thread_id stringlengths 1 4 | title stringlengths 1 365 | author stringclasses 218
values | posted_at stringdate 2022-09-04 17:45:21 2026-05-06 09:00:09 ⌀ | votes int64 -37 106 ⌀ | url stringlengths 35 91 ⌀ | body stringlengths 0 256k | posts listlengths 1 3.04k |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 04, 2022 | ZorbaTHut | 2022-09-04T17:45:21Z | 26 | https://www.themotte.org/post/1/smallscale-question-sunday-for-september-04 | Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated. | [
{
"post_id": "36",
"position": 1,
"depth": 0,
"parent_post_id": null,
"author": "ffrreerree",
"posted_at": "2022-09-04T18:13:24Z",
"votes": 5,
"body": "What is the plan if no one posts here? Would it make sense to announce an impending shutdown of the subreddit so that people actuall... |
2 | Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022 | ZorbaTHut | 2022-09-04T17:49:56Z | 106 | https://www.themotte.org/post/2/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week | "This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts.\n'Culture war'\nis vaguely define(...TRUNCATED) | [{"post_id":"38","position":1,"depth":0,"parent_post_id":null,"author":"JulianRota","posted_at":"202(...TRUNCATED) |
3 | In Defense of The Boring Company | ZorbaTHut | 2022-09-04T18:00:03Z | 33 | https://www.themotte.org/post/3/in-defense-of-the-boring-company | "I'm going to talk about what the Boring Company is doing and why I think it is not only not a terri(...TRUNCATED) | [{"post_id":"35","position":1,"depth":0,"parent_post_id":null,"author":"ZorbaTHut","posted_at":"2022(...TRUNCATED) |
4 | Old Culture War Thread: Your good books list | freethought | 2022-09-04T20:31:46Z | 22 | https://www.themotte.org/post/4/old-culture-war-thread-your-good | "There was a culture war post several years ago where users contributed their favourite books, inclu(...TRUNCATED) | [{"post_id":"89","position":1,"depth":0,"parent_post_id":null,"author":"Southkraut","posted_at":"202(...TRUNCATED) |
5 | Test | Jim | null | null | null | A place for people who want to test their ideas. | [{"post_id":"145","position":1,"depth":0,"parent_post_id":null,"author":"Jim","posted_at":"2022-09-0(...TRUNCATED) |
6 | Greetings Mottizens! | UraniumDonGER | 2022-09-04T22:17:56Z | 12 | https://www.themotte.org/post/6/greetings-mottizens | I come in peace, just want to see whats around here | [{"post_id":"143","position":1,"depth":0,"parent_post_id":null,"author":"UraniumDonGER","posted_at":(...TRUNCATED) |
7 | What if the hackers come for us? | cuwurious_strag_CA | 2022-09-04T22:31:55Z | 4 | https://www.themotte.org/post/7/what-if-the-hackers-come-for | "Gab - hacked\n.\nTruth social - hacked\n. What if they come for us? The rdrama codebase probably is(...TRUNCATED) | [{"post_id":"191","position":1,"depth":0,"parent_post_id":null,"author":"suy","posted_at":"2022-09-0(...TRUNCATED) |
8 | Do we already have shadowbans? | EyesAlight | 2022-09-04T23:24:25Z | 3 | https://www.themotte.org/post/8/do-we-already-have-shadowbans | "I noticed that the comment counts don't seem to line up with the total comments on this post, and a(...TRUNCATED) | [{"post_id":"229","position":1,"depth":0,"parent_post_id":null,"author":"ZorbaTHut","posted_at":"202(...TRUNCATED) |
9 | Hi! A few questions from the co-founder of rDrama.net! | ZorbaTHut | null | null | null | A place for people who want to test their ideas. | [{"post_id":"206","position":1,"depth":0,"parent_post_id":null,"author":"Jeffthespammer","posted_at"(...TRUNCATED) |
10 | Crazy water cat | Admin | 2022-09-04T23:28:29Z | 8 | https://www.themotte.org/post/10/crazy-water-cat | Can't post images but if I could I would post a cute water cat | [{"post_id":"228","position":1,"depth":0,"parent_post_id":null,"author":"carpathianflorist","posted_(...TRUNCATED) |
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codex dataset card
> generated by Codex_
Dataset Card for themotte_260510
Dataset Summary
A structured crawl of public discussion threads and comments from The Motte, a longform discussion forum centered on culture-war analysis, current events, politics, social science, philosophy, media, technology, and adjacent community topics. The dataset contains 1,615 thread rows and 419,741 nested comments, preserving comment IDs, parent IDs, traversal position, nesting depth, timestamps, vote/score values, authors, and text bodies.
The crawl targets public The Motte thread pages and public comment-loading endpoints visible without privileged access.
Content Warning: The Motte hosts controversial political and social discussion. The dataset may contain offensive language, inflammatory claims, references to real people, and discussions of sensitive topics.
Dataset Details
Dataset Sources
- Source Website: https://www.themotte.org
- Source pages/endpoints: public
/post/<id>thread pages,/viewmore/...comment pagination, and/morecomments/...collapsed-comment endpoints
Uses
Direct Use
Suitable for:
- Academic research into longform forum dynamics and pseudonymous online communities
- Computational social science research on political, social, and cultural discussion
- Linguistic analysis of argumentative and informal web discourse
- Studying thread/reply structures, voting patterns, and high-depth discussion trees
- Information retrieval and semantic search over The Motte threads and comments
Dataset Structure
Schema
| Column | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
thread_id |
string | Unique The Motte thread/post identifier |
title |
string | Thread title |
author |
string | Thread author username |
posted_at |
string or null | Thread timestamp (ISO-8601), when available |
votes |
int64 or null | Thread score/vote value shown at crawl time, when available |
url |
string or null | Direct The Motte URL for the thread, when available |
body |
string | Thread body text |
posts |
list | Flat list of comments associated with the thread |
Posts Struct
| Field | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
post_id |
string | Unique comment identifier |
position |
int64 | 1-based position in flat traversal order within the thread comments |
depth |
int64 | Nesting depth (0 = top-level comment) |
parent_post_id |
string or null | ID of the parent comment this replies to |
author |
string or null | Comment author username, when available |
posted_at |
string or null | Comment timestamp (ISO-8601), when available |
votes |
int64 or null | Comment score/vote value shown at crawl time, when available |
body |
string | Comment body text |
Statistics
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Threads | 1,615 |
| Comments | 419,741 |
| Thread date range | 2022-09-04 to 2026-05-06 |
| Comment date range | 2022-09-04 to 2026-05-08 |
| Mean comments per thread | 259.9 |
| Median comments per thread | 52 |
| Longest thread | 3,041 comments |
| Max nesting depth | 105 |
| Thread authors | 218 |
| Comment authors | 2,061 |
| Total authors | 2,081 |
| Threads with no comments | 0 (0.0%) |
| Threads missing timestamp/vote/URL metadata | 82 (5.1%) |
| Comments with a parent comment | 404,106 (96.3%) |
| Top-level comments | 15,635 (3.7%) |
| Comments with missing author metadata | 583 (0.1%) |
| Negative-score threads | 34 (2.1%) |
| Negative-score comments | 22,024 (5.2%) |
| Blank thread bodies | 57 (3.5%) |
| Blank comment bodies | 8,814 (2.1%) |
| Mean thread body length | 2,735 characters |
| Median thread body length | 438 characters |
| Mean comment body length | 688 characters |
| Median comment body length | 375 characters |
The largest recurring thread families are Culture War Roundup (191 threads, 323,172 comments), Small-Scale Question Sunday (194 threads, 31,774 comments), Friday Fun Thread (192 threads, 22,783 comments), and Wellness Wednesday (191 threads, 12,868 comments).
The most prolific thread authors include PaperclipPerfector (756 threads), naraburns (192), ArjinFerman (98), Soriek (26), and ZorbaTHut (22). The most prolific comment authors include hydroacetylene (13,293 comments), The_Nybbler (8,509), ArjinFerman (7,278), self_made_human (6,172), and netstack (6,046).
Dataset Creation
Curation Rationale
The Motte is a distinctive longform discussion forum with unusually deep comment trees and extensive recurring discussion threads. A structured archive makes this corpus available for research into online deliberation, pseudonymous intellectual communities, political discussion, moderation norms, and the evolution of high-context web forums.
Source Data
Data Collection and Processing
- Tool: Custom Python scripts using
aiohttp,aiosqlite, and BeautifulSoup - Initial crawl: The scraper iterated public numeric
/post/<id>thread pages, stored resume state in SQLite, and extracted discovered comment IDs plus pending pagination/collapsed-comment requests - Comment hydration: A follow-up script replayed saved main-page,
viewmore, andmorecommentssources to recover rendered comment bodies and store raw HTML plus parsed comment data - Scope: Public The Motte pages and comment-loading endpoints visible without privileged access
- No content filtering was applied to successfully crawled text
- Threads are stored as one Parquet row per thread
- Comments are stored as one flat list in the
postscolumn for each thread - Parent-child relationships are preserved using
parent_post_id,position, anddepth - Vote/score values are snapshot values from crawl time
Who are the source data producers?
The Motte users posting under pseudonymous usernames.
Bias, Risks, and Limitations
Content Risks
- Content reflects the interests, norms, moderation policies, and epistemic commitments of The Motte community
- Discussions may include offensive, inflammatory, politically charged, or otherwise controversial language
- Posts may contain speculative or unsupported claims presented with varying levels of confidence
- Sensitive topics may include politics, race, gender, religion, crime, war, mental health, sexuality, bioethics, immigration, and named public or private individuals
- Historical discussions may contain outdated claims, broken links, or references to controversies without later context
Structural Limitations
- The crawl is a snapshot processed on 2026-05-10 and includes no content discovered beyond that snapshot
- The latest thread timestamp in the file is 2026-05-06, while the latest comment timestamp is 2026-05-08
- Vote/score values, deletions, comment visibility, and user metadata are snapshot values and may have changed since crawl time
- The dataset is limited to content available through public pages and public comment-loading endpoints without privileged access
- Some rows have missing timestamp, vote, URL, or author metadata, generally reflecting unavailable, deleted, or otherwise incomplete source markup
- The Parquet file does not include raw HTML, source fetch metadata, upvote/downvote breakdowns, or hydration provenance tables from the scraper SQLite database
Personal and Sensitive Information
- No systematic PII detection or redaction was performed
- Users generally post under pseudonyms, but usernames or post bodies may contain identifying information
- Posts and comments may refer to real individuals, organizations, events, or personal experiences
- The dataset should be treated as containing potentially sensitive information
Licence and Redistribution
No licence was identified for the source forum content. This dataset is therefore marked as license: unknown.
The dataset consists of scraped public forum posts authored by third parties. The dataset publisher does not claim ownership of the underlying post text and does not grant additional rights beyond any rights users may already have under applicable law.
Users are responsible for determining whether their intended use is lawful, including with respect to copyright, privacy, data protection, and platform terms.
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