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naraburns  nihil supernum  6mo ago (text post)   Edited 6mo ago   5390 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for September 2023

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 in the Main Motte

@Fruck:

@ymeskhout:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

@cjet79:

@Londondare:

@self_made_human:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@raggedy_anthem:

Contributions for the week of August 28, 2023

@jimm:

@RandomRanger:

Contributions for the week of September 4, 2023

@ToaKraka:

@coffee_enjoyer:

@TracingWoodgrains:

@jeroboam:

@SSCReader:

All Moderators Are Bastards

@ymeskhout:

@Amadan:

@cjet79:

The Aliens Have Landed Gentry

@RobertLiguori:

@raggedy_anthem:

@hydroacetylene:

@ebrso:

Contributions for the week of September 11, 2023

@zeke5123:

@roystgnr:

@cjet79:

@screye:

Will the Real America Please Stand Up?

@satirizedoor:

@WhiningCoil:

@MathWizard:

Contributions for the week of September 18, 2023

@CanIHaveASong:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@Lizzardspawn:

@Soriek:

The Best Offence is a Good Defense

@Pulpachair:

@WhiningCoil:

@ymeskhout:

Who's Cheating Whom?

@MadMonzer:

@FCfromSSC:

@Meriadoc:

Contributions for the week of September 25, 2023

@JulianRota:

@kurwakatyn:

@functor:

@gattsuru:

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Three AAQCs making basically the same heterodox point about modern attitudes to adultery in slightly different ways is interesting - was it the same small group of people nominating all three posts because they were complementary, or have we rooted out a silent consensus among Mottizens?

was it the same small group of people nominating all three posts because they were complementary, or have we rooted out a silent consensus among Mottizens?

The silent consensus was basically established years ago once most of the leftists and liberals left.

But I am a liberal, and one of them was my post!

Hence the word "most"

I'd argue we are majority liberal for some common but not universal value of liberal. I disagree with much of what @HlynkaCG on many topics but there is a kernal to the truth that this place has a very left critique of the left feeling.

was it the same small group of people nominating all three posts because they were complementary

Well, all three posts arose in the same conversation, but multiple users nominated those posts. There was partial nomination overlap on two of the posts, but nominations on the third were not from any of the same users who nominated the other two.

have we rooted out a silent consensus among Mottizens?

In spite of what Hollywood, social media, and even conventional wisdom sometimes suggests, I do think it is the case that faithful sexual monogamy (or, at worst, serial polygamy) remains the standard expectation among American adults, and probably human adults generally. It is perhaps a little surprising, given the rationalsphere's reputation for acceptance (arguably, embrace) of polyamory, but I would be reluctant to agree that it is "heterodox" to expect fidelity within the bonds of marriage. Heterodox, maybe, to Notice and Condemn it in the public sphere, but still; sometimes I wonder if we need a way of clearly distinguishing when we're talking about the human experience (as experienced by actual humans) versus the Human ExperienceTM (as theatrically portrayed in legacy media, social media, etc.).

Did I break the record of having the least upvoted QC?

I haven't kept track of that (I basically never look at votes, just reports) but I do think we have had some low-negatives AAQCs. Even a Score: 0 is unusual, though. You got several nominations (nearly everyone in this roundup did), though. So you'd probably be near the top of "sort by controversial," if we had that.

I was really hoping that my first aaqc would be for my post about my dad teaching me how to use toothpaste (as thermal paste.) I know it's not a particularly mottey post, but at the time I wrote it I was worried I would lose him and reminiscing with him (or at him I guess, he was in a coma) and it was nice to have a record. And while I don't particularly care about aaqcs (although I certainly appreciate the sentiment behind them and am grateful to anyone who voted for me) I think he would have liked to know one of our outings made people smile. Which reminds me - @self_made_human and @inappropriatecontent - you both said kind things about that post and I was too occupied and then too distracted to reply, but I really appreciated them and wanted to reply, but couldn't find the words at the time (or rather the sentiment behind them). Here are those words and the sentiment now though - thanks guys, I really appreciate it!

Hey, you're welcome! For what it's worth, I did recommend it as an AAQC myself haha, The Motte could do with more flavorful stories on top of the endless Culture Warring.

Thanks man, and you are right, we could use more non culture war stuff. I should put more effort into that, I have grown very weary with the culture war recently.

Can you link it? Also I reported your post defending books so thanks for that babe. It was great.

Sure, it was here and thanks, I had fun writing it!

That was a great post! And it did get nominated as an AAQC, but unfortunately a lot of good posts don't make it to the roundup purely on the basis of "trying to keep the report to a reasonable length." We get around 200 comments nominated each month and honestly most of them could plausibly be AAQCs, depending on the month!

That said, it still would not have been your first, at least not on this site--you were in the November 2022 roundup for this comment.

Oh cool, I had completely forgotten about that post, and thanks!

So how do you sort through AAQC nominations? I mean obviously there’s probably a few that you can kick out right off the bat because they break the rules through partisan rancor or are lying schizoposts or got deleted right after posting or because it’s obvious the person who nominated it clicked the wrong button reporting or whatever, but you said most of the nominations could plausibly be AAQC’s, so I’m assuming there’s a bunch of reasonable AAQC’s which don’t make the cut. Is it number of nominations?

So how do you sort through AAQC nominations?

Here is my usual response:

All nominated posts go into a single pile. Dozens of posts, [sometimes] well over a hundred, are nominated every week. The soft goal for each week is to recognize about ten quality posts; sometimes less, sometimes more, but much more would get quite unwieldy. Some nominations are obviously people using the AAQC report to mean "I really agree with this user," but I think a solid majority (so far!) are posts that could plausibly be included in the roundup.

Unfortunately that means the primary goal of the moderator sorting through the pile is to look for reasons to exclude nominees. Posts that receive noticeably more nominations than other posts get more benefit of the doubt. Posts that themselves generated other Quality Contributions get more benefit of the doubt. Beyond that, it's a curation process. Did I learn something from this post? Are others likely to learn something from it? Does it represent a view I don't encounter often? Does it exhibit some measure of expertise? Is it surprising or novel or beautifully-written? Does it display a high degree of self-awareness, effort, and/or epistemic humility? Does it contribute to the health of the community? Is it likely to generate further interesting discussion? On rare occasion I will disqualify a post because the user who wrote it has other, better posts already included in that week's roundup--but sometimes a post seems too good to not include, even if it means that user gets three or four nods in one roundup.

But, sadly, given that it is a winnowing process, probably the single most important question is just--how does this compare with all the other posts I'm reading through right now?

Now, posts that do break other rules are generally discarded first.... Some AAQCs do receive negative reports also, and this is shown in the AAQC queue. A negative report does not automatically disqualify an AAQC nomination, but if the post is in fact unnecessarily antagonistic, heated, etc. then it's usually easy for me to throw out.... If I have included something in this roundup that had negative reports, I either concluded that those negative reports were being used as a super-downvote button, or I found that the post's positives greatly outweighed the negatives.

To the direct question--

Is it number of nominations?

--the answer is a qualified "yes." A post with many nominations definitely gets a harder look, but I read every single post, and there are almost always posts with just one nomination that get included in roundups that exclude posts with two or three nominations. I have excluded posts with as many as five or six nominations--usually, hotly antagonistic posts that were clearly drawing super-upvotes (for some reason people seem to especially enjoy AAQC-reporting posts that flame the moderators). So absolutely no one is included in this list based on number of nominations alone, but as always community feedback plays a central role in how things get done around here.

I am usually very happy to have one aaqc a month. Three of them makes me think I'm spending too much time here.

Hat trick club

At least it's quality time?

True, I should probably shoot for a specific quality contribution to post ratio. I don't want to waste my time here with things no one likes, but if people like what I write then its more worth it.

>mother approvingly emails Washington Post editorial to me
>read the relevant court filings and send back an explanation of the background and the judge's reasoning
>decide to crosspost it here for some extra upboats at near-zero marginal cost
>explicitly mark it as "not an effortpost, just a casual summary"
>tfw it still gets inducted as a "quality contribution"

There is in truth much to be said for a simple, honest effort at a clear-eyed explanation of a potentially complicated situation. It's not always clear to me why people nominate what they nominate--some users use it as a "super upvote," certainly--but one common way to get a lot of nominations is to be honest, clear, and thorough. We have a fairly sizeable silent readership--people who make accounts, submit reports, and click the quokka without ever writing a single post of their own. And while they apparently don't mind the heavier culture war stuff, they absolutely love it when posters present information as you did here: facts about something that is interesting but that is being spun so hard by legacy media outlets that good information is actually hard to find.

(For an example on my own part, I am totally mystified by the way that legacy media will report on major Supreme Court decisions without linking back to the actual court documents, freely and publicly available online, and often without even giving a case name or other identifying information. Like, what the fuck kind of reporter are you, if you can't even report the most basic facts about something? [Answer: a New York Times reporter, of course!])

Or to try to say this in fewer words: often the thing people find most compelling about the Culture War thread is posts that downplay, obviate, or otherwise evade the culture war angles.

I'd say that ToaKraka's post is a good example of actual high-quality journalism. All of the relevant facts presented clearly and concisely with minimal spin and links to relevant sources. It's more of a wonder that some person on the internet does it for free far better than the entire legacy media with their salaries, experience, and degrees.

The contexts are different. ToaKraka produced one piece of journalism, legacy media is trying to balance a lot more problems and issues.

The difference between these contexts is irrelevant. Providing a link to the primary source, after you already looked it up, is trivial, but legacy media routinely refuse to do so.

I've written enough long posts to notice the slight drag it adds, I think it's understandable why some people would not, especially if you're paid to crank out maximum articles instead of a few notable ones. Add to that the clear difference between writing news articles because you want to and writing articles because you have to pay your bills.

Whether that's how it should be is a separate question.

Whether that's how it should be is a separate question.

It's not. We're talking about whether or not Tora's post is actual high-quality journalism compared to legacy media. Clearly it is. You explained why legacy media has such poor journalism, but you haven't argued that it's not poor quality.

Re-read the comment I initially responded to, it says the following.

It's more of a wonder that some person on the internet does it for free far better than the entire legacy media with their salaries, experience, and degrees.

This is what I was talking about.

It's more of a wonder that some person on the internet does it for free far better than the entire legacy media with their salaries, experience, and degrees.

Their goals and ideas around high-quality journalism are very far from ours I'm afraid.

As one of the (mostly) silent majority who got a few ACQs back when we were on Reddit, you summed it up well.

I also share your frustration that media seems completely uninterested in citing any primary source, particularly court documents. It's not hard at all to find the .pdfs, so I can only assume they don't want readers to come to their own conclusions; just trust whatever we tell you!

I think the editors don't allow links in news stories because it harms the website's pagerank to have outbound links to other (often competing) webpages. This is one of the many subtle unforeseen harms caused by google's monopoly on search that I haven't seen people properly discuss.

What does Google have to do with it? How would having multiple viable search engines encourage adding links to sources that, for one thing, don't go through any of them?

End users have different priorities than advertisers. Right now, with one game in town, the advertisers’ priorities easily win. Introduce competition to retain users, and maybe that gets a little better. I wouldn’t be optimistic; the engines would also be competing for ad share, which is where all the money is, anyway.

Yeah, I think part of the issue is journalism has become really competitive now that everyone and their mother has a college degree so it’s a bit of a raised to the bottom.

journalism has become really competitive

This feels like quite an understatement. At least in the US: Newsroom employment dropped by nearly a quarter during the late 2000s, both because of downsizing and because thousands of newspapers have shut down completely. The job losses hit young and especially mid-career journalists hardest, and the median age for journalists today is nearly 50. This all followed a couple decades of already-declining job satisfaction and autonomy.

I could understand competitors in such a brutal market being reluctant to link to each other ... but reluctant to link to primary sources? Nobody's advertisers are going to lose eyeballs because their readers just went directly to PACER or whereever. The part of me that's annoyed at how lousy a job some of the media does wants to blame it on selection bias: perhaps most of the people competent enough to do citations as well as a typical Wiki editor are now making more money elsewhere than they could as a reporter? But more realistically I'd guess the problem is just a combination of tradition and overwork. You can't put a hyperlink in ink on paper, and it takes time to realize that in formats where you can add links, you should. And any sector with declining employment tends to become an exhausting place to work as everybody still remaining works their ass off to avoid becoming one of the ones who get pushed out, but typically that extra work cashes out as attempts to increase volume or marketability, at the expense of quality. "We never omit a hyperlink to a 50 page PDF full of legalese!" isn't marketable.

A humblebrag if I've seen one, but I feel like it's warranted haha

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