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naraburns  nihil supernum  11d ago (text post)   Edited 11d ago   2740 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for May 2026

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

@FtttG:

@urquan:

@magic9mushroom:

City-States

@Rov_Scam:

@wemptronics:

@Closedshop:

Contributions for the week of April 27, 2026

@MathWizard:

Contributions for the week of May 4, 2026

@urquan:

@cjet79:

Red vs. Blue

@Shakes:

@OliveTapenade:

@roystgnr:

More Than Meets the Eye

@FtttG:

@Amadan:

Art is a Four-Letter Word

@Primaprimaprima:

@problem_redditor:

@Dean:

@FCfromSSC:

Contributions for the week of May 11, 2026

@yunyun333:

@gattsuru:

@Soteriologian:

@Rov_Scam:

Be Fruitful, and Multiply

@hanikrummihundursvin:

@ThisIsSin:

@nomenym:

Contributions for the week of May 18, 2026

@FiveHourMarathon:

@Dean:

@100ProofTollBooth:

Contributions for the week of May 25, 2026

@ArjinFerman:

@gattsuru:

@Tretiak:

@Soteriologian:

Replenish the Earth, and Subdue It

@FtttG:

@OracleOutlook:

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I feel weird getting nominated for a comment with less than 200 words, but thank you

It is far from the shortest AAQC ever! In fact I think we've had at least one one-liner accrue sufficient nominations as to make the cut, though I don't remember off the top of my head when that was.

The nature of the space is such that length is often rewarded (and sometimes confused for effort/quality) but shorter posts do sometimes get nominated, and pretty routinely make the roundup.

IIRC, the shortest I've seen was, "We have Roko's Basilisk at home"

Dang, that beats my candidate: "The far-right statement isn't: 'It's okay to be white', it is you tearing it down."

Whose website is that?

It belongs to us. It was meant to be a dedicated website for cataloguing quality contributions, but I think the mods eventually decided it was more hassle than it was worth and basically stopped updating it.

This reminds me to be sad that Zorba had to reduce his time here because he was too humble to ask for money to run this website.

You're welcome to contribute to the Patreon. I do every month.

Based and succinct-pilled.

I missed @FtttG post about Dave, and while I’ll agree that Dave is likely porn sick, I don’t think that’s what happens all the time. My impression of most trans people of either gender is that they rarely understand anything other than what media or social media tells them their desired sex is actually like. They tend to, for want of a better term, “LARP”. Trans women tend to suddenly wear makeup and frilly dresses and take up interests in things that media holds as traditionally feminine interests. It comes of as the gendered equivalent of a white man deciding that his soul is that of a black man and proceeding to go out wearing dreadlocks, fake gold teeth, flashing gang signs and tattoos, and eating fried chicken and watermelon. No one would think of such a thing as a serious attempt to live out the life of a black man because that’s not remotely the way most black men live. It’s a stereotype, tropes, and are generally things that whites or at least racist whites think black men are like.

Most women, unless they’re feeling fancy, are not wearing dresses in ordinary life. Unless working in a field that requires it, most women aren’t wearing skirts. If they’re just hangout wyother women, it’s jeans and a cute top or something. And most women are not just doing things TV decided was feminine. Lots of women like sports and play them regularly. They go hiking and fishing, they play video games, they read science fiction and fantasy (and not all of us like romantasy).

So whatever is actually happening in the brain, I think it has less to do with a feeling of being a woman and more of a desire to be treated like a woman. They know what the media tells them women like, but they have no other source of information.

I've said it before that a lot of the gender culture wars seem to be caused by the apex fallacy. People draw conclusions about the typical or median of the other gender based on noticing the chunk that's high status enough to notice. I think a lot of transwomen suffer from a pathological level of it.

I don’t see apex in this, simply because so much of what trans women seem to think the interior life experiences of women are the things that the media tells people that women are like. It would be like me taking men’s media portrayals as what men are like. If I say I’m a man and I act like the media portrayals of male action heroes maybe like John Wick or something, you’d find the effect rather weird because this isn’t what any men are like. I don’t think John Wick in the wild is super high status, but he’s the character people think of when they think about maleness.

I'd absolutely say that John Wick is super high status, even before you account for the fact that he's, in-universe, famous as the assassin that makes other world-class assassins shit their pants. Ie even if he were some "everyday" assassin with just enough assassination skills not to be killed on the job, he'd be super high status. Men and women who are protagonists in fictional works are almost never very low status and often very high status, and even the very low status ones, like, say, Forrest Gump, are exceptional in a way that makes them relatively high status compared to similar people - it's exactly their exceptionality that makes the fictional story worth telling, because a loser being mopey and suffering and then dying without ever making anyone's life any better, including their own, is a really boring story.

But more to the point, perhaps you can argue that "apex" is the wrong term, and I would probably agree with that argument. It's a very broad "apex" being used to describe the slice of people in that genre who are high status enough to be noticeable. Which is probably like 40-70% among men and 60-90% among women, by my completely unevidenced speculation. In that bottom 10-40% of women are the women who aren't noticed by men, and I'd wager that women who are less traditionally feminine are more highly represented within that bottom slice. So if you build your vision of what a typical feminine woman's life is like while ignoring that slice, you end up with a vision that's, among other things, more feminine than the reality. I think a lot of transwomen combine that with some other pathologies to end up believing what they do about what being a woman is like.

a loser being mopey and suffering and then dying without ever making anyone's life any better, including their own, is a really boring story.

So you've read my first novel, then?

Similarly, I think a lot of "non-binary" or "grey-asexual/demisexual" identification is caused by people erroneously assuming that only the most macho/femme people are "really" men and women, and anyone who isn't asexual is a nymphomaniac.

Trans women tend to suddenly wear makeup and frilly dresses and take up interests in things that media holds as traditionally feminine interests.

But their communication patterns stay a strange combination of typically male with some exaggerated stereotypical female mannerisms thrown in. Which TBF is pretty much what you'd expect to see from someone who's LARPing.

I mean yes. The whole thing seems like a man looks at media presentations of “what a woman is like” and wears it as a persona. It’s not based on the way the majority of women spend the majority of their time. It’s honestly somewhat sexist to me as a woman to watch some of these trans women LARP as women and revive a lot of stereotypes about what women are like.

Is possible for an AI to be a woman?

I’m not sure what they’ll be if they achieve sapience. I’m hoping for Spock, personally.

I'd swear I read every top-level in most threads, and especially the CW thread, and yet every time one of these comes out it's the first time I'm seeing at least a third of them.

Felt righteous at the time I wrote my post, but felt like a fool soon afterwards when the original story turned out to be kinda fake. Though I think the quoted bit is still true. At least it held up to some verification. Would like to know if it is false as well. Because I should know better than to trust feelings of righteous Indignation.

Not sure if I should put this here, but for the Pittsburgh posts it’s one of the regions that are >10% Irish > 10% Italian. Which is an interesting culture not everyone in America is familiar with. I am a member.

https://x.com/sidkhurana3607/status/2060869302547296606?s=12 Been trending on Twitter for a few days.

Also interesting that the majority of the counties that fit this category are touching each other from Boston, NYC, with a horizontal line of connecting counties that ends up in Pittsburgh. And some reason non of them went to the middle of Pennsylvania.

Chicago in my opinion is weirdly missing. Maybe at one point it was 10% and 10% but later migrations waves knocked them down. And then some reason a random county in Florida which is perhaps a later retirement wave of North east snowbirds.

The Irish-Italian blending in America to sort of one distinct group/race is also interesting in my opinion because the Irish are basically the last refuge of Celtic culture and the Romans basically genocided them 2000 years ago. But the oddness and randomness of religion and economics between 1850-1920 made them into a distinct block in foreign land. Which then brings you to Pittsburgh as one of the 3-4 primary hubs of that culture.

And of this culture/race blending has played out in Politics as Joe Biden married an Italian and had a political alliance with Nancy Pelosi.

Thanks for the comment, but I don't know that I'd read too much into it as far as synergy is concerned. Enough places have greater than 10% Irish ancestry that the map you linked to is really just a map of places with large Italian populations. I think the supposed affinity comes more from being Catholic, as Italians around here seem closer to Slavs than anyone else, and if you look at historical settlement patterns Italians and blacks tended to live in closer proximity than Italians and Irish.

Irish descent is double Italian descent in America. Both of course sizable. Even if it’s just mostly an Italian map it’s still interesting how every county with a large Italian share all touch each other. The only real link to Pittsburgh is Pittsburgh being the the Western border of that immigration. Italians obviously have a part of the Pittsburgh story.

Twitter got interesting though with the talk about how in some communities everyone knew some Irish-Italian mix kids. Me being one of them from Pittsburgh. And there were a few more kids with Irish first names and Italian last names or the opposite I saw on Twitter of a Maria O’Callahan.

Pittsburgh always has a debate on whether it’s east coast or Midwest or something else. The east coast always felt distant to me but the shared Ellis Island wave is one east coast link.

Someone could probably do an interesting post on the common unique American mixtures. The most recent forming one is probably the white male asian female that seems popular in some areas.

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