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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.
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.
If in doubt, please post it!
Rules
- Courtesy
- Content
- Engagement
- When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
- Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
- Accept temporary bans as a time-out, and don't attempt to rejoin the conversation until it's lifted.
- Don't attempt to build consensus or enforce ideological conformity.
- Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
- The Wildcard Rule
- The Metarule
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I dub this the official rdrama.net visit thread; importantly, the single rdrama.net visit thread, because y'all are kinda spamming the place with low-content stuff.
Post it here and keep it within community standards.
Sorry I'm from rdrama and I posted another thread just now but it was before I had seen this and I posted it to let you know your stickies are broken!
They should be fixed now!
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Not fair! I tried to post my thread back when you guys had like three posts, and then your site died...
Yeah it's been a bit rocky. Sorry 'bout that :)
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Hi, I came here from rdrama, but I like the concept of this community, so I'm eager to lurk a bit and learn more.
You say "low-content" rather than "low-quality" or "low-effort". Does this imply that you look for sheer volume of a post above other metrics? Is brevity and conciseness something you value at all, or should I strive to put as many words to the page as possible?
The culture of this forum, and the forums it descends from, dislike brevity; it may be the soul of wit, but it is the bane of rationalists, whose idols are all infamous for taking a thousand words to say a hundred-word idea. That is not to say that the best posts and favorite posters have nothing interesting to say, merely that the shapers of the culture did not know how to speak succinctly, and it has colored the perspective of everyone drawn to these spaces.
The ideal post is interesting and high-quality, but undeniably you look better if your posts are longer. I greatly dislike this, but I get it; it's not perfect, but the effort to write out an essay is often incompatible with low-effort shitposting.
I sincerely hope this can change. If a sentence gets the point across, a paragraph is wasted time for everyone.
If.
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90 percent of the time I short post and I've never gotten shit for it. Except for when I'm a dumbass, but that isn't really a length issue
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We've never modded posts just for being one-liners if a single line expresses a point succinctly. The vast majority of posts on themotte, even those that received AAQCs, were not long essays.
What we dislike are "lol," "I agree," "These people suck," etc. (even if expressed in complete grammatical sentences), and various forms of shitposting. The more you tolerate one-line zingers or adds-nothing "likes/dislikes," the more the place starts to look like every other Internet forum.
Maybe the end result is that we tend to select for wordiness. Shrug.
Yeah, I get it. Wordiness is a proxy for effort, but like all proxies, it eventually starts being valued for its own sake.
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Yeah. The reason I ask is because a considerable amount of (really, most of) the effort I put into a post is paring it down from a stream on consciousness ramble to something that actually will get my point across.
Like if you really want long posts it would be trivial for me to produce long meaningless essays that state the same point in fifteen different ways, but personally; as a reader, that type of writing style can be frustrating.
If the reader feels like their time is being wasted it will be difficult to convince them to seriously consider an opposing view. Patience is a limited resource, after all. Plus, I'd hate to have someone waste all their effort reading my bullshit and then forgo reading something actually meaningful as a result.
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You can get away with short posts here as long as you state your point clearly. Keeping things laconic takes a lot of effort and skill in language but it's hard to tell the difference at a glance between a nessessarily short post and a lazy shitpost.
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mottemods have the usual bias for longposting, but they want actual content in the same way that netflix wants content. Stuff that drives people here.
So interesting perspectives and being a political weirdo gets you rather far.
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You’re very boring.
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Uh. Do we have animated userpics already? This makes me sad... I think animations do not suit this place.
Hmm. Do we? Can you point to someone who's got one? I think I would disable that option if it's happening, but I need a test case.
Notably @GetoGeto.
It's due to the site supporting WebP images, and those can be animated like GIFs.
Aha. Yep, good catch. I'm not gonna panic over this right now but it's on the list.
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Please save us from our marseyless fate. Imagine how much more compelling ten pages of text could be if tastefully punctuated by cartoon cat emojis. I can't tell if I'm joking
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What’s up faggots
thanks for the free shit
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Hi everyone, so happy this site is up and running and hope we succeed in bringing over the community!
Can we have a "new site questions and feature requests" thread? I come bearing content along those lines.
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The Motte was the only reddit page I was visiting frequently -- I am glad to be off that site and thus no longer supporting it by contributing to their user / view counts.
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I actually found The Motte subreddit in the posting history of a /r/drama user on Reddit a while back. I liked the cut of their jib so decided to see where else they post.
I’ve been pleased with the success of rdrama.net. What are some other successful exiled subs? Ovarit? Any others?
I’d love to see more this build up. Someone should clue in the politicalcompassmeme dudes if they are at all are interested in a long term future online.
Hope this place works out
The lesson I've drawn is that the only way to make a successful offsite is to kill or severely neuter the reddit sub. Otherwise nobody will move over, and you'll have a dwindling group of ever witchier witches.
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The lads over at rdrama made a spin-off site for the politicalcompassmeme dudes, but nobody used it so they gave it to... I forget. Some other weird little online community. You can check the wreckage and/or new construction out at https://pcmemes.net/
That explains so much. I remember being excited to see PCM have a shot at moving off-site, but the number of PCM users who joined was dwarfed by the number of rdrama users who did, so the culture was very different.
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The_Donald's spin-off, patriots.win, has been happily chugging along.
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What is this site??????????? I literally have no idea you guys should make a welcome thread that explains what this is
This is the alternative site for a subreddit called /r/themotte, check it out on reddit (still on, for now) if you want to know more.
Alright, I am just going to go ahead and say that this is not the kind of username we want around here. I'd offer you a username change but we don't have a way to do that right now; instead I'm going to ban you and tell you to make a new account.
Huh, neat.
But yeah, I'm fine just telling that person to come back with a better name.
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To be honest, between this and rdrama, reddit may have finally lost its hooks in me. There's a long tail of tiny subreddits left to trickle along, but not really anything that updates fast enough to maintain a habit of regularly checking in. Feels like the end of an era.
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Wow after being permanently banned from reddit years ago this is nice. I can finally stop seething in silence and promptly get back to getting banned again
Are you the real westerly who played as my minion in Blood on The Mottetower?
What was that?
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Hello Mottizens!
Long time lurker posting to show my support of us moving to the new site.
The Motte is dead! Long love the Motte!
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Clown shoes to be left at the door in this place.
/images/1662336239889923.webp
I can't, my feet are too big
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I cant help but feel like we are the jocks coming to bully the nerds at their lunch table
This is a nature reserve for neurodivergent folx who can’t suppress their urge to notice patterns Reddit doesn’t want them to talk about. Please be kind and do not tap the glass. 🥺
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I wonder if we will ever get emojis.
Image embeds would be nice.
Image embeds are a terrible idea for the culture we're trying to inculcate. It will invariably be used for low-effort meming. Links to images are fine if you need a visual aid to explain an idea.
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I still am hoping that we can somehow come up with a mascot as adorable as Marsey. Honestly, the sheer variety of cute cat emotes is one of the best things about rdrama.
The rationalist mascot is the Quokka
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I nominate some sort of adorable bovine. Bulls are nature's best animals, after all.
Warthogs
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Maybe this https://rdrama.net/e/marseyn8.webp ?
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Moloch approves
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Bears are best animal and very smart. Also they've been known to deplore censors. I once saw a consor attempt to tell a polar bear that it's no different than a black bear and the polar bear ate him.
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Sharks, sharks are awesome
https://rdrama.net/images/16587834491182978.webp
I know pictures don't embed here
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I was thinking maybe a dog, for the obvious cat/dog parallels. And also, I just like dogs.
Do not take the dogpill.
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someone let me know when the site is back online
nvm
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ヽ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ノ
That's the maximum words I usually can comprehend, thank you
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I know you removed marsey but still test the direct link
https://rdrama.net/e/marseylove.webp
Edit: Nope, doesn't work automatically
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