Y'all must be trying to kill me. The sheer volume of quality contribution reports, combined with the outrageous volume of text you maniacs generate every week, made this an astonishing month to be sorting through the hopper. By far the busiest month for AAQCs since I took over the task. This made winnowing them down especially challenging, and some very good posts simply didn't make the cut simply because the competition was so fierce.
Good job, everyone.
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. Here we go:
Quality Contributions in Culture Peace
@problem_redditor:
Contributions for the week of September 26, 2022
Battle of the Sexes
@problem_redditor:
@Ben___Garrison:
Contributions for the week of October 3, 2022
Identity Politics
Contributions for the week of October 10, 2022
Battle of the Sexes
Identity Politics
Contributions for the week of October 17, 2022
Identity Politics
Contributions for the week of October 24, 2022
Battle of the Sexes
@cae_jones:
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
If you ain't complaining about woke people, you're playing on hard mode my friend.
Other motte cheat codes (can probably be accused of most of these, I kid because I love)
-- Cite and link throughout to academic articles with titles and abstracts that seem related. Don't worry if the text of the article supports your thesis, very few people will actually read it, or even ctrl-f it. If possible, cite to non English sources, most of us are monolingual self hating Americans who will instantly give it extra cred, but we won't ever try to read it.
-- Accuse your opponents of LARPing their beliefs because they haven't martyred themselves yet. If anyone asks what you do about your beliefs in real life, refuse to talk about it and accuse them of being a narc trying to catch you admitting to something illegal.
-- Claim to have vague personal experiences that support all your points and dispute your opponents'.
-- Blame everything wrong with your life and the world in general on a mysterious cabal of humans so different from the average mttizen that we can barely understand them, who seem to hold mysterious power over us despite their lack of physical strength: Women.
-- work the refs. We all want to think we're fair minded, if you hop on right after a lib gets fucking buried you'll get the makeup call. See! We upvoted @thedag we ain't prejudiced!
-- Just keep typing. The longer your post the lower the odds anyone actually reads or argues with most of your points. The haters will reply to the first point, and you can just say that was addressed in paragraph 15. Your fans will also reply praising the first point, and just assume that paragraphs 20-25 support it.
Hey now, this memo wasn't supposed to be for public eyes.
More options
Context Copy link
I am always on the lookout for some new gender war posts because the whole "child bearing ~ p-zombies" debacle was very entertaining to read (regardless of the drama spill over). And that the discussions of that topic on the motte were some of the best I have read.
But I don't see any of those posts after that saga! Where are they?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
By volume of posts I really don't think this is how the process works. Woke aligned posts if anything seem to have an advantage because they generate significantly more interaction. If you're talking about upvotes I agree but for aaqc if it were harder to get on without being anti-woke then the complaints of this place being slanted to the right would be ridiculous considering how often left aligned positions get marked as quality contributions.
Agreed.
The upvote:aaqc ratio is much higher for posts that come from a left wing angle.
Counter to @Chrisprattalpharaptor, I think if a post makes a good faith attempt to explaining a left wing position without sneering at right wingers 3 sentences in, or just without being disrespectful to rightwingers and calling them nazis or cousin fuckers or whatever, there is a much higher chance of it showing up as an aaqc.
I have nominated a few left-wing posts based on that criteria alone, "didn't call right wingers nazis and blamed all of the worlds evils on them, and made an honest attempt to understand their worldview". You might not realize how rare that is!
This has been said in the motte a whole lot, but for the average Blue Triber, the default mode of interaction in most of the internet is vehement agreement. Inverse for the Red Triber. So most blue tribers have their calibration way off and come away with even mere disagreement being hostile, and acceptance of Red Tribers as almost downright unbearable.
For all the bitching and moaning that progressives do about the Motte, does how the motte talk about progressives or their sacred cows even hold a candle to how most progressive places talk about right wingers?
It was mostly tongue-in-cheek, and I'd probably agree with the first half of your comment.
As for the second, well, I think you just haven't found the right corners of facebook/gab/parler yet.
Not for the most part, but you're comparing the highly educated and slightly restrained members of one group versus the rabble of the other. Compare /r/pol with the breitbart news comments section and you'll find some interesting symmetries.
I don't think a left-wing parallel to the motte exists at all to make a comparison to. That is a left-wing forum that discusses the culture war primarily. Ironically the ones that do somewhat meet that criteria are all rationalist adjacent places.
But if we compare the motte to non rationalist, educated, restrained left wing places such as academic forums, hackernews, or even some very high quality subreddits. Its atleast obvious to me that the word "republican" is much more of a slur than the word "democrat" is a slur here in the motte.
So I am sticking to my premise that leftwingers in general are just not used to disagreement because their baseline is everyone agrees with them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
classic memes, tanista, whichever of the guys with ssc in their name doesn't bitch about the woke, stefferi, amadan and even you made the list.
More options
Context Copy link
There are dozens of us! Maybe!
More options
Context Copy link
Hah well I am a liberal but I also don't like wokeism so maybe I can shift gears. I've also only been posting since the site move so I probably have a ways to go.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link