Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
META: Is it easier or harder to secure a Quality Contribution than it used to be?
I am a pathologically insecure person whose thirst for validation is omnipresent and unquenchable. It was for this reason that I shared the links to every Quality Contribution Roundup in the year to date with ChatGPT and asked it to build a leaderboard of Quality Contributions by user. Suffice it to say that it gave me the answer I was looking for.
Without showing the breakdown by user, here is a monthly breakdown of how many Quality Contributions there have been so far this year:
But I was curious, and asked it to do the same for all of last year's roundups:
As you can see, there has been a substantial drop in the volume of Quality Contributions year-on-year. The monthly average for 2025 was 38 AAQCs, which has fallen to 32 this year. 2025 saw five months with forty Quality Contributions or more, which hasn't happened even once so far this year. Similarly, last year's floor was 30 quality contributions in a month, while this year's is 25 (granted, that month was the only month with less than 30).
What could be the cause of this? A few possible explanations come to mind.
*Based on eyeballing the total comments for the CWRs for August 31, September 7, September 14, September 21 and September 28. Obviously these threads contain some comments posted before or after September, but I'm too lazy to go digging through them to identify which comments were posted in what period. It's a good enough proxy metric, nothing more.
I've had some disruptions since late last year as well, and while neither as severe a disruption as Dean's nor as initially prolific, it's both impacted my ability to write in depth, to respond coherently, and to even keep up on the news enough to know what's happening to talk about it. While not as heavy on the QCs, WhiningCoil had some similar matters pop up no long earlier.
Of course, it doesn't help to know a cause without knowing that cause will reverse direction, or even if it does change, whether it will reverse the trend. Economic uncertainty is an unpleasant monster.
Funnily enough, you've had more Quality Contributions in the year to date than in the entirety of 2025.
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Yeah, about that. Funny stories behind this, which I'll share since it would be shaping the data and it's not quite what some people suspect.
Back in 2025, there was a point that I realized I had a many-month streak going, albeit by accident. Out of curiosity / ego / an inebriated bet to myself, I wanted to see if I could make a year straight of AAQCs, just to see if I could. The 'so you want to get an AAQC' thread at the end of 2025 was the culmination/reflection of that deliberate effort. The early posts in 2026 were just trail of from that- the one in January about Maduro was literally typed in an airport waiting for a flight after a new years trip.
That obviously took a lot of time, and with some long-term predictable things on the horizon for 2026, I made a new years resolution to try and cut back. There were three parts- too much time spent chasing AAQCs, not enough time spent on some personal efforts, but also a resolution to try and cut down on the number of internet arguments I got into this year, especially culture-war related.
I mentioned earlier this year I was taking a sabbatical to play a game that had just come out (MENACE), which coincidentally happened before the whole Iran conflict. It did have impacts to me professionally, but my absence from the motte really was mostly spending my free time playing video games and writing about that on reddit instead of writing in the motte. By the time my pre-planned hiatus resolved, the Iran War discussion seemed toxic enough that I mostly didn't want to get involved.
Then in mid-2026 more personal predictable things happened, and I changed jobs. Which entailed all the typical prep, move, and new faculty familiarization. It also entailed unfortunate property damage, including a personal gaming computer I also used for Motte posting. Which was replaced with a better computer able to actually play more of my backlog, including games that recently got updates.
Now we're approaching US election season, which goes back to the new year resolutions, but it's also bringing back Iran angles for geopolitical reasons as well, which goes back to sitting out the Iran discussions in genneral.
I suspect I'll increase the posting again in 2027. It won't be the artificial highs of 2025, but it (probably) won't be the artificial lows of 2026. I have some personal priorities on the horizon, but I also have some ideas of a monthly effort post series of fun-for-me topics tying nerd media to real world competition.
That aside- for your main questions, I suspect the biggest reason for fewer AAQCs from 2026 is Iran / Trump / AI nexus sucking out most of the oxygen. Fewer people want to talk about much else, especially with the American election year involving all three, but Trump and AI are old topics at this point with fewer new insights, while Iran toxicity squanders the novelty option.
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I think it is that it is because we are living in the time of quagmires and stalemates. Everything devolves into quagmire eventually. When something genuinely new happens - there is flurry of new comments and new perspectives - from which usually the quality contributions come.
Israel - Gaza - stalemate and quagmire - there is no reason to see the conflict differently than in 2024, because nothing new has happened. Same with Ukraine, Iran, housing, cost disease, cost of living, the inevitable march of AI that will doom us all or immigration. On the culture side - netflix will continue to cast black men as vikings, cossaks and queen elizabeth, western game female game characters will be ugly, writing in everything will be shit, but the parasites are not killing the host fast enough - so the decay will continue. Surveillance state is here to stay as are stabbings by immigrants in Europe.
They only really interesting culture war events lately was Clancy trial and the pushback against the cornell rape story - and i would say both generated quality content.
The culture war is one of attrition now - and read - All Quiet on the Western Front about how eventually participants in one feel.
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I think it's mostly the first thing - we have had a gradual but inevitable decline in activity (and what activity there is in increasingly self-referential or just retreading old ground), and thus in QCs.
I think part of the decline comes from how a lot of people stake their claims. When a poster declares that people who disagree with their stance are "low-g", "retards", or "barely sentient" straight from the jump, I generally don't care to engage. If somebody has already clearly expressed that they think dissenters are barely sentient retards, what are they expecting to get out of responses in the first place?
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Debate seems like it's dying here and I'm guessing the percent of posts that belong to «look what famous person did this week» is rising (we are 2/2 already this week [1] [2], look what Ilhan Omar did this weekend, look what happened to famous store chain today). The response to this is above average for weighty topics now, in 2018 I think there would have been at least 5 people willing to effort post back and forth on this topic until comments were hidden (the downvotes are disappointing but may have happened on reddit). I got one taker and he scurried off after half an exchange. It feels like it is literally impossible to have a real philosophical conversation on here now. I can't get anyone to directly defend why it's morally right for the group to vote on who to eat for dinner (that is, why a democratic state has the moral right to kill anyone) because nobody will debate at all and they leave before the web of «but it do be like that though» and «what about the roads / safety» is slashed through. This is true on every other topic. Probably all the people willing to put effort in on these topics are either gone or 80% gone in that they're here but their effort is ... gone. Turning 40 and having babies on top of the collapse of novelty will do that.
I would agree that debate on more abstract or esoteric topics is down. But part of this is a more piggybacking/tragedy of the commons problem. There are a bunch of old guards here that did a lot of the overposting on reddit, many of them have left, evaporative cooling. The ones that remain are often more culture war oriented than debate oriented. That means they make more culture war debate overposts. Nothing is stopping others from making more debate overposts other than interest. There was a comment (was it you??) about wanting to create a Sunday Singularity thread for AI discussions, putting effort into making that a thing, might drive more abstract debating or at least more less-binary culture war posting.
This is just life. It's already a niche hobby debating on the internet with totally random internet strangers. I imagine it is also a hobby that skews elder-mid millennial. Do we actually have that many zoomers or gen-alpha here? Older people have less time in their life to stay up debating shit.
TrannyPorn0 used to make a lot of interesting posts. I wish he was still around.
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I am scared to because I ate a ban for basically not posting about the current thing a few months ago. I think there have been other examples as well. So, the mods are not helping, they lean towards making it a politics gossip forum instead of a political philosophy forum. I was thinking to maybe start a Saturday thread for abstract topics since culture war seems to be identical to the news at this point.
If you are talking about the Doki Doki topic, I don't think this is a fair categorization. That wasn't some abstract topic, but more a target of niche current events.
Maybe, but it wasn't good precedent. If I post something abstract @Amadan will rush in to call it «hobbyhorsing.» Nevermind the fact that I post on a range of topics and the abstract post could be on any one of those. I guess I have 10 hobbyhorses. It's not a hobbyhorse when you're singularly obsessed with it, it's a hobbyhorse when a mod doesn't like the topic. See my previous comment on this topic.
No topics are banned. You're not being persecuted.
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In theory, maybe you could ask Amadan to proof read before you post, explaining that you really don't want to catch a ban. It might be that your model of of the rules is unfortunately malformed or corrupted. If the mods want improvement, and I see no evidence that they don't, sometimes it takes more than negative reinforcement, but also some positive reinforcement.
If I try to shape the direction of the CW thread, I am pretty sure I will get banned, whether or not my posts are charitable or not. Charity is hardly ever the problem -- I did eat a ban for slurring Trump, which was fair, but the others I've eaten were pretty unfair. The way it works is, when you have a bunch of controversial opinions, you have to let the others talk down to you an extra amount or you will eat the inflammatory posting ban. You have to give the forum huge breaks from discussing the topics you like, or you eat the wildcard rule / hobbyhorsing ban, while people posting nonstop about the White House never get banned like that, even though they should if you assume all topics are equal. All topics are clearly not equal, that is how the actual rules work, if I took the sidebar literally I would already be banned right now because I would have made too many hobbyhorse top level posts already.
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Why would anyone want to put in the effort to recreate a GWB-era argument about anarchy? I'm amazed you even got one taker. The only step you missed was bringing up medieval Iceland, which would trigger PTSD in anyone who spent time arguing on the internet in 2006.
I have two points here. One, I'm not an anarchist, I'm thinking more along the lines of Robin Hanson's recent blogging, so calling it 2006 is improper. Maybe my post pattern matched to 2006, and I don't know if I'm to blame or if you're to blame. I was not around debating during GWB so maybe give me some pointers on how to avoid pattern matching to whatever it is you're thinking? For one thing I have some familiarity with 2010s lolbert arguments and the main issue was blank slatism, so I'm trying to be original by making points like the state breeds the violent criminals only to act like the hero when it locks up a portion of them, and that if you tone down statelyness most of the new violence is these exact people slaughtering each other or being killed in self-defense, so it's both a self solving problem and it's not actually relevant to higher types of people (this includes, I believe, motters, and more generally the top 20-30% of people at least if not more, so hear me out), who are only burdened by the state. These types of points in particular was ignored by FC probably because it was not able to be responded to with stock phrases taken from 2006.
Second, even if some of my points are 2006, you never debunked them, so just saying they're old is a fallacy. HBD is from the 1960s. So what? You might as well be saying in 2018 when basic HBD was still controversial, «why would anyone want to put in the effort to recreate a Clinton-era argument about IQ gaps? I'm amazed you got one taker... the only step you missed was bringing up the MTRAS...» that pattern matches clearly to someone who doesn't want to talk about it for the obvious reasons, and the reason is not because it's a boring debate or because it's trivial that the controversial position is factually incorrect.
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Was medieval Icelandic democracy a common discussion point on the internet in 2006?? That sounds very ammusing. Dating myself but this is was before the time I got into online forums.
Re: Medieval Icelandic Democracy, see this review of Njal's Saga by an ACX reader:
Ahhh, I would very much assume that these days discussion of Icelandic Lawsuits in the anarcho-syndicalist commune would be a thing. Thinking of people doing it in 2006 is the hilarious.
EDIT: After watching the video, this was an absolute hoot. Somebody make Icelandic saga anime!
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That was Scott himself, if I remember correctly. It won the contest but he disqualified it, on the basis that winning your own competition seems gauche.
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Maybe all of our high-decouplers left? Though at this point I've kind of settled for "this is how the average low-decoupler with a given set of beliefs behaves -> here are strategies for dealing with them" than anything else; while that is still valuable, it's not something that makes me much better at this point.
If all I can get are upvotes (or downvotes, I guess) but no actual engagement I consider that a failure, and at that point any such comment was nothing more than evidence of intellectual masturbation.
Or maybe I'm just not paying that much attention to find the ones that are like that, since I didn't really notice that one. But then again the only way I'm going to be able to properly your question is simply to deny the premise that objective morality is something that even exists in the first place.
Then again, I've also kind of already said that, void of any other engagement.
(Especially from the Christian angle, where most Christians seem to think God actually cares about morality, even though actively seeking it is generally orthogonal to what Christians are 'supposed' to be doing- but then again, "may God have mercy on your soul" is just a cool phrase you say to someone coincident with having sentenced them to death with no further implications or tacit acknowledgement of the fact the person you are about to kill might have been more aligned with God's will than you, right?
The only conventional 'morality' God seems to care about is sexual, but I get the distinct impression that, because sex and idolatry can have a lot to do with each other [which is something most people know internally, and something Christians are more likely to be bothered by for reasons beyond the fact idolatry is something they're not supposed to do], that this is a lot more a problem of muddying the waters [and social cohesion, contra homosexuality and effeminacy in men] when it comes to observers than anything else [and compounded by the fact that human beings, unlike idols or other magic sky daddies, are observably real], which is probably why 1 Cor 7 is immediately followed by 1 Cor 8 and why those 1600s-1900s US East Coast Christian sex "cults", as far as I'm aware, tended to cloister themselves somewhat.
I also think the problem of evil is a lot easier to swallow once you give up objective morality, too: if I'm powerful enough to create life de novo, I can do and prioritize whatever I like. If there is any duty here, it's the duty not to destroy those in alignment with the reason that creation occurred in the first place... a point very clearly made, coincidentally I'm sure, in the first 11 chapters of Genesis.)
I guess I could just keep every scattered thought I had as part of the response, and really don't have an answer for why that wouldn't be right here beyond it not feeling like the right thing to do. Though I guess I might as well test that theory here.
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Consider the possibility that you get downvoted because your debate style is obnoxious and supercilious and you describe people who weary of it (or maybe just have lives and families to get back to) as "scurrying off."
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Or in other words, thoughts are not getting any more refined. My first comment here and my last comment here will likely be the exact same.
I still browse the threads as a time-sink and to properly order social dynamics I've been
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Or rather, what people generally come to this place to do is, for the most part, a solved problem. At this point I think I could train an chatbot to do the kind of analysis I already do and it'd be no different materially to 90% of what I usually say, outside of the benefits of actually having to think about it.
There are a few crucial insights that are generated in that process, and rehashing of everything else, but the number of those per week I will agree has decreased, and I should probably find something else to do. Maybe it's just a more boring time; 2018-2022 were a significantly more interesting time period (and not for very good reasons).
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We’ve done much better and survived with decent activity much longer than I expected, I will say that. But I think now is the time to think seriously about going back to Reddit before the community really dies, which is probably on the horizon if 25% a year declines persist for a second full year from the current baseline. Still, I know almost nobody else agrees.
I'd actually disagree with this. Reddit has recently ended login-free read access to the site. And it has lots of AI content filtering going on beyond terrible subreddit moderators. I see more than a few "removed by reddit" posts (for some reason, the posts sometimes get filtered after being viewable for a bit) with thought crimes like failing to use the latest TikTok filter euphemisms for violence ("unalive", "grape", etc) or daring to link to local news sites mentioning these things.
Now feels, if anything, a more dangerous time to move back: coordinating the move was difficult enough, but for the frog to jump back into the warming water would be a bad choice.
If anything, the declining amount of commentary seems to me downstream of an uneasy détente in the Culture War: there is just less drama to talk about. Normies seem tired of extreme takes right and left, and we're maybe begrudgingly coming around to the old "don't talk politics and religion in polite company" rules.
Yeah, I'd forgotten about this. I'm not participating if I need to connect my contact details.
@2rafa is a bit out of date with her concept of reddit. Reddit has basically banned all higher thought and you can assume it collects as much data about you as possible and hands it directly to your government as well as any paying corporation or advertising agency. They would also like to force you to use the atrocious new reddit view; AFAIK as of now even a new, phone-numbered, residential IP addressed account cannot use old reddit. They are only allowing it for old accounts. Who knows when that will end. Reddit of all places really is not an option, literally anywhere else would be better, probably even facebook. And the idea that there are quality people waiting on reddit is wrong as well, reddit is very much a platform for the bottom 40% of people these days. The forkliftertariat, one could say.
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Replace reddit.com with redlib.catsarch.com.
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I thought they only ended it for NSFW content (and old.reddit, where I think for engineering reasons restricting only NSFW content was somehow more difficult since they never did it there). We were never tagged as this on Reddit and neither are most ‘edgy’ discussion subreddits provided they don’t directly post eg extreme gore. In addition, as a discussion club, presumably all of us would be logged into Reddit anyway, just like I can’t remember using The Motte while logged out.
I have no real opinion on the Reddit NSFW login wall but it’s clear to me that it’s very different from what’s happening on X (which is essentially trying to replicate the Instagram or Facebook dynamic where every casual user is forced to have their own profile). Reddit is just trying to force porn watchers (who are, outside of really hardcore addicts, mostly using the site in incognito mode and/or otherwise not logged in) off the site by killing traffic to those subreddits via the old.reddit workaround without suffering a Tumblr style backlash that would result from actually banning that content. This is good for advertisers and the business especially as many governments pass ID check laws for this content anyway.
X harbors ambitions of being an actual social networking and payments etc app platform which requires most users to have accounts under their real names, like the much more lucrative IG / FB. Reddit knows that’s never viable for it and never will be.
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It is true that going back to Reddit would lead to an increase in new posters, but it seems to me that this community would make it less than a year before being banned. Reddit site policy is very clear that a number of left-wing positions are sacrosanct, and this community would not respect that at all (which is kind of the whole point, discussing ideas without respect to sacred cows). I don't think that it would be ultimately beneficial to get new posters but then have the community die (or have to migrate back off again).
They’ve clearly taken their foot off the cancellation gas pedal since 2022, and even then we were just one of many many communities (some with far more egregiously ‘unwoke’ content) that were warned but not banned, most of which are still on the site. Stuff is broadly tolerated even on semi-mainstream subs now that never was back then, a lot of professional moderators/admins were laid off and a lot of volunteers quit for various reasons, and the AI that’s replacing them cares far more about things like direct use of slurs and harassment (which were never really tolerated and still aren’t here) than it did about simply discussing heterodox views.
I really think the chance we would draw any admin attention whatsoever in 2026 on Reddit is extremely minimal. But we could always do eg a ‘trial week’ and see.
We were already on the admins' radar when we moved. I agree that we probably moved sooner than we had to, but I absolutely think we'd have been banned eventually, and if we returned, sneerclubbers and other old friends would be reporting every post about HBD, Jews, trans, and Boogalooing. We mods get shit here for sometimes cracking down on people stepping a little over the line in their eagerness to express how much they hate their enemies, but I think people have short memories if they think half of what they get away with here would fly on Reddit.
Yes, we're probably in a long, slow death spiral. I occasionally visit forums I frequented twenty years ago; some of them are still around with the same dozen or so people who were there twenty years ago. Maybe that is the Motte's fate. I'd like to think there is a way out of that, but you're kidding yourself if you think "woke" is so over that we can go back to the days of the first Trump administration on Reddit.
Again though, there are a LOT of like dissident right euro and US politics subreddits going far harder on those topics than anyone here (even securesignals) and they’re not banned.
Are there really? Reddit is actually letting people post that they want to kill da Joos now? I wasn't aware of that, but if that's so and you can post that trans women are men, then maybe we could make the transition. I am skeptical, though, especially since even a temporary liberalizing could easily be reversed.
We don’t let people post the former here so I don’t see how that’s relevant (even I won’t strawman any regulars by implying they say that), and yeah there are plenty of semi mainstream subs where people post the latter, like BaR, RedScarePod, 4Chan, Greentext etc.
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/r/blockedandreported is basically just Motte Lite.
Being Motte Lite, it's also pretty stupid most of the time, yet the stupider the subreddit the more offense they tend to generate to outsiders.
(Honestly the only thing I've learned from that place is that being able to clearly think about things that make most people really mad is actually pretty rare, and I get the impression that the flood of Substacks are from people who want to monetize that scarce resource.)
Yeah, and while that subreddit is more centrist and less intelligent than this place, the general tone and the heterodox positions at the right wing tail are not dissimilar from us in terms of no no content.
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Isnt that by definition?
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