This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
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Notes -
Interesting that I think a few of those posts are bad or just not special. One of the post is just taking a simple argument and making it 5k words while still ignoring to address the criticisms that are evident in a 200 word synopsis. My definition of very bad writing when you just go for length.
Another I thought was just stringing together a few hot takes. Which I don’t think is generally bad because it can be a starting point for bringing up an issue but I wouldn’t consider for a quality contribution because it lacked specialized or depth of knowledge on the issue.
So write something better.
An AAQC need not be Pulitzer material; it requires no expertise; it needn't even be correct, though all of those things could count toward an AAQC. I have approved many, many AAQCs that I'm confident were just objectively wrong. AAQCs are not an endorsement of brilliance or accuracy; they are a way of noticing and rewarding people who make positive contributions to the community through their engagement. What's a "positive contribution?" That's a qualitative question answered substantially by the user nomination and review process. Hundreds of posts are nominated every month, most of them quite plausibly AAQCs; the main reason I winnow them at all is that we do like to keep the list to a manageable size. If someone else were curating the list, it would probably be a little different--but less than you might think.
So like... it's okay that you think a few, or even many, of these posts are not the sort of thing you want to see. But there's exactly one thing you could do about that: write something better.
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In all likelihood, the post does contain more information than could be compressed into 200 words. It’s pretty hard to write coherent, sensible sentences that literally say nothing, unless you really go out of your way to do it.
Typically when people say that writing “uses too many words” or “says nothing”, what they actually mean is that there is content there, but they simply find the content to be trite, false, uninteresting, irrelevant, etc. All of which may be valid criticisms. But that’s different from there being no content at all.
Or that it's repetitive, saying the same thing in too many ways rather than saying new things.
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I think in general a debate has a scissor statement in it. Let’s take an example - Barack Obama isn’t black or Joe Biden isn’t Catholic. Let’s say we had an election with one of them and it was becoming a campaign issue.
An equivalent would be writing 5k words on Obama’s genealogy. Doing some DNA analysis, skin testing for melanin, etc. The people that will disagree and you are trying to prove wrong will be entirely concerned with a lack of ADOS and other connections to American blacks. Same for Biden and Catholic where they will just point to his abortion stance and lack of obedience to the Pope. To prove to the other side and defeat the scissor you need to find a check to Pro-life or other similar actions he’s doing to promote that. The scissor statements can be very short. And if you are writing 5k words to defeat the scissor it doesn’t matter how much you write adjacent to the scissor. And I think that is bad writing if the goal of the writing was to win the argument and convince the other side your opinion is better than the existing view.
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