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naraburns  nihil supernum  2d ago (text post)   1295 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for July 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

@naraburns:

@urquan:

@Amadan:

@Ioper:

Contributions for the week of June 29, 2026

@gattsuru:

@RussianAmericanMormon:

Contributions for the week of July 6, 2026

@birb_cromble:

@Rov_Scam:

@dr_analog:

@FCfromSSC:

Contributions for the week of July 13, 2026

@RenOS:

@JTarrou:

@faceh:

@johnfabian:

@FtttG:

@YoungAchamian:

@gattsuru:

Metamotte

@ZorbaTHut:

@StableOutshoot:

Contributions for the week of July 20, 2026

@urquan:

@georgioz:

@Shakes:

@MartianNight:

@FCfromSSC:

Contributions for the week of July 27, 2026

@FtttG:

@cjet79:

@Shakes:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@gattsuru:

@JeSuisCharlie:

@hanikrummihundursvin:

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Disappointed that Faceh's comment got so many nominations and upvotes, given that his comment was a trivially dispprovable claim (discussions of birth rates focus mostly on men) and his 'evidence' was three articles he didn't like combined with a nonsequitous call to action (find me a pronatal policy that tries to limit women's behaviour, when there are literally no pronatal policies that limit men's behaviour). For an apparently 'quality contribution', there's no actual contribution there, no argument beyond the impulse to blame women.

I think the problem is that his comment is really doing two things. @faceh is trying to make a point about how social norms and messaging affect men - MeToo and the articles he linked are illustrative examples of this - but is asking for examples of concrete pro-natal policies. Explicitly pro-natal policies are rare and thus hard to list. I can only really think of subsidized fertility treatments and government support for families with children. I think this serves to dilute the argument about culture and rules regarding relationships, sex, and dating.

If we expand our list to include these rules, I think there are actually many policies that could be reasonably argued as pro-natal that restrict in order to protect women. They are just not branded as such. For example child support, alimony, and intimate partner violence laws are all policies that disproportionately restrict men. These all affect the incentives for women to get into long-term relationships and have kids. Meanwhile, I truly am hard-pressed to think of policies that are explicitly aimed at making relationships and children look like a better choice for men.

I truly am hard-pressed to think of policies that are explicitly aimed at making relationships and children look like a better choice for men.

The obvious one to me would be joint tax filing. In practice, that acts as a big tax break for married men. And child benefits in general incentivise both men and women to have children. Surely those would count?

And rules against abortion are a big obvious restriction on female behaviour.

I think Faceh's comment is a great example of the problem with gender discourse online. There are certainly problems that need solving (low coupling leading to low birth rates being the one I care about the most). But since the cause is a technological shock affecting everyone, it doesn't fire up the blood in the same way. Much more fun to feel the righteous fury of blaming the opposite sex.

Out of these, I'm not sure anything other than child benefits count as a valid example. Abortion laws restrict female behaviour, but I don't see how they would "make relationships and children look like a better choice for men" - if anything the possibility of a pregnancy that you won't be allowed to abort adds a risk factor to relationships for men (who would be on the hook financially and often reputationally) as well. At least in Germany, the tax breaks for the married are essentially designed in such a way that they reduce the tax on the difference between the greater and the lesser earner, so men in a marriage only benefit to the extent that they pay more than their equal share into it and you might as you well see it as a tax credit for subsidising your wife. A 0<x<1 fraction of negative money is still negative money.

That being said, my meta^n-contrarian streak aside, I agree the original post should not be in this list. When reading something with the AAQC label, I hope for something a bit more rarefied than a standard internet argument, even a winning one; but a refutation of an assertion (which a supermajority of the community already clearly disagree with) with three unsurprising counterexamples and the claim that you have never personally seen a counter-counterexample is something you can find just about anywhere. This seems like a pretty egregious case of AAQC being used as a "super agree", with mod complicity. (Sorry to @faceh, whose post wound up being the jar of skub through no fault of his own.)

Fine with me.

Also I suspect that the comment thread as a whole is what might make the lead comment worth AAQCing.

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