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 -
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.)
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