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 Threadsβ’ 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.
UPDATE
POV: You made a mottecel VERY ANGRY and now he's going to spam your thread with the same comment 21 times 
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TheMotte represents a dunce trap within a dunce trap, as if everyone there has two dunce hats.
The first dunce trap is joining a group that calls itself Rationalists. Only dunces think: "Oh, Rationalists! Those people must be very good at being rational" and not "oh no, someone stupid enough to name their group rationalism." But some people can't understand enantiodromia.
The second dunce trap was Scott Alexander's fault. See Scott Alexander was subject to what I'm calling Woke Derangement Syndrome as part of what I'm calling the Woke Moral Panic of the Internet's post-atheist age. A bunch of atheists forgot that religion existed and was dangerous out of their fear for blue haired SJWs and all started their own political forum that was meant to spectate the culture wars. They reified their politics instantly into a form where you were ostensibly supposed to avoid 'fighting' the culture wars even as your gaze, with your fellow pseudo-intellectuals, reified those wars.
Scott Alexander wrote about neoreactionaries and pulled a fascist and racist audience in. I stumbled in not knowing this, went "hey what's with all the racists and fascists?" WHAM BANNED for noticing. Because those are meanie words, and the culture war threads were a costumed civility party.
Eventually though people noticed the racists and fascists and they moved to /r/TheMotte to avoid causing trouble for their spiritual leader, and Scott Alexander got a slap from the NYT that did not have the effect of knocking any sense into him or his community. So in a very loud and petty way, Scott Alexander cemented his relationship with TheMotte forever on his former blog and deserves to be dragged through the mud for not understanding any of this intellectual failure.
It's the most shocking and horrifying thing I've seen. A consensus reality of pseudo-intellectual dunces within a consensus reality of pseudo-intellectual dunces.
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Well of course they forgot that religion was not dangerous because it isnβt
Are you sure there were fascists though?
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Practically no mottezan will cop to the rationalist label. And I'm sure someone has already explained that this is not what the rationalist monikor means to you plenty of times.
You're actually just an r-slur with no self control that managed to get banned in the place that all you have to do to avoid being banned is not consistently shit yourself in anger when people disagree with you.
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Wow. Your dunce cap is showing. Hint: what something means in your magically objective mental space doesn't matter compared to how that meaning unfolds in practice.
Learn the difference between contempt and anger!
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Ah, so your magical thinking version of the definition trumps the actual in use definition. But then again, you're the kind of brain dead leftist that literally believes they can manipulate reality by playing word games so it's unsurprising that you'd say something so vapid.
Mere contempt can be hidden. Anger is what causes you to be expelled from yet another community.
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... he says, as he writes words in a box to attempt to manipulate reality. Like seriously you're neurodivergent: you are caught in a constant appeal to authority.
"Words mean only what I think they mean and nothing else" is not sane. "Rationalist" has the effect of drawing in people who then aren't very rational.
Your model of my mind is deeply broken. Why should I hide my contempt? Getting expelled from rationalist communities is a sort of proof by pragmatism of their intellectual dysfunction. Don't discount the importance of the Epistaxis Cycle. Not every community has an exodus of people who can't stand the smell of pure object level thinking autism anymore.
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What are you even talking about? I'm using words to describe reality. It's not an appeal to authority, we're talking about a self applied label that was invented from whole cloth. It means what it's defined to mean. It's not like 'women' where activists tried to manipulate the already existing explanative power of a word to manipulate people into changing their behavior. It's a bunch of people who thought being rational was actually much harder than most people assumed and committed themselves to behaving more rationally with various methods. Your interpretation implies christians think they're actually christ.
This is not a mistake anyone who has bothered to read the sequences would make and people who don't understand the project of rationalism would not find the movement very appealing anyways, or at least wouldn't have until there was money and power to be grifted off of the rationalists.
Dude you've been reduced to serious posting on rdrama for your intellectual output. This is not what winning looks like.
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That's neurodivergent.
If only I felt like a loser because an neurodivergent person told me I should feel shame.
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I'm not neurodivergent but I admire the neurodivergents. I have one in my board game group and she lives a blissful life. I find your contempt for the neurodivergents to be sad, is this really how you try to make yourself feel big?
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Far be it from me to tell you that you're neurodivergent just because you show a myopic focus on dictionary definitions.
I admire them, too, but that doesn't mean their tendencies can't become a difficulty that can't be left unchecked.
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isnt scott alexander the dilbert guy
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no that's Scott Adams, who is also in the story because while everyone was either ignoring the boomer bumble president or noticing that he was an authoritarian boomer narcissist, Scott Adams very Smartly wrote about how there's two movies on one screen, and this postmodern construct infected the rationalists who were generally objectivist in their outlook (since they only ever prefer to make object level arguments). what you ended up with was a community predisposed to listening to complicated explanations for how a tweet "The media is the enemy of the people" isn't fascism. On 1/6 the place was the BEST for wacko takes.
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But the media is the enemy of the people though?
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if you say it, it's valid criticism. If a politician says it, they should be shot in minecraft.
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This isn't reddit, you don't have to add "in Minecraft" you cute twink
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I'm going to write offsite at some point and I want to be at least nominally politically viable. for instance, my only use of the n-word was to direct people to "The Student As N-word" which I consider to be a perennial leftist text. Violence against elected officials is bad and I actually believe they should only be killed in minecraft or some other virtual setting.
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Why are you afraid that your online account is going to be tied to your Impassionata account? Just donβt self-dox irl or delete everything if you are really paranoid, especially since archiving here is spotty at best so you canβt be cross-reffed.
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Why do you have to politically viable? No ones going to read the dumb shit you post on another website
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I mean nominally politically viable in the sense that I mostly want my radical message to be incisive and my modrat librul message to be consistent.
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But it isnβt fascism though?
Against liberal democratic values and notions sure but itβs not even close to make someone a goosestepper, especially given the current state of media.
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no man that tweet was super fascism
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Trump is Evola?
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Trump chose moves which are definitely, obviously fascist in nature and you're an idiot if you can't understand that. "The media is the enemy of the people" is pure fascism when it comes from a politician.
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Except Iβm not and it is absolutely not obviously fascist in nature otherwise commies and leftoids who repeat that and/or similar phrases would be labeled as fascists.
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no democrat politician has said anything like "the media is the enemy of the people" and your inability to understand this distinction is pure autism.
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No.
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Yes.
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So true, bestie!
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I'm never sure how much you're a fan lmao
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I've read your arguments on reddit. I know what you are, and it is good.
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this is a superweapon
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You're sweet.
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Wow, you must be a JP fan.
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