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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1976 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 11, 2026

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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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:

Month # AAQCs
January 2026 39
February 2026 30
March 2026 32
April 2026 32
May 2026 37
June 2026 25
July 2026 33
August 2026 34
September 2026 30
Sub-total 292

But I was curious, and asked it to do the same for all of last year's roundups:

Month # AAQCs
January 2025 44
February 2025 41
March 2025 39
April 2025 30
May 2025 39
June 2025 41
July 2025 43
August 2025 34
September 2025 35
October 2025 40
November 2025 36
December 2025 33
Total 455

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.

  • Lower volume of comments: Let's compare September 2026 with September 2025. The five Culture War Roundup threads* in September 2026 received a total of 6,812 comments, while the corresponding CWRs in the previous year received 9,221 comments, a fall of 26%. (Not every Quality Contribution originates in the CWRs, but they tend to be the busiest threads, making them a useful proxy for site activity.) If there was a perfect linear correlation between volume of comments and volume of Quality Contributions, a 26% decline in comments would predict only 26 Quality Contributions in September 2026. But in fact, there were 30 Quality Contributions in September 2026, suggesting that the site is selecting for quality over quantity. (The ratio of CWR comments:Quality Contributions in September 2025 was 0.003, while in September 2026 it was 0.004.) Alternatively, it could mean that (contra the next bullet), the mods are becoming less selective over time and it's actually easier to be included in a Quality Contribution roundup than it used to be.
  • Increased mod selectivity: Perhaps the decline in the number of Quality Contributions year-on-year is not indicative of a decline in the quality of the discourse. It could well be that the comments are just as good as ever, but the mods are more selective about those they think are deserving of being included in a Quality Contributions Roundup. Most of the top-level posts in the CWRs fall into one of a handful of familiar topics (AI, trans, Israel, Trump's latest antics, immigrant crime etc.) and many of the same arguments are rehashed and reiterated each time. (I'm as guilty of this as anyone, if not more so.) Over time, the low-hanging fruit gets picked, the mods see comments containing familiar arguments getting nominated for AAQCs, and they don't feel comfortable about including a comment in the Roundup which rehashes an argument previously expressed more eloquently by someone else. They expect more of us.
  • Regression to the mean: A boring and obvious explanation I'm including for completeness's sake. Maybe 2025 was an unusually high-quality year and 2026 is more typical. One would need to look at the volume of Quality Contributions in 2024, 2023 and so on to confirm.
  • Dean is not as active as he once was: Last year, @Dean made so many posts or comments which were included in Quality Contributions Roundups that many commenters independently made the facetious suggestion to rename the Quality Contributions Roundups to the "Dean's list". My analysis bore this out: he easily topped the 2025 leaderboard with one-third more contributions than the second-place contributor, and was the only person in either 2025 or 2026 to produce 5 distinct Quality Contributions in a single month. I guess real life got in the way because he hasn't been as active a commenter this year.

*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.

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.

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

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.

Nothing is stopping others from making more debate overposts other than interest.

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.

I am scared to because I ate a ban for basically not posting about the current thing a few months ago.

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.

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.

More comments

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.

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:

Remember, medieval Iceland was an early attempt at anarcho-capitalist utopia. When Harald Fairhair declared himself King of Norway, the Norwegians who refused to bend the knee fled west to build a makeshift seastead on a frozen volcanic island. No lords, no kings, no masters. Only lawsuits. So, so many lawsuits.

Once a year, the Icelanders would meet at the Althing, a free-for-all open-air law court. There they would engage in that most Viking of pastimes - suing each other, ad nauseam, for every minor slight of the past twelve months. Offended parties would sell their rights to prosecute a case to the highest bidder, who would go around seeking fair arbitrators (or, in larger cases, defer to a panel chosen by chieftain-nobles called godi). Courts would propose a penalty for the losing side - usually money. There were no police, but if the losers refused to pay, the courts could declare them “outlaws” - in which case it was legal to kill them. If you wanted to be a Viking in medieval Iceland, you needed a good lawyer. And Njal was the greatest lawyer of all.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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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