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.
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.
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.
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