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.
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.
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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