top | item 27980673

(no title)

CobsterLock | 4 years ago

What kind of forum is this? Super cool perspective

discuss

order

silveraxe93|4 years ago

In a big nutshell:

There was a blog written by Scott Alexander called 'Slate Star Codex', which was read by a lot of big tech entrepreneurs. Last year the New York Times wrote a piece on it, and told him they would reveal his name.

Scott took issue with being doxxed (too much to unpack in this, but caused a bit of a stir including here in hackernews) and took down the blog in protest. The blog had regular open threads for discussion, with some quite active regulars in there. datasecretslox was created for some of those to keep that space for discussion.

Lately Scott moved to substack and writes at AstralCodexTen.

Cthulhu_|4 years ago

Looking at the home page it's a nice small forum, reminds me of 'back when' before the big social networks took over. I've been active on and running them for close to 20 years now.

But the activity of that one also wanes and waxes, and the community is mostly active on our Discord channel now. But, I and the other 'regulars' have changed too, we don't have the mental energy, time, arsedness and powers of concentration anymore to read and write multi paragraph essays in threads spanning the ages.

Thankfully there's a lot less drama and crazies as well. We've seen some shit.

CobsterLock|4 years ago

That small forum feel was what I appreciated. I thought they all disappeared by now, so it surprised me that the this post was added recently.

smnrchrds|4 years ago

Its name is an anagram of Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex, and Astral Codex Ten, so it is probably a forum for Scott's disciples.

thaumasiotes|4 years ago

> Its name is an anagram of Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex, and Astral Codex Ten

That would be difficult, since those three phrases are not anagrams of each other.

Where is the 'n' in 'data secrets lox'?

_Microft|4 years ago

It's an anagram of "Slate Star Codex" but not of the others.

dri_ft|4 years ago

It's the forum that frequent commenters on Slate Star Codex set up to chat while Slate Star Codex was on its NYT-induced hiatus. It seems to have developed a life of its own and is still in use even now that Slate Star Codex is back as Astral Codex Ten.