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.
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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 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.
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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