This post is an unscientific clickbait for people who want the flattering kudos and ego-stroke that come from a minor accolade on this corner of the internet.
This post is a grab-bag of meta-observations on the sort of tactics or techniques one might use to start building a positive reputation in a reputation-economy moderation forum.
This post is a completely selfish effort to get other people to write more of the sort of posts I like to read.
Any of these reasons could be true. None of mine are noble. But like the rule of three, if it works for thee…
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Why Should You Believe Anything In This List?
Let’s just start by saying you shouldn’t, and instead read on with healthy level of indulgence. I am a stranger on the internet with a history of opinions and a whole host of pejoratives earned in return. I make no claim to insider insights, impressive metrics, or special profession.
On the other hand, personal credibility can help. At the same time, it is hard to appeal to yourself without appearing a cad as well as a braggart. Instead, let’s just settle for that I have written some AAQCs, and read even more from others.
Hopefully, the following claims can hopefully stand on their own, with some appropriate caveats. This is a list for organization’s sake, not a claim of all relevant factors. I am (trying) to keep it relatively short per claim. None of this guarantees you will get an AAQC. Fair enough?
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Agenda
This list of fifteen tips will be organized in four parts.
Part One: Social Engineering From The Start
1: Moderator Interests
2: Interested Audiences
3: You (Yes You)
Part Two: Structure and Formatting
4: Fundamentals Always Apply
5: Depth vs Breadth vs Brevity
6: Organization & Visualization
Part Three: Traps to Avoid
7: The Diss Post
8: The Typical Rut
9: The AI Assist
Part Four: Topics Of Common Interest (And Honorable Examples)
10: Subject Matter Experts
11: Timelines & Narratives
12: Global Political Developments
13: Popular Culture Media
14: People & Places
15: Human Experience Stories
Conclusion With All The Tips
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Part One: Social Engineering From The Start
There is a relatively simple social formula for getting an AAQC:
[YOUR AAQC] = [(Moderator Accepted) AND (Not Moderator Veto)] AND [Nominated by Mottizan] AND [Written by YOU]
Recognizing the implications and interests of these three groups can help you get to the door, or at least not exclude you from consideration.
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1: Moderator Interests
Tip 1: Moderators are the last and most obvious screening party. Less obvious is that they screen in two ways.
The last stage of every AAQC is a mod formatting the post they will make of the AAQCs they have selected. Every AAQC is nominated via the same report button used to tag potential troublemakers for consideration. While @naraburns leads the process and posts the product, IIRC other mods in the past have mentioned they all can see the report folders, and thus greater opportunity to opine, during the list’s creation and tailoring phase. While different mods may have no influence on the process, others might functionally, if not formally, present a veto.
This does not mean you should try to appeal to moderators too directly. naraburns don’t like no brown noser. It does mean you should try to understand what they would oppose, or what they want to promote, and why. naraburns has been open that they view AAQCs not as a mark of accuracy, but as rewarding people for a positive contribution to the Motte community. What makes something a positive contribution? You can find more of Nara’s modding philosophy here. Other mods have their own. When the time comes to narrow down all the AAQC reports to a final list, those philosophies are what influence which of the variously deserving posts make the cut, and which are cut.
These perspectives collectively lead towards a general point- moderators view AAQCs as a way to nudge The Motte towards the sort of forum they would like it to be. They are more likely to advance an AAQC they view as contributing that that ‘better,’ even if they disagree with it on a personal level. They are not going to proactively advance nominations they feel detract from the ethos or health of the Motte. Though differing opinions could lead to different conclusions of what qualifies as what, from an AAQC-seeking perspective moderator views are a reality you need to navigate around.
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2: Interested Audiences
Tip 2: Some of your fellow Mottizans must find your post interesting. Preferably serial nominators.
If moderators are screening for impact, it is the rest of the Motte which actually nominates based on interest. Unless you are so desperate that you would use a sock puppet to nominate yourself, your AAQC depends on someone else thinking it is interesting enough to bother pressing the few buttons to report it. No one does this for the things that bore (or frustrate) them.
This does not mean that you need to appeal to many Motte posters. While the number of nominations may sway a moderator’s consideration, a post nominated by just one person is just as in the bin as a post nominated by one hundred. The bigger impact of popularity-posting is probably/possibly that someone bothers to nominate it in the first place. If each person who likes a post has a 1-in-X chance to actually nominate, then someone who appeals to X people has a much higher chance of getting nominated than someone who appeals to less-than-X.
But in practice, or typical human psychology, not all audience members vote equally. Call this a guess, but were I a betting person I’d bet that people tend to nominate far, far more than others, for the same sort of reasons that some people post more, or downvote more, or so on. Granted, this is probably topical rather than general- it is less that these people nominate for all topics, but their topics of particular interest. These purely hypothetical ‘super nominators’ are your ‘real’ target audience if you seek an AAQC nomination. Writing to the topics that interest them enough to nominate is your ‘hack,’ whether that topic is AI, academia, geopolitics, or whatever.
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3: You (Yes You)
Tip 3: You are a Mottizan too. Write about what interests you.
Every AAQC ever approved first had to be written. Inverted, no one has ever gotten an AAQC for a post they did not write. You (yes you) are more critical than any other person in the process. No mod can endorse a response you did not post; no audience be interested in an argument you did not make.
This reinforces the point about writing to the interests of those who matter. It is not just the people who nominate an AAQC who must be interested. You are people too. You have to be interested enough to develop the post in the first place. Yes, you could approach a deliberate AAQC as if you were authoring a book report. Book reviews are a reasonably predictable way to get an AAQCs, if that is all you care about. But if you are on the Motte, you are at least a young adult, and adults have competing priorities and interests that will tend to win over unnecessary book reports for interweb audiences. AAQCs are kudos, not paychecks. There is a reason that most Mottizans who go writing for Substack stop writing much here.
This is why it is important to write about things that interest you. Your own interest is what corresponds with the other factors that cultivate interest in others. Passion can lead to more effort and exposition that can reveal new and novel things to the audience. Positivity encourages positive interest, contrasting with passivity and doomerism more likely to stir apathy to hitting that report button. People having fun nerding out encourages other people having fun nerding out with them, which is the sort of good-faith discussion that the mods want to encourage.
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Part Two: Structure and Formatting
If you are going through the effort of writing an effort post with the hope of an AAQC, put in that little bit more to make it easier for the audience to digest. Many in the audience have limited time and less patience to scroll through a never-ending narrative. Giving a sense of progression can help the audience hold out to the end and thus get to that report button which you want them to push.
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4: Fundamentals Always Apply
Tip 4: Basic principles of writing (almost) always apply.
AAQCs are not college essays, and the idiosyncrasies of informalities add to the quality. That said, the things that would make for a bad paper can reduce a ‘quality’ contribution to merely ‘interesting.’ A lot of this is surface-level cleanup, like using a spell checker, making sure you did not leave incomplete sentences as you were trying to organize thoughts, or overly long paragraphs. (Yes, I am aware of the irony. There is slack.)
The most important shared principle is hooking the audience’s interest by telling them what you are going to tell them as early as possible. The Motte weekly threads have over a thousand posts a week, more than is feasible to read. People skimming will read what looks interesting. If they cannot tell that within the first few lines, they are as liable to skip it as something that looks uninteresting from the start. If you can do this with a suitable quip that the mods can use for your AAQC tagline, all the better.
There are exceptions to everything, however, and having a mastery of fundamentals is what gives you the judgement of when and how to deviate. Grammar checkers are good, but AI slop that bores people is often excellent on a technical level… so having technically incorrect grammar (like …s or (parentheses clauses)) can increase the informality. Telling the audience what you are telling them is good, but sometimes a bait-and-switch for demonstration purposes depends on you not doing so. Such techniques are easy to misuse, and can annoy some, but performed well they can deviate from the norm enough to stand out and be called out.
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5: Depth vs Breadth vs Brevity
Tip 5: Know whether you are trying to go deep or broad, and then be brief on the other part.
AAQCs do not have to be long, but they tend to be. It takes a bit of space to lay out enough thoughts to be far enough outside the norm to stand out. It is easier to do that by adding more in unique ways than in trying to rearrange a smaller set of text in ways that will pass the social selection tests. However, too much text is boring, and being both deep and broad leads to exponentially more text. If you cannot be brief in general, be brief on either depth or breadth.
Depth in AAQCs tends to come from paying a lot of attention to a relatively narrow context. This allows exploring the nuance of a specific subject, series of events, or perspective. It is rarely well suited to grand theories of the world, but it does not need to be. ‘Depth’ AAQCs are probably the easiest in terms of effort, since they can come from your individual subject matter expertise in a particular subject, but the hardest to stand out in if your area of expertise is relatively common. Brevity in depth comes from pruning the tangents or rabbit holes that would lead away from the focus.
Breadth in AAQCs tends to come from tying together a lot of different fields to form a coherent narrative. This is much harder both because there are more areas your area of competence to trip over, but also because any one of these fields could provide its own ‘depth’ effort-post. ‘Breadth’ AAQCs are probably the hardest in terms of effort, since you must bring in more topics, but the easiest to stand out from people who do not / cannot do it as well. Brevity in breadth comes from concisely summarizing new actors or factors as able, so that you can cover the effects they had rather than the factor itself.
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6: Organization & Visualization
Tip 6: Write in a way that makes it clear where you are starting, where you are going, and how far along the way you are.
Humans are superficial visually-oriented creatures, and appearances matter. In so much that the cardinal sin of AAQCs is to be boring, few things bore as much of seemingly endless walls of text. While tip four focused on hooking people with your topic, and tip five focused on scoping the topic, this tip acknowledges the dark art of all true Mottizans- PRESENTATION!
With moderation and deliberate effort, you can make the exact same text grab (and keep) attention if you use text format to draw attention not words later in the paragraph.. It’s not just that bold is for emphasis, or italics allow an alternative insinuation if you know what I mean, or that the Motte’s blue text external links are you sign of something useful, interesting, or amusing,
or all three. (There is an AAQC to be made about that one, I swear.) Those are characterizations of how the text formatting is used by an author. The utility for the author vis-à-vis the reader is easier. Even if the reader is skimming, they will notice a key point buried in a paragraph if it is well formatted. That notice may draw interest, and attention, to stay engaged. Just… don’t overdo it, or it loses the effect.
Finally, consider a chapter break system between the distinct arguments in longer effort posts. In shorter posts, you can use bolded words as ‘chapter titles,’ which makes it obvious when a new topic starts. In a longer post, using a page break at the end provides the scrollers that indicate that the previous topic is over, and the new stuff may be more interesting. Personally, I like to use / and /// as minor and major transitions, so that people can know if they are still on the same general topic or a larger change of topics.
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Part Three: Traps to Avoid
The other side of learning the principles behind AAQCs is recognizing the tendencies that undercut it. This returns to the previous point that AAQCs are a mod tool for highlighting and commending posts that shape the Motte towards a certain sort of discourse. By extension, the sort of posts which go against that will typically not make the cut.
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7: The Diss Post
Tip 7: Writing in insults is a way to write yourself of an AAQC.
A key ethos of the Motte as a project is to optimize for light, not heat. One way of interpreting this is that people are expected to disagree but are moderated on how they do so. Whether it is booing the outgroup of your political opponents in a post, or insulting the other poster you are responding to, carrying on an argument too aggressively is a quick way to scuttle any AAQC post.
This does not mean that critiques, even personal critiques, are off limits. You can get AAQCs for explaining why people hate certain athletes, outright calling an academic study bullshit, or even takedowns on the bad faith troll arguments of other Motte posters. The Motte is named for a military metaphor for a reason, and it is not because the forum is expected to be agreeable and harmonious.
But as much as Amadan’s AAQC takedown of Darwin has practically become a Motte legend for how the passion and fury behind the direct criticism led Darwin to abandon the guesswho account and the Darwin association entirely, it was the exception and not a norm. It was exceptional because, despite the anger behind it, the personal critiques still centered on the target’s own arguments and behavior associated with pushing those arguments. Most posts lack that distinction, or that balance of historical context, to manage that. If you want an AAQC consideration in the context of an argument, to publicize your position and get some sort of last word in the argument, take down the argument, not the arguer.
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8: The Typical Rut
Tip 8: Build a reputation of being more than a single-issue poster by posting on more than a small cluster of issues.
Several previous points emphasized that the Motte AAQCs are part of both a reputation economy and an interest economy. Part of being interesting is novelty, so people do not grow bored and dismissive if your argument pattern matches their predictions of you. Like a dish of your favored food, something that is enjoyable at first, becomes a lot less enjoyable if over-indulged. For AAQCs centered on ‘depth,’ plumbing the same narrow cluster of themes gradually grows stale.
This is an issue with single-issues posters share, whether you feel their issue is a good one or not. Someone with a new take on an issue is unique once, but there are only so many variations on the theme before it is stale. People with less popular issues, such as joo-posters who try to frame even nominally different topics in terms of malign influence, tread the same rut point to the point it is practically a game to spot the fixation. The issue for AAQC qualification is not whether the issue is morally good or bad, but whether it is tiring and trite.
The antidote to this sort of typecasting is to share the breadth of views that make you a character rather than a caricature. Not only does a diversity of opinions leave people guessing what direction you will take this time, but it enables the sort of ‘breadth’ AAQCs that have a lot more chance to combine things in novel ways. You don’t have to abandon your interests either- just use your starting rut as the initial path to a topic less traveled, and eventually you will be seen as a person with a world view as opposed to a single view point that could be machine generated.
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9: The AI Assist
Tip 9: The judgement of whether AI improves the quality of your post rests with the audience, not you.
This is not a point about whether AI tools can help you write better. This is not a position on whether AI assistance should matter. This is a point that indications of AI use do matter with the audience, which goes back to the first two points of AAQCs being a social vetting game. Whatever your own feelings on using AI, the audience and moderator views of perceived AI use matter.
You should understand the arguments against use of LLMs on a discussion forum even if they do not persuade you. I feel @4bpp started a good discussion summarizing AI skeptic concerns, which approach both a moderator and a user concern as the other two endorsing parties. Motte moderators have an interest in encouraging people to put in the effort to contribute, which is undercut if people use LLMs to create longer responses for a fraction of the effort. Individual users can develop their own ‘allergies’ to the tells of AI content, including dislike or boredom just form the signs of editing. Since AAQC writers need an endorsement from both groups, a posting style that could turn off either is an exceptional risk.
Does this mean that no AI can be used in any way in creating an AAQC? No. And sometimes LLM-inclinations to repetition are unavoidable in some formats, like the overlapping /common justifications behind this list of distinct tips to writing AAQCs. But if the people you need AAQC endorsement from are reacting poorly to your use of LLMs to generate or even alter your posts, then you have two general choices. You can ignore their concerns, and hope your post passes muster anyway, or you can tailor your AI use around their concerns. You will not be able to intellectually brow-beat them into endorsing your post if they do not want to, and having a fight over the use of AI is more likely to make ‘neutral’ observers, users and mods both, not want to.
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Part Four: Topics Of Common Interest (And Honorable Examples)
While individual AAQCs tend towards the novel or atypical, there are broad genres of topics that consistently clear the user and moderator approvals each month. If you, the would-be AAQC writer have an idea but are not sure how to frame it in a way to catch Motte interest, the topics below are historical winners. Not every post along these lines will be an AAQC, but a good-faith and exceptional effort post along these lines has a better chance of being nominated.
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10: Subject Matter Experts
Tip 10: Wonk In / Nerd Out!
Subject matter experts can write the best ‘depth’ posts by simple virtue of being able to contribute more (and more interesting) knowledge on the (interesting) topic of interest than the layman audience. People know the most about things that they have to know about because it is part of their job, or they love to learn about because it is their passion. Let us call these wonks and nerds, and celebrate both because of what they can bring to any topic.
Wonk-topics tend to be practical, professional, and public-interest issues. Because someone is getting paid to know about them, they tend towards some level of practical and public interest by default, or else no one would be paying for that sort of knowledge. Since the wonk must have a certain level of competence to get and stay hired over time, it implies a certain level of proficiency. With both time and position comes insights into the behind-the-scenes professional perspectives and internal politics that provide those qualities of novelty and insight that make for easier AAQCs.
Nerd-topics may be less elite, but no less interesting. As much as wonkery provides a monetary incentive to go learn an exceptional amount about something, passion needs no other reason. Nerds can dive deep for the strangest of reasons, or no reason at all. Good nerds can bring their wonk skills to other fields to elevate the quality of their passion. Tremble before the nerd who can bring their wonkery or multiple nerd-interests to the same issue, for they can provide unparalleled breadth and depth of effort.
Honorable Wonk AAQC: @gattsuru: "VanDerStok has dropped."
Honorable Nerd AAQC: @UnopenedEnvilope: "Opera! Now this is in my wheelhouse."
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11: Timelines & Narratives
Tip 11: Tell an interesting story over time.
If subject matter experts provide an easy route to ‘depth,’ posts centered around tracking the narrative of something over time is a straightforward way to ‘breadth.’ Narratives that track a person, group, or dynamic over time by their nature must expand to encompass the other factors impacting the subject of interest. They also take the work that makes it easy to stand out from the rest of the AAQC contenders of the month.
A timeline effort can be a surprisingly literal approach. Take a topic, show how it changed over time, typically with multiple citations of news articles or perspectives at various moments. This style of post stands out because it can connect the limited viewpoints of media coverage in the moment to show how perceptions changed. What was, or was not, mentioned at the time that became clearly obvious / relevant with hindsight? Where are the culture war flashpoints of yesteryear now? These are interesting, but combined in a way that a single perspective at a single point in time fundamentally cannot convey.
A narrative differs by emphasizing the ‘breadth’ of contextualizing something in relation to the world, and less on the developments over linear time. Historic context may matter a great deal, but a narrative approach tends to use the past to explain the present. Sometimes a narrative may be a grand theory of something, sometimes it is just framing (or challenging) how people see the world, but by its nature it is relating a concept to other relevant parts of the narrative.
Honorable Timeline AAQC: @BahRamYou: "Do you remember a short story called "Cat Person," which was published in 2017? It went viral and caused quite a stir at the time."
Honorable Narrative AAQC: @recovering_rationaleist "Someone's wrong on the Radio: Internal contradictions in the narratives on USAID"
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12: Global Political Developments
Tip 12: The world is filled with interesting things waiting for an interesting take.
Most Motte AAQCs come from the weekly Culture War Roundup thread. While the culture war in question is normally the American one, there are a lot of somethings to be said about cultures and wars elsewhere in the world. Talking about places foreigners are not familiar with, from the cultural viewpoint of a different culture, are easy ways to be novel, outside the norm, and provide that unique je ne sais quoi to seem worldly and experienced. Two approaches of this genre are posts which talk about global cultures, with any conflict being of secondary importance, and posts that cover global conflicts, with culture being secondary.
Talking about global cultures could be anything from an ethnography analyzing a culture foreign to you, to a casual attestation of your experience from within that culture. These topics tend to focus on relating one’s own observations to another frame of reference, whether that be another country or the expectations of an outsider audience. Talking about global cultures leans towards ‘depth’ posting, since you are focusing on a specific aspect of a culture.
Talking about global conflicts can be anything from current geopolitical conflicts to the clash of cultures. The Ukraine War has been a reoccurring topic of the last few years, but intercontinental culture wars, or trade wars, and other conflicts count too. Global conflict posts lean towards ‘breadth’ posting, since you are naturally covering multiple complex states to an audience with a wide range of views of the same issue.
Honorable Global Culture AAQC: @Southkraut: "Such is the dominant discourse in Germany, as imposed by the victors of WW2, and you're getting a taste of it now."
Honorable Global Conflict AAQC: @The_Golem101: "...I think you're making a historical error to include things like the Bengal famine and even the Irish potato famine in with the holodomor uncritically - especially using the same term for both Ukraine and Ireland."
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13: Popular Culture Media
Tip 13: Truth can be stranger than fiction, but both are interesting.
The Motte has a surprising appetite for discussing media, and not just the reality-covering kind. The culture war touches many parts of culture, of which fiction is as much a part as daily news, and it drives a lot of Motte discussion. Sometimes people want to read about how the culture war affects their media, and sometimes people just want to discuss the culture within their favorite media.
Culture-touching-media posts provide an external viewpoint of the relationship between the real-world culture war and its impacts on the creation and contents of media we consume. These discussions demonstrate the second-order-effects of how the culture war starts to shape not only the people directly involved, but what we later see from them. This approach leans towards breadth over depth, as the separation between culture causes and effects on the media starts to increase the parties and contextual interests.
Culture-within-media goes in for looking at a piece of media on its own terms, often with an internal perspective towards the internal logic of characters, setting, or themes. These takes can generate interest by taking a subjective viewpoint of a setting, then tying in some external IRL factor to give it more salience. This approach leans towards depth over breadth, since it is often a nerd out moment of a specific cluster of personal interests.
Honorable Culture-Touching-Media: @Testing123: "I want to take a break from talking about how modern politics and the culture war is ruining society to explain how modern politics and the culture ruined one my favorite book to movie adaptations: The Long Walk."
Honorable Culture-Within-Media: @self_made_human: "Batman might be a typical Wuxia character. Superman would be a weak character in a Xianxia setting, especially in a novel that is managed to steadily creep up in both power and page count."
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14: People & Places
Tip 14: Go to interesting places. Learn about interesting people. Tell us about them.
If global culture wars make for good AAQCs because they cover interesting places and people, who needs the culture war? You do not, which is why just talking about notable people or interesting places are regular AAQCs. Even if most of the forum is American, the Motte’s user base is heterodox enough that staying here is already an indicator of interest in different viewpoints from different views and places, making this an easy genre to get at least some interest in.
Notable people posts are some more in-depth introspection or observation about someone notable. Sometimes this can be a way to talk politics or the culture war by talking about a specific politician or culture warrior. Alternatively, it could be a reflection of some personal acquaintance, minor luminary, or something else. These AAQCs will typically make it as AAQCs if they can tie the observations to some broader point, though outright biographies are rare enough that they could work as well.
Interesting places is the AAQC zone where people can be as personal as simply sharing their travelogues or experiences of where they lived. These are the sort of posts that may seem utterly mundane to someone ‘trying’ to think of something interesting, but can be fascinating to outside observers. There are countless local curiosities or observations that may seem mundane to you but make for a distinction to other people’s lived experiences.
Honorable Notable People AAQC: @WhiningCoil: "Never Meet Your Heroes, Even Posthumously"
Honorable Interesting Places AAQC: @aqouta: "Aqouta goes to China", Part 2, Part 3
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15: Human Experience Stories
Tip 15: Tell us what you think it means to live.
The final genre of AAQCs is the Motte equivalent to the human-interest section of the news media. These are the sort of personal posts that talk about the human condition, or make deeply personal admissions that resonate with the audience. While I do feel obliged to advise everyone to never compromise their internet anonymity for the sake of internet kudos, there is a certain sort of sincerity that comes from trying to untangle the mess of emotions we call the human experience.
Human condition posts are those that muse on the nature of what it means to be and live as a human. Over the years this has included everything from transhumanism, religion, or dating. Everyone has their own human experiences, and thankfully not everyone experiences the full range of human experiences. Writers who can share their own atypical experience with those who have not are contributing to the community sharing that bit more of the human experience.
Personal experience stories are accounts of one’s own lived experience. These can include the sort of viscerally personal confessions of past shames, hard lessons, or humbling admissions that you would almost never hear in public. For all that these are incredibly subjective and non-generalizable, there is a credibility that comes with willingly lowering your guard. While I again never advise anyone make themselves vulnerable to strangers for the sake of internet kudos, some of the people who do so willingly and deliberately are practicing a level of bravery and charity that I will never mock.
Honorable Human Condition AAQC: @FiveHourMarathon: "Taking advice, really taking it to heart and following it, requires a radical act of submission foreign to the modern mind."
Honorable Personal Experience AAQC: @DuplexFields: "Then in November 2010, in my darkest depths, I discovered My Little Pony Friendship is Magic."
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Conclusion With All The Tips
And with that weighty tip, let us review!
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The 15 Tips For Writing AAQCs
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Moderators are the last and most obvious screening party. Less obvious is that they screen in two ways.
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Some of your fellow Mottizans must find your post interesting. Preferably serial nominators.
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You are a Mottizan too. Write about what interests you.
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Basic principles of writing (almost) always apply.
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Know whether you are trying to go deep or broad, and then be brief on the other part.
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Write in a way that makes it clear where you are starting, where you are going, and how far along the way you are.
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Writing in insults is a way to write yourself of an AAQC.
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Build a reputation of being more than a single-issue poster by posting on more than a small cluster of issues.
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The judgement of whether AI improves the quality of your post rests with the audience, not you.
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Wonk In / Nerd Out!
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Tell an interesting story over time.
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The world is filled with things waiting for an interesting take.
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Truth can be stranger than fiction, but both are interesting.
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Go to interesting places. Learn about interesting people. Tell us about them.
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Tell us what you think it means to live.
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This concludes your fifteen numbered tips on how to go about getting an AAQC, and uncounted numbers within them. Yes, fifteen was an arbitrary number of click bait hook to attract interest. Yes, trying to stick to three supporting paragraphs a tip was an equally arbitrary way to maintain pacing. If you are reading this, then it worked, no?
I would like to give thanks to all the people who helped develop this list. None did so wittingly, and some did so by demonstrating what not to do, but I would not be here years later if there weren’t good eggs here. A shout-out to all the AAQC contributors who were shouted out as honorable examples. There were a lot of good posts this year, and it was a joy to review the last year of roundups. I imagine some of you might be a bit embarrassed for the reminder, but you can blame @naraburns for his diligent effort each month that caught you on record.
Finally, I’d like to leave off by dispelling any absurd suspicions about my motives for this effort. The research behind this advice entailed only the highest quality sources, and was not picked solely from my personal pet peeves and biases. This was always something I planned to do, and not at all a result of being trapped in a series of airports and airplanes during holiday travel. Most of all, any insinuations that I am hoping that this might prompt new or old Mottizans to (keep) writing more of the sort of posts I like are completely unfounded rumors.
I just selfishly want more people to write more and more interesting AAQCs this year, I swear.
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Notes -
Of all the things for me to be legendary for...
I can't speak for all the other mods, but I pretty much never look at the AAQCs folder. It's all @naraburns AFAIK.
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