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.
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.
I'd actually disagree with this. Reddit has recently ended login-free read access to the site. And it has lots of AI content filtering going on beyond terrible subreddit moderators. I see more than a few "removed by reddit" posts (for some reason, the posts sometimes get filtered after being viewable for a bit) with thought crimes like failing to use the latest TikTok filter euphemisms for violence ("unalive", "grape", etc) or daring to link to local news sites mentioning these things.
Now feels, if anything, a more dangerous time to move back: coordinating the move was difficult enough, but for the frog to jump back into the warming water would be a bad choice.
If anything, the declining amount of commentary seems to me downstream of an uneasy détente in the Culture War: there is just less drama to talk about. Normies seem tired of extreme takes right and left, and we're maybe begrudgingly coming around to the old "don't talk politics and religion in polite company" rules.
Yeah, I'd forgotten about this. I'm not participating if I need to connect my contact details.
Replace reddit.com with redlib.catsarch.com.
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