakening engagement.

  • High engagement posts dying out faster

The nature of the Culture War Thread, especially given that the default view setting here is "new" (a good thing!), is that older posts get less engagement as the week goes on and new posts push them out. Of course, this will be true of any post, including front-page posts, and maybe it would be equally true of front-page posts, rendering this point meaningless. But I don't think so. For one thing, a front-page post allows for more top-level comments on that post, which I think potentially allows for more wide ranging and extensive discussion and which (I believe) keeps a post farther up on the front page. This is partially due simply to the UI; the more nested a comment is, the more quickly it gets relegated to "click here to see rest of thread" oblivion, where far fewer people see them (see below). I also get the sense that the algorithm works a little different for front-page posts than for comments, and that it allows a well-engaged front page post to stay higher up on the page than a well-engaged comment, though I could be wrong about this.

  • By shifting to front-page posts, we would get a whole extra level of viewable comments!

Due to how a reddit-style UI works, relegating our major posts to the Culture War Thread means that we shift the entire discussion one step "over" (or "deeper"?), which in turn means that comments become unviewable without clicking "see more," which definitely decreases viewership and thus discussion. If people's responses to comments/posts were top-level, instead of second level, we could have more wide-ranging conversations and perhaps a little bit more engagement (which adds up) on interesting posts.

  • It may be confusing to new users

I'm not sure about this one, since I was lucky enough to find the Motte before the move, but intuitively it seems right to me. Imagine you have no idea what "the Motte" is, and have no idea about its history as a spin off of the Culture War Thread from the SSC subreddit, etc., etc. Assume also that like many visitors, you don't bother clicking on the FAQ on anything like that, but instead simply start scrolling through the site's posts. You'll notice that there aren't actually that many front-page posts, and that many of those posts don't get very much engagement at all. If you don't notice that the Culture War Threads get thousands of comments (especially likely if you come on a Monday or Tuesday, see above), you might then conclude that this is a relatively "dead" website, and move on. I'd like the site to keep getting new blood, so this worries me, although I have no idea how big a problem this might be in reality. (Also it seems possible that the kind of person who can't figure out about the Culture War Thread, etc., might be the kind of person we're not particularly interested in attracting in the first place, but I don't know that for sure.)

Any other thoughts on this? Reasons you like the Culture War Thread vs. a front-page post format? Ways the Culture War Thread could be improved? Other ways in which the current format creates problems?

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Personally I like the culture war thread. Having to run on the treadmill keeps things focused and keeps a sense of momentum, while discouraging too much nitpicking of what someone said three layers up.

In short, I think having to be relevant is good exercise. If there’s something you really want to discuss, post it in parts like @Hylnka’s recent series. That way feedback can ideally be incorporated and you can refine your thoughts as you go on.

I like the thread for a very important reason: no titles. If the posts were standalone, they would all need a title and we would judge their worth before reading them by reading their titles. CW thread toplevels jump right into the topic, I can scan the text quickly and determine if that's something I want to engage with (and read the comments) or not (and collapse the whole thread).

I agree that recycling the thread on a different day of the week might boost the engagement. As for collapsing the three other recurring threads into one, I used to be in favor, but I'm not so sure now. Sure, wellness and fun are routinely treated as one and the same and I won't mind if they get merged, but SQS should remain as the dedicated place for low-effort JAQing off that we engage with in good faith.

My impression is that there's little reason to contain culture war in specific. Other similar spaces I participate in (eg /r/blockedandreported) do just fine with a discussion thread for most topics and independent posts for particularly effortful or relevant commentary. I think it would make sense to preserve the culture war thread as it stands while allowing effortful posts touching on culture war topics to stand independently if the author wants to post them at the top level.

Ya it seems there's a lot of high-effort stuff that can get buried for being in the culture war thread...

Maybe a soft rule that culture war-related posts can be top level, if, and only if they are indeed high effort.

You get this weird disjuct where stuff that gets posted outside the thread can actually be quite inflammatory and low engagement, but its allowed because its not immediately culture-war related, whereas a lot of gorgeous high-effort stuff would not be seen by someone scrolling through the landing page because its culture war-related and buried in a thread.

Like the quality contribution roundup is amazing and we should maintain it, but you have to remember the reason it exists is because of how bloody hard it is to find even a major, forum-defining contribution... mere days after it hass been posted

At the same time I think I’ve found less engagement overall posting stuff outside of the culture war thread, I assume because that’s the main place everyone is looking.

As a long time lurker (but posted back on Reddit) I like the thread but have the same complaint with it that I have with Reddit, I would like to more easily be able to surf original posts. It’s kind of a drag to have to scroll past comment chain after comment chain to get to a new post. In that sense it would be better to not have most content in one thread, it would be easier to find new content .

It’s entirely possible there’s a way to do this and I just don’t know how since I don’t use Reddit basically at all and this site is kind of a clone

I like the culture war thread. Personally I think the change I'd like to see is replacing the Sunday Small Questions thread, Wednesday Wellness thread, etc. with a general catch-all "Daily Discussion Thread" that takes anything. I think the site's big enough it doesn't need separate threads like that to generate discussion, yet not so big it'd drown out anyone's comments

I think it's worth having the new thread start on Saturday. You're right about people having the most time to post at the weekend so it makes sense for a new thread to begin then.

I'm unsure about breaking it out into single-issue threads though. I don't want the forum to turn into all culture-war all the time and the roundup does serve to stop outrage-bait taking over everything.

I'd rather see effortposts like "Thansnational Thursdays" on the top level, same goes for other effortposts. But "outrage of the day" ones are quite fine within CoW thread.

Yes, but if we are going to have transnational thursdays, each country a person posts about should be their own reply not in the top level or mushed together in one comment.

I see that you make valid points, but I'm personally fond of the CW thread myself.

It acts as a lighting rod for discussion, a schelling point that everyone knows and anticipates. Have a good idea you want to effort post on? Save it up and you know exactly where to put it to get eyeballs.

I do agree with the slowdown at the end of the week, and while I'm (atm) unemployed and bored so have plenty of time to read with and engage with everything regardless of the date, it might not be a bad idea to simply shift the start date of the thread to Friday or Saturday. It can't really hurt can it?

The extra click is crucial for participation and being exposed to ideas you would normally avoid. In threads the title so important and half the time that title seems either like clickbait or something I'm not interested in or indecipherable without clicking to clarify. Going in and out of threads I may be interested in seems just like a worse version of what's done now. As someone else said when this was brought up before you end up reading things you never would before because they're all in one thread as top level comments. And I also think it promotes participation because it ends up taking the heat off of a top-level comment rather than a top level thread there might not be any real distinction but being buried in a 1000 other comments when people tear your ideas apart is a lot more comfortable than that failure existing on its own. I think burying old ideas weekly helps everyone, the deeper comments go the more angry and snipey they get and forcing a new topic is a great cooling method for that, I think the weekend and switching off to the friday fun thread then small scale questions thread helps with that as well.

The idea also segregates all topics. Some people might see that as a good thing but it's just an exercise in people radicalizing themselves. I can see dissenters becoming fewer and fewer as each separate single-interest topic is dominated by those that have a lot of interest in something. People will start avoiding threads started by users they don't like and it'll become even more about people who just agree with each other. And you lose that "there's someone wrong on the internet! this won't stand." drive where you see something that you think or know is wrong and feel compelled to correct them. A top level thread usually presents no facts or real ideas in its title and you lose that possible drive. Every new topic about people's specific bugbears will just be dominated by those people and become a "HBD general" or "AI threat general" or "Immigration general" if people think that the majority opinion dominates and destroys minority opinions now then it would only get worse.

It also creates an idea of staying-on-topic that limits conversation. You can go into a top level comment about the economy and then have people start talking about AI safety two comments deep and it feels normal and fine to switch to that and even if it would be alright otherwise you limit how many people are going to participate in that topic-switch or even know its there.

I do agree that it sucks if you want to post and respond to serious topics on the weekend but that could be fixed by staggering the thread's replacement every few weeks or so but otherwise I think thread level topics will just end up in worse quality probably worse engagement and more personally it would "fuck my shit up" with regard to how I consume what's on this site with all the extra navigation and clicking that it would require.

I think organization by topic is generally better for engagement. In the usual CW thread, there are hundreds to thousands of posts, and I think a lot of great ideas get missed less because they aren’t interesting or well thought out, but because they’re buried under an avalanche of other discussions of various other topics. I’d love to debate topics around education and education reform, but I don’t think having even a top level CW megathread post would get much debate simply because there are so many other topics in that same page that it would be buried.

I want to write up a thread on education that’s only tangentially related to the culture war titled: What Should I Look for in my Child’s School?

While it’s inspired by recent developments in public schooling, it’s much more than that, looking at course offerings, child wellbeing, social networks, values, etc. Essentially a rationalist dive into what schools produce the best overall outcomes. (A lot would have to come from the contributions of others.) I just don’t really know where to post. I’m not going to post it in the CW thread on a Saturday where it will get buried, don’t have a substack to link to, and so am considering a top level post and hoping it follows the rules.

Well, I know that it's not apples to apples because of inertia and expectations but, right now, top level threads get much less engagement and very little debate compared to top level comments in the cw thread. And I still view being buried as a positive thing for broader engagement. Long endless threads on particular topics become dominated by whoever has the biggest hobby-horse investment in the topic and there's just endless multi-quotes between people arguing about nigh useless minutiae that a casual debater/observer has no interest in. Refreshing the topic constantly allows it to return to a state of wider focus. This is just my experience with forums and "general threads".

How much of that is that most of the interesting content is relegated to the CW thread though? Most of the thought out content is there, and thus if you want to read something substantial on this forum you go there.

My issue is that because of the burial of good topics, a lot of good content never gets the engagement it deserves and even on the top posts, it’s really not nearly as well written or sourced as it might be as a stand-alone thread in which everything will be seen, read and digested and counter sourced as people debate the topic in full without having to scroll past other discussions.

The other issue is the dead front page. There are two culture war threads, a Wednesday wellness thread and a Friday fun thread. Not much else is posted here outside of those particular threads. No philosophy or science stuff, no weird topics that don’t fit the other threads. If you locked everything but those three threads, it wouldn’t affect the site because there aren’t a lot of other discussions to be had. Which I think is a problem simply because it gives newcomers no idea what this place is or why they’d bother.

This all seems right. Well said and thanks for the post.

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