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.
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
- "Republicans/Conservatives have been hamstrung for decades by the dynamics of government work."
- "Which is the final contradiction: talking constantly about Master Morality is often a form of Slave Morality."
Contributions for the week of June 24, 2024
Contributions for the week of July 1, 2024
Contributions for the week of July 8, 2024
Contributions for the week of July 15, 2024
- "A Trip to the Mall and our Society-Wide Experiment in Extreme Trust"
- "I came away from this saying, the Cybertruck really is as fast or faster than a 911, even with a lot of cargo."
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I'm trying to come here to discuss the culture war, not to wage it. I consider myself to be on LoTT's side, but don't really care to exaggerate how bad something that happened to them was to prove what side I'm on. It was a little bit bad, but that's all, and I don't think they deserved it.
Is there any actual person out there who really thought LoTT was super serious professional journalists who exhaustively verified everything they touched and is now shocked and not trusting of them because Trace managed to trick them? Probably not literally zero people, but I suspect it's below Lizardman's constant. I feel like we're all just being performatively mad because it looks bad. It's almost like a thing where the less bad it actually is, the more people get mad about it. When something is actually really bad, everyone knows it, so there's no reason to or value from getting really mad.
Metz's article about Scott probably did cause a measurable number of people who were unaware of Scott or had a mildly positive opinion of him to now have a negative opinion. It also caused a huge flurry of reactions from Scott himself and countless other people. So no argument needs to be made.
The whole incident was probably a lot more damaging to Trace than to LoTT. The fact that he did it, posted about it in that tone, and had a poor reaction to people being upset about it. I think a substantial number of people in our community who thought well of him and respected him before now think rather less of him, and I include myself in that category.
I think that's the wrong question. There's a difference between "not verified as well as the New York Times should be able to verify" and "not verified at all". It's possible to believe that LoTT verifies well enough to not get very many fakes of the conventional kind (by people who intend for the fake to be believed by the audience) even if Trace managed to sneak something through.
But even then, the harm done isn't to that group. The harm done is that now every time someone brings up LoTT, they face a barrage of complaints "look what Trace did, LoTT never verifies", etc. even if those complaints are exaggerated or mistaken. Just in this thread we've seen someone not understand that Trace had to fake a second round of evidence. Trace's role in creating such misconceptions and forcing LoTT supporters to dispel them is harm.
It's got to be put into perspective though. LoTT's primary presence is on Twitter/X as far as I can tell. There, they have 3.3 million followers and their posts seem to commonly get hundreds of replies and thousands of likes and reposts, and regularly get reposted by elected Republican politicians. I can't read all of the replies to their posts, but I've skimmed some and I don't see any mention of that incident. They've also got a Substack, and as far as I can tell, nobody is commenting on their substack about the incident either. Therefore, I think that in the real world, the number of people who actually care about that is a rounding error compared to their total audience.
I'm sure LoTT has plenty of haters too. I'm not sure where to find them specifically, but I'd bet there are 10,000x more LGBTQ+ activists who hate their guts with a fiery passion for going against their agenda than reasonable-seeming people on the Motte who falsely think they don't verify their content well enough.
I don't think I've seen anyone actually comment on LoTT organically here, i.e. not in a thread that started based on Trace and the things he's said and done. We're kind of in different worlds - they're in the outrage-bait and memes world, we're in the long-winded calm and reasonable discussion of things world, and we don't really interact that much. If someone was to tell them that some person on the Motte was mildly smearing them, they'd probably be like "Huh? Where's that? I never heard of that place. Why are you bothering me with this? Go away, I'm busy finding new memes to post."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link