This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Contributions for the week of September 28, 2026
Contributions for the week of October 5, 2026
@kky:
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Notes -
I am disappointed that "let me assume a headcanon about a piece of fiction-> rhetorical exhortations -> therefore I present conclusions supposedly about the OG work but actually more about arguments I smuggle in as assumptions" a makes an AAQC. What is the quality, as I am not seeing it?
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In general. I know this isn't a democracy and it would be more work for the mods, but could we get perhaps fewer QCs, if they would be accompanied by more rationale on the editorial decisions why a nomination makes the cut and which nominations do not? Some users like to complain about mod bias, the mods like to claim they are unbiased, perhaps some editorial opinion on what the mod team values positively would help.
The report "showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts." I assume the people who nominated this one found it interesting.
That isn't necessarily a dealbreaker, but you can safely assume that it will usually be a dealbreaker, yeah.
Nominations are the single most important factor in what makes the roundup. After that, it's down to moderator judgment. In practice, that means it's down to my judgment.
It has never helped before, so I don't have any reason to suspect it would help now. We do take time to explain things, sometimes, and our decisions are often moderated by community feedback. But first, I don't always know why a particular post gathered many AAQC nominations, so often I would not even be in a position to say anything more than "this one got a lot of nominations and it doesn't seem to be rulebreaking, so here you go." And second, we've learned over the years that there is a threshold of effort beyond which the whole AAQC report will simply fall to the wayside. Zorba's tools make it possible for me to get this done once per month, and most of the work is just whittling the list down to a manageable size. If I had to write intricate explainers for every entry in the report, that would not merely reduce the number of AAQCs, it would eliminate the report entirely. So, I'm not going to do that.
Very generally, if you think an AAQC is undeserved, you are free to say so, but you and everyone else would be better served if you spent your time writing a better post yourself, instead of a complaint about someone else's.
With specific regard to this post, it got plenty of nominations but also I did think it made an interesting point. Real people make real decisions every day concerning whether they should or should not pass along their genes, for example because they carry a serious genetic malady. If magic did exist, and it were genetic, it might be bigoted to hate Muggles, but surely it would make perfect sense to pity them--and all the more, if they were Squibs who knew about the world of magic but could never fully participate in it. This is often a difficulty in "magical realism" novels, because the most realistic thing that would ever happen in a world with hidden magic would be for that magic to be exposed and, then, for the world to be thrown into upheaval and chaos as it adjusted to the revelation. If there were a "magic gene," I am 100% confident that our existing biotechnology industry would be completely obsessed with detecting and, if possible, replicating that gene, that parents would be screening embryos for magical aptitude, that witches would sometimes abort their Squib babies, etc. I am confident of that because IQ is not even one one-millionth as interesting as magic, and humans are already obsessed with screening for intelligent children, selecting embryos based on highly tenuous polygenic scoring, aborting babies with presumed intellectual disabilities, and so forth.
You don't have to think that's interesting to think about, but if you can't even see why others might find it interesting to think about, you might consider the possibility that you have a serious blind spot (or extremely trapped priors) here.
Well, thanks for a reply. I disagree on the subject.
For the record, I did write a comment in the original thread. Reportedly, I am an antiwizard goblin from Daily Prophet or some shit. I have no delusions, I am lazy and not particularly skilled writer, and my opinions are substantially unpopular here that I have never had an AAQC and probably never will, even if I think I am occasionally manage a reasonable and correct point. I take that I am free to complain of AAQCs I think are insufficiently meritous, on the pain the you complain back. I suppose that ... is fair .... and it is price worth paying as it is beneficial for everyone concerned that people who determine what is "actual quality" to explain themselves once in a while.
I have noticed people regard AAQCs as worth something more than a badge for starting an interesting discussion opener. It is common that less than stellar openers in culture war thread lead to higher effort discussion, but that doesn't make the first comment a prize-worthy high effort.
I am not arguing it is super bad comment by motte standards, but I am exasperated, I think is a kind of blatant he is not making interesting points about magical realism, he himself says he is a making point related to the real world. Postulating that magic is carried by a single autosomal recessive gene so that mixed parentage will results in relative increase in squibs is one headcanon, which will result in the conclusion that "mixed race kids are a bad thing". You can insert to the source material similarly or more parsimonous, different headcanons, but that no longer would serve the implications that are not about the fiction. Or you could focus on adding "realistic" assumptions on different parts of the headcanon, such as so few pureblood families (source material throws out number 27) that clearly they can't form a self-sustaining population with pure ingroup marriages and likely affected by heavy mutational load.
You should be careful. I thought the same way, and now for some reason I have 3 AAQCs, 2 of them for frustrated rants. I'm a bad writer, and I am also lazy. When I first started posting the mods told me I got a lot of reports because I apparently have unpopular positions. This place can metamorphize you merely from the memetic infection of reading and writing on it.
You say that like it's bad...
It's interesting. What is the pure self? How much of interacting here acts as a good or bad abrasion to your understanding of your own identity? Metamorphosis is not good or bad, it merely is. TheMotte being the carpenter replacing planks on your ship of Theseus. It's possible that some rotten planks are replaced but also that weird ones are added. Is that a good thing? If you intent is maintain your self unchanged, any memetic mutation would be bad.
Idk I have weird, protean thoughts about this. Very unformed/stream of consciousness.
I find it to be fascinating myself, and I am fond of the education that I got from the hackers, (note: hackers, not crackers) the cypherpunks, and the individualist flavors of techno-libertarian that were the primary culture of the nascent internet at the time. For better and for worse, those things are a part of my DNA, even though I'm old enough to have watched my ideology fail and die. And IME, yes, participating in internet culture is a case of the abyss also gazing into you, metaphorically speaking. I was never a normie in the first place, so I couldn't tell you to what extent the internet revealed to me versus changed me, but I can tell you that it's absolutely been a Thing for me.
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