@FormerLurKONG's comment on 'TheMotte.org, a fork of rDrama that painstakingly removed all the cool features of rDrama, has a "Weekly Fun Thread" every Friday. To avoid actual humans from possibly being exposed to fun on TheMotte, they have now fully automated the Weekly Fun Threads.'

Pardon the groomcord screenshot, I just felt this was the most succinct summary and I needed a thumbnail and I'm on desktop so I don't have any cute animals immediately available to use.

!effortposters get in here, this is going to be a long one.

BACKGROUND

http://TheMotte.org came into being last September. It is a spinoff site of /r/TheMotte, which is apparently a home for "rationalists" which I've come to understand means "racists who are too afraid to call themselves racist," although in light of recent revelations, this appears to be wrong. More on that later. Our own @trihardk describes rationalists as follows:

The quokka is a meme animal that lives on Bald Island on the SW coast of Australia, where it has no natural predators. If you visit this island, it will fearlessly walk up and try to hug you. Why am I telling you this? Because the eye of Sauron has fallen on the rationalists. Rationalists = quokkas, this explains a lot about them. Their fear instincts have atrophied. When a quokka sees a predator, he walks right up; when a rationalist talks about human biodiversity on a blog under almost his real name, he doesn't flinch away.

I am apparently much more ignorant about Reddit subs and cultures than most people here and I had no idea they existed until shortly before they made their own website, so I'm not sure how much backstory about TheMotte is needed. If you take a look at the sub, or their site, though, you can see endless walls of text in the most sanctimonious, autoerotic-flatulent-asphyxiation language possible. It is so bad it is literally impossible for a remotely functional person to understand a single thing that is being said, because the eyes glaze over trying to parse a Mottepost. I am not exaggerating. I cannot stress this enough: it is physically impossible to read Motteposts without spacing out in a matter of seconds. Look, I clicked a thread at random, inexplicably titled "Why We Duel" and here are the top comments:

No one has any fricking idea what they're saying. I tried to read both comments. I could not. It is weaponizing tedium to the point that plainly spoken messages with banking details, state secrets, terroristic plans or anything else could be inserted a few lines into the thing without a care in the world because any reader is not going to make it to that point.

This is The Motte.

FUN THREADS

TheMotte, as explained in the title, has "Weekly Fun Threads" - they are, ostensibly, a place for their users to have fun every week with lighthearted posts, memes, jokes, and what-have-you. First, I would like you to take a look at some of the examples of what are considered "FUN" comments as I post a few excerpts of top-level top-rated FUN comments in a FUN thread:

Wild and crazy party lifestyles and the dangers of crippling addiction if you take a klonopin more than once a week to sleep:

Are Reddit users too pro-America?

Anyway the whole point of this thread is just because I found TheMotte's automation of FUN Threads™ so that a user no longer has to dirty their hands with once-weekly mandatory fun to be really funny. I'm burying this message here in hopes that if anyone is actually reading this, they will keep reading.

Assorted Sneering

The phrase "toxic simulacra" has been used on TheMotte. Not only that, but it has been used three times.

The first instance of toxic simulacra can be found here, from @Supah_Schmendrick:

https://www.themotte.org/post/341/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/61862?context=8#context

I, again, have no idea what it says because I cannot bring myself to read it. It was very well-received by Motte standards and got 20 updooterinos, though. But I was able to read another comment from @Supah_Schmendrick!

I am very confident that this is par for the course with Mottecels.

Oh wait oh my god I found another old top-rated old FUN Thread screenshot in which a user asks for books about algebra and then has a discussion about them!

Anyway, moving along.

Motte Mechanics

As touched on in the preamble here, TheMotte is a Redditfugee community. They weren't banned from Reddit. It's not at all clear why they left Reddit. They weren't subject to sanctions, or emojiposting, or anything, but they did make the jump from Reddit to their own offsite with none of the features and a fraction of the userbase.

I think it had something to do with Reddit censorship?

So, one of the first things the mottecels did was have @TwoLargeSnakesMating remove all the fun rDrama features like all emojis, the casino, the shop, the ability to post images in comments, and so on, They also removed the coin system. They didn't just turn it into karma, they completely removed the entire gamified voting posting system in which users receive X in exchange for upmarseys. Which is all well and good at first blush, but they kept the Nu-Forum system wherein comments and threads are displayed in order of the number of votes they receive. So coins and karma are gone, but you still need to sufficiently circlejerk with your e-peers in order to have your posts seen.

Literally.

Because aside from the vote-ranked system, all users are shadowbanned and need to have their posts and comments approved by a gigajanny by default until they receive a sufficient, hidden truescore value. Exactly like how Reddit default subs will bar users from posting anything until they've gotten enough karma in other subs. Users are not notified of this at any point: they have no idea they're preemptively shadowbanned and the hidden truescore mechanic and threshhold is not mentioned anywhere. And it gets worse because if your hidden karma drops too low, you go back to being shadowbanned for all future comments and posts. If people - or even one person, with enough free time on his hands - disagree with you on the website about disagreeing with people, you are mechanically unable to talk anymore. You're not notified of this, either, of course. @justcool393 has fallen victim to that. I have as well. Which brings me to my final sneer:

I received the low-karma secret-shadowban treatment (plus an actual, real, 3 day ban) for posting a meme. In a Weekly Fun Thread. It was not offensive, it was not edgy, it was not combative. It was literally just a Harry Potter meme and they smashed me with a 3 day ban and -27 secretkarma over it. When the ban expired, I asked in the "Weekly Small Scale Question Thread" why a meme in the FUN Thread warranteed a ban, to confusing results, ranging from "Is it about Keffals?", "I don't understand it", "STOP CALLING IT HOGLEG", and "you are a bad faith actor trying to get us deplatformed."(?????)

Further Confusion

I said earlier that I think TheMotte is just for racists who are too afraid to call themselves racist, because that's what I've been told, so I searched the ol BIPOCword there and surprisingly, got 0 thread results and only 77 comment results. All 77 seem to have the word in quotes, like they're being extra careful to show that they're quoting someone and not actually saying the word? But all the same, I kept scrolling and I found this gem which is far and away the most Reddit comment I have ever seen off of Reddit:

https://www.themotte.org/post/427/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/80720?context=8#context

It is heavily upmarseyd. So I am really not sure what to make of TheMotte besides that everyone there is a disgusting subhuman who absolutely smells like stale Fritos and should be relentlessly bullied into going outside so that they can be bullied there instead and stop stragging up an rDrama codebase derivative.

This thread is all over the place and I am very sorry. I just thought automating the Weekly Fun Thread was funny.