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
Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris
Contributions for the week of September 30, 2024
Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris
Contributions for the week of October 7, 2024
Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris
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Notes -
Squeaking in on the last day with a post that I would personally not categorize as "quality" is kind of interesting. We talked about this before, that certain sorts of highly partisan speech get lots of upvoting and AAQC reports, and I think it's probably not very healthy for the ecosystem. This isn't to say that I think my post is bad or that I don't stand by the position, but I really don't think it's particularly insightful.
Yeah, I feel like I am in the same boat as you. I think the only mercy there is that AAQCed rants with the right political valence, like the one I produced, often wind up stringing along more deserving posts like Primaprimaprima's (who was my interlocutor in that exchange, frankly produced much better and more interesting points, and would probably still have been sitting at negative upvotes if it weren't for the AAQC-induced attention). Perhaps someone with a more optimistic outlook could say that inspiring actually good responses is a quality all its own.
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I’m sort of disagreeing here. The point of a debate forum is to debate in good faith. And quite often political debates are capable of being good faith debates.
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That can't be fixed. There is literally no way mechanically to prevent people from treating the AAQC report as a super-upvote. You would have to address it at a cultural level, but that would also be impossible without removing a big chunk of the people who come here in the first place.
That's a drop in the water though. This place hasn't been healthy for a long time, and arguably wasn't even at its conception. Then again, one community's illness is another community's peak condition, so maybe I'm wrong and this place is good precisely for why I think it's ill.
I don't think it can be, nobody just stumbles into these offshoot communities, so they tend to degenerate into a very base form of whatever birthed them into existence.
If anything, I'm kind of impressed at how similar this place seems to the subreddit from two years ago, although values-level disagreement is obviously lower.
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Are the AAQC's not reviewed? I assumed mods looked at the reports and used discretion to make a cut. Which I guess means the janitor duty thing goes all the way and the AAQCs are only reviewed by the handful of people as temp jannies. But @naraburns is still (thankfully) editing these lists so I imagine they are glancing?
AAQC inflation makes sense in a period of decreased activity, decreased quality, or both. If
jannieswe want to encourage Good Posts to keep coming the gold star is all we have besides uptokes. Which can include bread-and-butter top level posts without big surprises, such as mine there, if the place is lacking them. But to compare my submission to a contribution like Dean's series of comments-- these are in a different weight class with regards to quality, insight, and effort.Yes. Eternal struggle doomed to failure. It's fine.
In defense of everyone else, I was on bed rest for about half of those, which explains both the availability of time.
I also highly appreciate the inputs that everyone makes that make it into the AAQC list. Don't underestimate yourself and what might strike a chord.
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Yes, something like 200-300 comments are nominated each month. Most of them are plausibly "quality." I read all of them, but the curation process is primarily driver by user sentiment--nominations are the number one thing, nobody gets an AAQC without at least one other user nominating them (and the mods rarely nominate anyone).
After user sentiment has been accounted for, the selection involves a lot of throwing stuff out before opting stuff in; I toss out obviously rule-breaking posts, or stuff that was clearly nominated as a joke. Eventually I get down to a reasonable number of posts to read them over again and think about what each one does. I try to get through the queue weekly but realistically I end up doing most of the work at the end of each month.
I have always regarded the AAQC process as a very important "carrot" for the community, and one of the best things to come out of the old SSC subreddit. I don't do nearly as much content moderation or community participation as I used to, for what are probably pretty predictable life-related reasons. But it's important to me that the AAQCs get done, which I suppose is why I have now been curating them for almost four years. (For contrast: when I took over, counting the AAQC reports from the SSC subreddit, the AAQC report had existed for about 3.5 years.)
But I would not be able to curate them at all if Zorba hadn't created a bespoke queuing system for the process. I think people underestimate just how much our little community depends on the technical prowess of a few key, committed individuals. The work I do, could be done by just about anyone; what makes me useful is that I am willing to actually and consistently do it. The work Zorba does, I wouldn't even know how to begin doing.
And, sincerely, thank you for doing so. It sounds like a lot of work, and it provides a lot of value.
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For the sake of positive reinforcement- I appreciate them, I welcome the chance to read them, and I hope they continue for some time to come, by you or otherwise.
Thank you and the team for maintaining the system that lets this happen.
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Maybe? It's not like you can tell if you get
blocked andreported outside of what comes back every month, and most of the AAQCs tend to have high positive scores anyway. There's only one exception this month with [currently] a score of 0, and it is definitely not something that's ideologically aligned with most of its replies given all the others are [organically] pushing +20 - which then raises the question as to who nominated it (I'm pretty sure you can't nominate yourself).I think a lot of the problem is that, for the moment, [the average poster] is in fact correct about their political outgroup being in the wrong/their desired self-enrichment is more destructive than their political ingroup- that's a consequence of having a community made up of people who get objectively right answers more often than not. The anti-boo-outgroup[ers] rule exists partially to protect the members of the outgroup that are not holding those beliefs just to be selfish, after all (outside of "the selfish answer and the right answer are the same picture", which brings the people who can't get power from being correct into inherent conflict with people that are more correct than average). And it's inherently harder to defend those beliefs, because there's never any constructive plan to address the failures other than double down, because having power means you don't need to think about constructive plans. But this is the just the thesis of "right is the new left".
And a second-order effect of this tension is that it naturally causes flame-outs after a while, especially among people whose political sympathies lie more with the collective outgroup, because that's the problem when you apply 'anti-wrong-answer, not anti-wrong-person' over a collective of people whose replies might be permissible to the forum at large, but not be beneficial towards that goal. And that line is a lie anyway because a wrong answer from a person actually does give you valuable information about them ['blameless culture' management styles, and 'all men are equal', also suffer from this tension], so being wrong about something puts you in a position of weakness, and people instinctively hate feeling weak, because weakness is death.
Then, the only thing that will prevent you from quitting a competition you're losing [and the disgust reaction/emotion is partially designed to reinforce your body's definition of 'losing'] is a devotion to some other goal. It's the emotional equivalent to seeing a 100 dollar bill on the street [in the economist's sense], but it's got a bunch of dogshit all over it and people are watching you; are you going to pick the bill up anyway, or is the dogshit going to 'win' and prevent you from doing so? And then, what are you going to say about the dirty money when others ask you about it- you're going to say that investigating it would have given the dogshit power, because you had to overcome it to get that money.
After a while, people get devotion fatigue and quit (loudly, quietly, doesn't matter). This place grows or dies based on the rate of old contributors are flaming out- growing if new contributors are 'joining' faster than the old ones are quitting, and dying if the reverse is true. (Which is why one of the suggestions is 'make it harder for them to flame out by slackening the rules', and balancing to what extent that would be destroying the community's goals to preserve the community itself.)
"Make sure to like, comment, and subscribe!" say all the YouTubers. The existence of upvotes doesn't negate my point.
Even if this was true, you should never buy into your own hype.
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It's an interesting question. It's not exactly healthy, in that it's not what I'd want to see in a community like this, but I think it's as good as it's going to get, given the circumstances. This may all be projection, but a part of the issue seems to be us accumulating cynicism as we grow older - I don't know how much I can play "steelman the opponent" post- gamergate, BLM, metoo, BLM2, COVID, and "WPATH to hell" - but more importantly I think it's less of a local culture problem, than a global culture problem. The culture of discourse that the rat-sphere sprang from is dead and buried. Personally I think it's because discourse is an existential threat to our ruling regime, and so people need to retreat to echo-chambers just to maintain society. From there, it's not exactly surprising that this place has become rather skewed in one direction, but the depressing thing is it's still better than the majority of alternatives.
It never had or has to be that way.
Why on earth is that your conclusion when the far simpler one is that people don't remain in spaces they find uncomfortable?
Sure, it doesn't have to, but surely you see how maintaining the levels of open-mindedness one had when they were 20, is fighting an uphill battle?
The question is why are they finding those spaces uncomfortable? We've had several high-profile flameouts stemming from tolerating too much Actual Nazism, racism and sexism, but basically none stemming from tolerating Actual Communism, CRT, and patriarchy theory.
When one holds views that are unpopular with the establishment, one has no choice but to develop a tolerance for pro-establishment views as they're being expressed everywhere, but there is no need to develop such tolerance when you're holding prop establishment views to begin with. You can always go somewhere where opposition to your ideas is not allowed to be questioned.
As to why I think open discourse is an existential threat to the regime, it's because they tell us so! Western governments are quite open about their need to control the kinds of views that are allowed to be spread on social media.
The other reason I usually hear for posters feeling uncomfortable boils down to being piled on. I have a lot of sympathy for this, but attempts to find solutions haven't really gone anywhere. I always suggest turning off the voting system, and rate-limiting responses to minority-view posters. Do you think that would help? Do you have any ideas on what could be done to alleviate feeling piled on?
Other than that have I missed something? Are there reasons for discomfort that don't boil down to tolerance for repugnant views, or being piled on?
Likely a good suggestion here, but I do not think doing so improved Scott's substacks comments or anyone's substack comments. Not having a voting system does not seem to make DSL any more peaceful or open, but there's other structural barriers there.
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Voting is literally the only way the community can respond to a persistent troll the mods have decided to enable. They can ban people for criticizing the troll, they can ban people for reporting the troll, but as far as I know they can't ban them for downvoting the troll.
I don't know why anyone would want to take that one recourse away from the users.
There was only one instance that I recall where this was an actual issue, and it was Darwin, and by the time we moved here, even the mods were tired of his schtick.
Because for every person that gets downvoted for being a troll, there are scores that get downvoted for having an unpopular opinion.
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TheMotte does seem to have homogenised somewhat faster than DSL, and this is an obvious potential cause.
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I'm the wrong person to ask this because I was constantly fighting against uncharitable depictions of wokeness even when I believed many of the same things the more prominent people here believe. Whether it's because I have more quokka in me or I am simply better at decoupling my anger at wokeness from the argument I'm willing to believe about it, I've always tried to muster the energy to take people to task for uncharitable arguments which are directionally correct.
I've never struggled in this regard. Not since day one. I can charitably describe the views of 2020 election truthers even when I vehemently disagree with them.
Oh, then sure, I agree - people who can easily spaces to share their politics won't develop resistance to opposing views, and the left has this in spades online. I think your framing denies the majority the right to express discomfort with views without it being a stain on their character.
I think the first definitely would, I've never seen the second proposed. I was and still am an advocate for the first, I suggested it a long time back as well. I think the second has some issues, though, because you'd have to control for the quality of the responses. It doesn't help if a bunch of incendiary and uncharitable commenters get there first. Or perhaps the people who get there first don't make good arguments?
It's a fundamentally difficult problem to solve, as I think you are aware. I suggested to Zorba that this space lacked left-wing chatter i.e comments which made it clear that any left-wingers/wokes/pro-establishment types were not without reinforcements. It's not rationally honest, but it's psychologically helpful.
Edit: Another idea would be to pressure people away from exo-sadism (the belief that your enemies only act they way they do to always hurt you no matter what). I believe this is a serious impediment to getting anyone who isn't already anti-woke to come here and possibly defend their ideas or critique yours. Just as anti-abortion advocates would not remain in spaces where they are presumed to just hate women, your opponents are not going to show up if they are presumed to be evil, monstrous, inhuman, etc.
Yes, there are people who, if accurately described, would fit that description. But in consequentialist terms, it would have greater value for the plurality of views if half the political spectrum wasn't treated as if it were the sworn descendant of Stalin himself.
"The argument I'm willing to believe about it" might be the crux of the issue here. Like you, I can charitably describe almost any view, but I'm having real trouble believing these views are held honestly. What good is my Charitable Steelman about accommodations for trans people being about alleviating the suffering of people afflicted with a rare condition called gender dysphoria, when people spearheading gender affirming care are putting up conferences where they say you don't need dysphoria to be trans, that schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder shouldn't disqualify you from transitioning, and for that matter maybe we should dispense with that pesky binariness, and start affirming eunuchs as an identity? At some point it's the steelman that caricatures actually held views, rather than the supposed strawman.
That depends on what you mean by "expressing discomfort". I think we all agree that FCFromSSC improved when he abandoned the firebrand speeches about not wanting to share a country with the other tribe, and embraced exactly the kind of decoupling you were advocating for earlier. I wouldn't call it a stain on someone's character if they can't do that, it's far too human of a flaw, I can't pull it off myself most of the time, but it seems it's something necessary for both sides to do in order to create the kind of space you'd prefer.
I agree, but the advantage is that it's a structural, rather than a cultural measure. The latter, like your "no exo-sadism" suggestion has the issue of needing buy-in from the majority of participants. If the problem is the current culture, you're going to have a hard time convincing people who maintain it to do a 180.
I'm not sure what you mean by "rationally dishonest". I agree that something that would signal "there are other people like me here" would help in drawing more left-wingers, but tribal chatter usually boils down to shitting on the outgroup, which is exactly what you want to avoid, from what I understand. Even if we found a way around that, is the idea here that the regulars here would perform such chatter to attract new left-wing users? Won't that fall apart rather quickly, the moment we discuss any issue of importance (and maybe that's what you meant by "rationally dishonest")?
I'm not sure I agree with the premise. Back when we had a much more of a 50-50 split, we regularly had to field accusations of racism / sexism / xeno-islamo-trans-phobia, and we kind of had to take that on the chin. In fact, I kinda think that to the extent you're right, it's more of a product of Current Year culture than being some iron law of human behavior. I distinctly recall Christians, creationists, etc., showing up on atheist forums of yore, trying to convert us, no matter how much they got shat on.
This goes back to the earlier point about cynicism. I have no issues taking someone at their word when they say "I believe in X, but I don't want any of that crazy Y and Z stuff", the problem we're having is that for a while we've been seeing the "Y and Z are not happening, and it's a good thing that they are" pattern unfold several times. When we start discussing issues X', Y', and Z', I can take a specific supporter of X' at his word, but it's going to be hard to believe that the movement he's a part of is not going to push for Y' and Z' in short order. If specific charity is not enough, and group-charity is necessary... that's going to be a tall order.
I think it's good because it reminds people what the better position is. Not just oppositional, but actually taking a stance which doesn't amount to rejecting one side or the other by embracing the opposite totally. But I acknowledge that it's hard to say something like "you're saying the truth, but you should be more sensitive to presentation" when the issue might be so lopsided.
But we don't expect people to be just human. We expect a level of rationality and reason.
I'm staring any my own response and trying to determine the same thing. How did I forget what I meant in ~24 hours? If I think of it, I'll let you know.
Right, but we're talking about people who don't have that thick skin. The asymmetry means that if you want to hear their ideas, you'd have to "take it", as it were, when they say uncharitable and unkind things.
That's a tall ask, and I recognize that. I can't say I'd tolerate it if I was treated that way. So maybe this whole thing is doomed from the start.
I think that often comes down to the vast inferential distance between the two sides. One man's hypocrisy is another's "clear distinct situations".
I suppose you're more right than I initially thought - this space probably is as good as it could be for what it's aiming at.
Well, the latter has the issue that sometimes one might hold a strong opinion, and feigning neutrality would be hard to pull off, and come off us dishonest anyway, but on the former I guess you're right, and I'll try to keep that in mind. I think I even managed to pull it off one time with words to the effect of "I do have my doubts sometimes, and if I'm wrong the opposing view that I find most likely to be true is...", followed by an expose on a group that holds a completely different view, which I disagree on the level of fundamental values. If that fits with what you had in mind, I guess it's something worth going for.
Funnily enough, that's something I'm willing to concede immediately. My tendency to sperg on some issues will probably get in the way of living up to this standard, but it's a standard worth aiming for.
I may have lost the track of the conversation somewhat, but I think that was my point. This is why I'm salty at all the people that outright flamed out - I thought we all signed up on for some baseline level of decoupling. But yeah, in the end we're all only human.
To be fair, I see how the roles are reversed now. It takes a different form, but between the downvotes on unpopular views, and the constant background hostility to progressivism, it must take a pretty thick skin to post here, if someone is leaning left. The only thing I'll say in our defense is that it's still better than most mainstream forums, as we don't ban for disagreement, and are at least theoretically aware of the value of having dissenting opinions. But in any case, my hat is off for the lefties that still hang out here.
Sometimes, maybe even often as you say, but there are cases where it's really pants-down "you literally said this never happens" type stuff. "No one is doing surgeries on minors" is something still being repeated by people who haven't caught up with what's actually happening.
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Is that even good enough? My experience increasingly is that any place not straight-up banning people in accordance with progressive views will bleed away all the progressives posters, who'll explicitly state that they're leaving since they're not willing to share a space with -ists. And it's obvious why, given that they can always go to reddit or similar where they can and do get anyone banned when they're losing an argument. The SSC subreddit, while still better than reddit overall, is a prime example of this dynamic.
I don't even completely disagree with you, this place is clearly populated by a very stable niche at this point, even if it's a very different one than what some on the left allege. But I also don't know any place more tolerant of differing viewpoints, and at this point I'm at a loss how you even can get progressives to join a not-progressive space.
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This is a social club for people who largely share at least a few political beliefs. I think there’s still a lot of spirited debate and disagreement, though.
I agree, but the political lean has it's issues. For example I'm a big fan of the "post something wrong and wait until someone smugly corrects you" method of truth seeking, and it can't work if your wrongposting feeds into the bias of the community.
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