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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.
We’ve done much better and survived with decent activity much longer than I expected, I will say that. But I think now is the time to think seriously about going back to Reddit before the community really dies, which is probably on the horizon if 25% a year declines persist for a second full year from the current baseline. Still, I know almost nobody else agrees.
It is true that going back to Reddit would lead to an increase in new posters, but it seems to me that this community would make it less than a year before being banned. Reddit site policy is very clear that a number of left-wing positions are sacrosanct, and this community would not respect that at all (which is kind of the whole point, discussing ideas without respect to sacred cows). I don't think that it would be ultimately beneficial to get new posters but then have the community die (or have to migrate back off again).
They’ve clearly taken their foot off the cancellation gas pedal since 2022, and even then we were just one of many many communities (some with far more egregiously ‘unwoke’ content) that were warned but not banned, most of which are still on the site. Stuff is broadly tolerated even on semi-mainstream subs now that never was back then, a lot of professional moderators/admins were laid off and a lot of volunteers quit for various reasons, and the AI that’s replacing them cares far more about things like direct use of slurs and harassment (which were never really tolerated and still aren’t here) than it did about simply discussing heterodox views.
I really think the chance we would draw any admin attention whatsoever in 2026 on Reddit is extremely minimal. But we could always do eg a ‘trial week’ and see.
We were already on the admins' radar when we moved. I agree that we probably moved sooner than we had to, but I absolutely think we'd have been banned eventually, and if we returned, sneerclubbers and other old friends would be reporting every post about HBD, Jews, trans, and Boogalooing. We mods get shit here for sometimes cracking down on people stepping a little over the line in their eagerness to express how much they hate their enemies, but I think people have short memories if they think half of what they get away with here would fly on Reddit.
Yes, we're probably in a long, slow death spiral. I occasionally visit forums I frequented twenty years ago; some of them are still around with the same dozen or so people who were there twenty years ago. Maybe that is the Motte's fate. I'd like to think there is a way out of that, but you're kidding yourself if you think "woke" is so over that we can go back to the days of the first Trump administration on Reddit.
Again though, there are a LOT of like dissident right euro and US politics subreddits going far harder on those topics than anyone here (even securesignals) and they’re not banned.
Are there really? Reddit is actually letting people post that they want to kill da Joos now? I wasn't aware of that, but if that's so and you can post that trans women are men, then maybe we could make the transition. I am skeptical, though, especially since even a temporary liberalizing could easily be reversed.
We don’t let people post the former here so I don’t see how that’s relevant (even I won’t strawman any regulars by implying they say that), and yeah there are plenty of semi mainstream subs where people post the latter, like BaR, RedScarePod, 4Chan, Greentext etc.
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