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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.

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.

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.

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