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
Contributions for the week of August 25, 2025
Contributions for the week of September 1, 2025
Contributions for the week of September 8, 2025
Okay, Chuck. Another Fine Mess You've Gotten Us Into.
- "Way back in the 90s, there was a popular freakout about video games making young men into killers."
Contributions for the week of September 15, 2025
@kky:
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Notes -
This months takes feel a little weak to me, maybe it's because I'm starting to outgrow this place. The same happened at LW, my first impressions of that site were good, but then I gradually became able to see flaws in peoples arguments, and now most of the posts on there are simply annoying to read, and none of them blow me away or make me feel like I'm not qualified to read them (a feeling which I happen to enjoy, and actively seek out). My method of evaluation is rather non-standard. I consider a unique and insightful take to be superior to a mediocre, but relevant take. I suppose I also find it frustrating to see people debate a X-year-old issue, with none of the arguments being any better than they were X years ago, especially for large X on issues that I consider "solved".
Some of the takes on here are also completely obvious to a lot of 'regular' people, or they're things which used to be common knowledge, but now manages to be uncommon knowledge, especially in educated circles. Some people also advocate for traditional ideas, but do so in a way which has integrated a modern perspective. As a fictional example: If somebody were to say "Borders are an extreme, but necessarily solution" then they'd be refusing the modern position of open borders, while buying into the ridiculus, modern idea that borders are something which needs to be defended in the first place, rather than something obviously necessary. As you fight against bad ideas, you shouldn't also integrate them into your own worldview. You shouldn't buy into a wrong context even if you can refute some ideas from within it. Good takes on general issues are timeless, so a forum which is too strongly colored by the current year will have takes which are only useful within the context which prompted them (causing poor generalizability), they'd be purely reactive. It also creates the fear that moderators would punish you for writing something outside of the overton window, which would be considered completely inoffensive in some other culture and/or some other century.
Most things that frustrate me are very minor, but still impactful, like the idea that loneliness and a lack of sex are the same thing, as if seeing a prostitute would make you less lonely. This very framing is pathological. (I realize it might just have been a simplification though)
Not that all takes are mediocre, a few are quite good (and I'm completely spoiled by having internet access, so I have very high standards), and the only way I can describe it is that reading them feels completely different from the average comment, they're refreshing to read (unlike my own comment. I'm not a good writer and the arrogant tone is probably off putting as well)
Bro, this place is just a hangout without pretensious ideals like Less Wrong, I doubt there's a lot of people who post here with the goal to blow lurkers' minds, and the ones that do are probably eyeing a S***tack career. Anyway, if you're mainly here for consoooming instead of participating as an equal, you're probably doing it wrong.
I once asked which internet community had the most intelligent people, and that's when I was recommended this site.
I don't want to be a parasite on the community, but in order to engage with a comment, I feel like I have to understand most of it, but most comments speak of specifics that I have never heard of before (and which doesn't interest me). And I'd feel bad responding to a long text, just to discuss a minor part of it, as that's just nitpicking or directing the conversation towards what interests me but which may not interest the other person.
As for your link, the reason communities don't "feel like home" to most people is because they feel like public spaces instead. It does not feel outside the panopticon, it doesn't feel like a place where one can take off their 'mask'. For this feeling to go away, every layer of the structure will have to be unrelated to something that I consider hostile to myself, which means that this website and every layer that it's contained within (the host, for instance) will have to forgive me for being an imperfect human, not just now but until it ceases to exist. It's hard to say if the internet changed, or if I did (oversocialization?), but 99% of websites feel as homely as a public shopping mall to me. Now, I don't know if this feeling is correct, but I do know that it correlates with age, so it's probably socially conditioned
Please don't feel bad about that. I frequently find that the most interesting content is 1 - 2 branches off of a top level post.
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I feel pretty darn maskless here. I can talk about Jewish influence on Western politics, and I can talk about my deep abiding desire to become a woman. Rare is the space that tolerates both.
But this is just a phantasm that can never be realized, in particular because people are actually much more hostile to themselves than they realize.
Do you forgive yourself for being an imperfect human? Probably not, to be honest. But then, why would you expect anyone else to do it?
All you can really do at the end of the day is pick your poison.
I don't see a big difference in being hostile to myself, and others being hostile to me. Self-censorship happens because the brain doesn't consider certain actions to be safe, and as long as you cannot convince it otherwise (get rid of the belief), you won't be able to do said behaviour without an altered state of mind. If you simulated a universe with just a single human being in it, I don't think concepts like shame, embarassment, judgement, "being cringe", prosecution, etc would exist.
And even if you can talk about anything, can you be yourself? Can you write emojis like "^.^" without feeling extremely uncomfortable?
I don't want to sound ungrateful that this space exists, but it has nothing on the old internet. You could probably talk about both of these subjects on the Gaia Online of 2010 and people would just think you were silly. I don't know about the old Club Penguin and Habbo Hotel, but likely those too. In the past, you could only get banned by breaking the rules. If you didn't break any rules, basically anything went, even if everyone hated you. This changed around 2011 or so. This is likely why subreddits like "cute dead children" existed until around that time.
Calling out jews or wanting to be a woman is acceptable to maybe 10-20% of the population, that's a lot. That you think either of these are weird seems to prove my point. And I agree with Arjin below, who knows how many bits of identifiable information exists in the typos that I consistently make? Most freedom enjoyed in the modern society is freedom through obscurity
Yes. ^.^
I want to stay focused on the central issue here rather than turning this into a huge quote reply that nitpicks a bunch of little points. What do you want to be able to say or do here that you're not being allowed to say or do? What "mask" do you feel like you're being forced to wear on TheMotte?
The rules here are relatively lax, all things considered. Outside of maintaining a standard of cordiality, restrictions are minimal. I have fond memories of getting banned from multiple forums in the 00s, so I can assure you that the concept of the moderation of internet discussion forums is not a particularly recent invention.
That's a good sign! The correct grammar comes across a bit robotic though. It also comes across as professional, but I imagine communicating warmth through such correct language is difficult?
Now that you mention it, the reflection was started by the quality contribution about holocaust denial. I think it was a bit of a condescending and angry reply, and I imagine that people upvoted it because of that. I don't think it was written in a way which would sway anyone on the fence about the issue. I felt like I was on Reddit for a second. But I wasn't really criticizing themotte as much as making an observation about the modern internet. Even if there was no outside pressure forcing TM to change, some users would leave and others would arrive, and the site would change over time as a result. My comment isn't really actionable in any sense, I was mostly venting. I was also fishing for recommendations of obscure writing by intelligent but somewhat crazy people like this.
You know, this comes up surprisingly often. X will say to Y "no I want you to show me your true self" and Y, with a look of befuddlement, will reply "...but I already am showing you my true self". People have a hard time grasping that the "true self" can vary so wildly among different individuals, or that the "true self" within a single individual can take on such a fractured and polymorphous nature.
This is just how I naturally think and speak. What you see is what you get. My posts on TheMotte are a fairly direct mirror of my own internal thought process (or at least, they're an amalgamation of fairly accurate representations of various internal thoughts of mine, rearranged for the sake of presentation). Even in my most intimate and unguarded thoughts, to the extent that they're verbalized internally at all, their grammar is always "correct", because I'm fuckin' nice with it like that. I take pride in maintaining at least a minimal semblance of order.
In environments where social pressures dictate that I have to lower my manner of speech, I feel like I'm able to express less of myself, I have to put more of a mask on. I value TheMotte precisely because this is one of the only discussion forums where long-form writing is actually valued, and I can count on the audience here to possess a certain degree of intelligence, so that I don't have to constantly abase myself for them.
There appears to be a bit of a tension here.
On the one hand, you're decrying self-censorship, and you want people to take off their "masks". But on the other hand, you're uncomfortable with the fact that someone wrote an "angry" comment. It appears that you can't have it both ways? Anger is an authentic emotion too. If you want people to be authentic, then that is going to, at times, involve them getting authentically angry. Especially given the nature of the topics we tend to discuss here. (One of the few ways in which TheMotte actually does force people to put a mask on is that, due to the cordiality rule, people have to bite their tongues on certain issues and not express the full extent of their ire. But I think this is a perfectly valid tradeoff. If you want a literal free for all then just go to /pol/.)
For my part, I think the spirit of the old internet as exemplified by Erik Naggum is perfectly alive and well on TheMotte -- probably more alive here than it is almost anywhere else, with the exception of 4chan.
Granted, how you're speaking here is how I speak to myself internally, and I consider that voice to be myself when I identify with the part of me responsible for rational thought (which I don't do much anymore. I should be more grounded in my body and less in my head). I might have misinterpreted you, or perhaps the brutal honesty you have with yourself comes across as holding others to brutal standards as well. I have multiple "real selves" so I can understand you more than average people can.
I no longer dislike that normies communicate not for the sake of information transfer, but for the sake of social coherence and good-will. What I dislike is the sort of evil which stems from weakness and fragile minds (being triggered, jealousy, the crabs-in-a-bucket mentality, and various other herd morality).
What I disliked was the dishonesty, and the... schadenfreude perhaps? which pretended to be quality. This is a flaw in people, and not in the site itself, which is why it's not solvable by the site. But I do think that taste and correctness are in conflict. Do you know this article? Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans. It's wrong. Good taste cannot co-exist with open information. You cannot be human and do science simultaneously (unless you can approach science as "serious play" like John Conway could. Probably easier with math than with politics). But "the mask" is not an issue when it exists purely for aesthetical reasons (i.e. for the sake of beauty), under such circumstances it becomes [manners] and even [art], rather than [manipulation] and [fakeness].
But while you cannot have both openness and taste, can have free, honest communication without hostility through sportsmanship. You know how boxers can be enemies doing fights, but friends outside of it? This idea allows us to "fight as friends", and it's what fragile minds lack. Negative emotions like anger do not need a target. You can simply acknowledge "That makes me incredibly angry", without making the other person responsible. You could even give in to the emotion without blaming the other person for feeling it, and without becoming malicious. A lot of things which are logically impossible happen to be psychologically possible, so you might be throwing away advantages through e.g. enforcing internal logical consistency. Grammar and logic are restrictive, they're self-imposed limitations.
Also, the old internet is different both in structure and in its inhabitants. Communities with intellectuals and freedom of speech are something like 90% male with an average age of about 35 (pure guesswork). We used to have freedom in spaces with average ages of 14 or 15. The mentality of teenagers is entirely different, which is why the modern internet is unable to replicate the atmosphere of the past. Granted, I'm speaking about 2005-2012, if you go further back, the ratio of older men goes up once again.
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I think what he means is that the place is perfectly open to Google CrawlBot, and how many AGP antisemites can there be in the world? Between your posts here, and the rest of your Internet fingerprint, you might get got like Light Yagami.
Some of us have come to terms with it, even as we maintain a fig leaf of plausible deniability, but he might not be ready for it.
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No, you're missing the point a bit. It's fine if this place doesn't feel like "home" to you, but I'm saying that the reason it does for me, is that I don't feel like I have to work for, buy, or sell anything here. Your shopping mall analogy might be quite apt, because if all you're doing is buying the hottest new product, I guess at some point it's going to feel a bit empty.
From my side, I guess I could try upping my game to make this place more appealing to people like you, but the issue is that for me the whole appeal is [insert that Buena Vista Social Club anecdote], and also that I don't have to.
The shopping mall analogy turned out to be a poor choice on my end, I meant the feeling of the space itself, not any of its functions. A bar, a mall, an airport, a school.. They all feel public, in a way that your bedroom, or a house in the forest 50 miles from any other civilization does not.
Neither problem can be helped, I think. Some people (high IQ non-conformists) are 10 times less common today than they were in the past, so asking for a community with a higher concentration of them than this is a rather unrealistic demand. Also, this website cannot improve much further than this, because the surrounding world wouldn't allow it to be much more based than it is already. As the world gets more connected, the difference between everything decreases, on every scale (cultures, countries, websites, people, ideas, genes, you name it), and then it faces "pressure" from the outside to the extent that it is different. So if your surroundings degrade, you degrade as well. Fighting this is like keeping your house cold in the middle of the summer, or trying to keep a child from learning any swear words.
What I seek may become possible if/when web3 becomes a thing
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I am pretentious.
I only ever post with the intention of blowing everyone’s minds.
Funny, one large reason I post is to poke holes in 'mindblowing' arguments or to just point out some glaring counterexample that demolishes up a convenient narrative if acknowledged.
I've come to learn that the way the world 'really' works is messy and on the fringes is quite unknowable, and I've come to gain an instinctive skepticism towards anyone who claims to have a insight that explains large, abstract phenomena.
I like people who engage with the messiness and admit to the limits of knowledge over those who claim to have it all reduced to smooth lines and platonic ideals with certainty.
You should certainly make an effort to study philosophy then! It's right up your alley. (The tradition of philosophers tearing down Platonic ideals goes back to at least Plato.)
I mean, I did study it.
Hume kind of demolished the idea that we can ever achieve certainty regardless of how airtight our arguments seem.
You still get some brave souls trying to swap an ought for an is, and acting like I wouldn't notice.
Isn't this limitation a part of the map rather than part of the territory? Language is limited, logic is limited, math is limited, etc, but reality doesn't particularly care about the mental jails which we create. I disagree with your earlier comment that understanding aspects of the world in depth is impossible, but I do believe that knowledge alone is insufficient. A condition you might accept for "understanding aspects of the world" is being able to predict the future, and some great people of the past have made eerily good predictions (I believe Tesla predicted phones and computer monitors, and Nietzsche predicted communism and its death toll. Less impressive works are ones like 1984, but that still requires a good intuition to notice an approaching problem before others). Maybe it seems like a nitpick, but my claim is "0.01% of people have a solid understanding of some aspect of the world", and with how statistics work, the vast majority of people who claim to have these abilities are wrong.
I hope you get to experience something which breaks your models of what's possible. It's a refreshing experience and a great blow to limiting beliefs
My model of what is possible is pretty vast and expansive.
My model of what humans individually are capable of is far more limited.
The muddly part is all about coordination. Game theory, information theory, and public choice theory (and other branches of economics) all help give us an idea of how humans in groups might interact for better and for worse, and how power gets pushed in directions that aren't ideal for human development.
If humans can get aligned together and communicate well enough to share an (accurate) world model and use that to advance a particular goal, we get amazing things. The Apollo Program. The Manhattan Project. The Large Hadron Collider.
But somehow, despite our tools improving, the ability of humans to do large scale coordination seems to be eroding? This makes it way harder to predict future developments, but it does not bode well.
Game theory problems only emerge at scale. Smaller communities don't suffer from them nearly as much for this reason. I believe in the capability of exceptional individuals, humanity has advanced thanks to great people/'giants', the mediocre masses add very little value.
I also happen to have reverse engineered some of these dynamics, and probably better than 99% of researchers, for I have solutions that I don't see anyone else talk about directly. Granted, Jordan Peterson wrote a book warning about excessive order, but I don't think he realizes that he's mathematically correct in warning against that. And do you know that the definition we use for "rational agent" is one which always seeks its own advantage? If our ideal for how one ought to think is completely void of good taste (like that definition is), then we will run into problems which didn't exist in the past because good taste used to protect against it.
How do you get somebody to do 1000$ worth of labour, without paying them, and without coercion? It seems impossible mathematically, and yet, my grandma has sometimes done this, just because she enjoys helping people. By making people more intelligent, but less human, less things become possible. General intelligence might conflict with instincts, as learning logical thinking is all about suppressing your natural biases, instincts, emotions, etc.
Accurate world models aren't bad per se, but they're not sufficient. Being completely objective also puts you at a high risk of becoming a nihilist.
Of course our coordination is getting worse. We're also becoming more lonely despite being "more connected" than ever. The reasons are more obvious the less educated one is.
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Have you considered opening a S***tack?
Nah. It's not a format I'm interested in. I like the community dynamic here, and I like the spontaneous back-and-forth arguments that emerge.
Well then, you are doing it right.
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You keep spelling that with one too few *'s, you know...
I thought he was writing Shittack.
It was actually "Substack" all along, but I was acting like it's a slur.
I got it, just going for low comedy.
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I hope I don't get banned.
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