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?
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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.
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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