This is probably part of the lifecycle of any internet platform. Plenty of old heads still pine for the "old" internet, pre-FB, -MySpace, -AOL, -whatever.
I don't engage in the ACX comments very often, but I do spend much more time on r/slatestarcodex. I haven't been there long enough to observe any long-term trends in comment quality, but I like it for the reasons you write about—people engage on that subreddit with a relatively reasonable amount of good faith and even more thoughtfulness (especially if you avoid being smarmy).
More interestingly, I almost never see Scott comment or post on his own account on that subreddit. All of his main ACX posts get reposted by someone, but it really does seem like r/slatestarcodex is this relatively agenda-less posting board for people to discuss whatever they want so long as it's reasonably thoughtful and interesting. I'll occasionally post one of my own blog posts there and usually get decent results, I'll comment out longer and more thoughtful takes than I usually do in response to other people, and I've seen many people summon really good comments from the ether just by asking something sincerely. I think this is my second comment in the actual ACX blog, but I've left many on the subreddit—it really feels like r/slatestarcodex is filling the "purposeless thoughtful internet person" void that Less Wrong has lost a little as it has become more AI-forward (and also as the "inner circle" of highly regarded voices gained more prominence and influence).
There's also something to be said for Substack's design as an email newsletter subscription forward service. There are probably a lot of people who subscribe to Astral Codex Ten and primarily read from their emails, and you can't engage with Substack comments from your email—you need to take the extra effort to go to the app or the blog itself. This is probably not the case for the old SlateStarCodex blog, where if you read a post on the blog, you would physically be on the blog, and thus your chance of engaging in the comments would be higher just because it would be easier and more convenient to do so.
Or the opposite could be the case. I used to read SSC in deliberate lurker mode, reading new articles together with their comments days or weeks later once the hubbub had died down. Most of my active engagement was with the subreddits. But I registered a Substack account to be able to comment at ACX and to get the full dopamine experience. (Insofar as the occasional response to a comment qualifies as any kind of experience.) Unfortunately the app actively makes it tricky to write effortful comments or to quote from the article or other comments or to provide links to substantiate one's assertions. So short responses without heft or substance are the result.
I second r/slatestarcodex . It’s my favorite source of new blogs and interesting stuff more generally.
Scott will occasionally comment there, although rarely. Almost exclusively on his posts, or those specifically responding to him. There are repost bots like u/dwaxe that will repost automatically, so there’s really no need for him to do it himself.
Most internet discussions of complex topics seem to fall into the trap of non-central tangents. That is to say that the general experience of myself and observed happening to many others is that there will be long comment chains that start off being about some detail, and quickly veer off into various conflicts and arguments that are uninteresting. Alongside this are orphaned comments substantively engaging with the main point. If this happens a few times I mostly stop engaging, and I imagine it is similar for others.
I don't see that non-central tangents are an issue in themselves if they are interesting and original. If they end in discussions of history, etymology, theology or some interesting observations about the world that actually enlightens readers. They can be problematic if they are stale political/culture war debates or dull non-toxic threads on personal experience of the commenters.
Even though I enjoyed this review, I almost want it not too win at risk of all of us coming across as way too narcissistic (even if the final conclusion is one of decline)
One thing I'm curious about is the level of polarization on ACX in the Trump era. I have never blocked anyone on any platform in my entire life, until I started more earnestly commenting on ACX and realized that a small but noticeable group of people were advocating for positions that I just did not want to engage with. The decline of Trump related conversation in 2024 could be because everyone already sorted out their block lists
Brilliant work, almost suspiciously so. The rigor, the digressions, the weirdly poignant affection for long stale sentences…has anyone checked whether Scott himself ghostwrote this under a nom de data?
More seriously: the evaporative cooling theory rings true, but I also wonder whether the move to Substack imposed a subtle cognitive shift. SSC comment sections felt like salons, public squares for weirdos. ACX, being structurally an email-first platform, feels more like receiving missives from a trusted priest. Less agora, more liturgy.
P.S. Whoever wrote this: if you're not Scott, you're doing an uncanny impression of someone who once hallucinated him in a dream and built a spreadsheet about it.
I don't think this is Scott. Scott is way too good at knowing how studies break to have treated the shift in OT frequency as a minor footnote, when I strongly suspect that was the entirety of the 2016 breakpoint.
I'm pretty sure he's done it before, so it wouldn't be unprecedented. He didn't win, and I think he said if he had, the prize would have gone to the runner up instead.
I usually am nervous about being complimented. But I told a friend last night that this was a good post but should have come out stronger about the shift in OT frequency being the entirety of the 2016 breakpoint, so I'll accept this one :)
I originally signed up to Substack because it was email-first. But the app makes the email aspect invisible, and I don't think I've looked at my ACX email archive for over a year. No liturgies here.
I'm pretty sure Scott would not be able to do the coding and analysis the author of this piece did. I've never heard Scott talk about doing something like this, either conversationally or by mentioning in a post that he analyzed something relevant to his topic by coding a tool.
Immediate thought from a reader who's only been here for ACX: wow toxoplasmosis of rage sure was prescient back in 2014. Also, did luxury beliefs actually start on SSC and not from Rob Henderson?
This made me incredibly nostalgic for SSC comment section. I really feel like the back and forth there helped me learn how to think critically. I’m glad you mentioned the Gupta post. Nothing has ever made me laugh as hard as the first time I read Deiseach response to Gupta threatening to break her arm:
““Warrior background” my arse. You think verbal bullying backed up with nebulous physical threats is going to impress anyone? I can boast of my family lineage as well – do you want to try casting curses and inflicting losses by the power of the glám dícenn and the aer? My family line is that of the fílí who were more powerful than kings, as we can raise blisters on the face by our imprecations and physical imperfection on a king disbars him from the kingship. The legendary king who tore out his only remaining eye to give it to a poet who requested it bears witness to our power and status in society, why then should I be intimidated by a buffoon and bully who huffs and puffs over bone-breaking (he would, an he dared, so he could!)? Those of my derbfine and even closer kindred even to this day are poets, musicians and creative makers, you envious little braggart!
If you are half-Scottish, then we have a share of blood in distant common, and as far-sundered kindred I rebuke you – mo náire thú!”
Oh, that was fun, but the wrong kind of fun. I got a little too much into it, and charity went right out the window. And if it truly wasn't Gupta but someone pretending to be him, then I should be even more ashamed of taking his name in vain.
I try to be nicer nowadays (doesn't work but I do try).
Oh, it was hilarious, and it's not wrong that it really should be part of the canon. I regret that I didn't actually post "You do realize that there are a lot of us familiar enough with the defense world that waving around a blue ribbon from the DoD science fair isn't going to work, right?" Because that's basically what he had, and while that's not of zero impressiveness, it's also not what he was making it out to be.
If it was the real Gupta, he was a bit too full of himself but I should have been a little more tactful. If it was someone trolling us all, I feel slightly better about that, because it was braggadocio on both sides and a fine exchange of flyting:
Yeah I think you are nicer. But I do miss the wicked tongue lashings you'd deliver. It truly was a large part of my enjoyment. If Scott is the Grand Caliph, (or whatever it is you name him) then I'd always seen you as the court jester. (The experience would be less without you. Thx.)
Great analysis! I myself tried to use stylometric neural networks to analyze why LLMs can't replicate Scott's writing style no matter what I try. The biggest help was adding the LISA model with 768 interpretable features.
Some features LISA found to be enriched in Scott's writing:
- able to view the situation in a balanced way
- clear and direct in their opinion
- focusing on the facts
- expressing skepticism
- confrontational
Some features that AI slop was enriched in:
- thought-provoking
- using scholarly words
- the author uses a critical tone
- using punctuation to create a sense of tension and suspense
- uses a combination of short, simple sentences and longer, more complex sentences
It can also highlight the passages particularly enriched in the feature in question. Would be curious to see if someone wants to apply LISA to the commentariat analysis.
> I have already mentioned that April 2016 marked an extreme high-water mark for usage of the term ‘SJW’. From what I can see, there’s no particular reason for this specific to SSC – April 2016 has two threads with significant usage of the token, but they are completely random threads – OT47 and Links 4/16 (Links 4/16 does have a link about social justice warriors so that makes some sense, but OT47 doesn’t, so my conclusion is that there is just something that was in the water around that time).
Here's a theory worth considering: Try analyzing the combined usage of the terms 'SJW' and 'woke' and see if this combination doesn't show a bit more continuity. This was around the point when the SJWs started abandoning the former term and adopting the latter. (Which of course they they turned around and abandoned too, not to many years later, as people outside their ingroup picked up on the fact that these were the same toxic people with the same toxic ideology as the SJWs that everyone got sick of years ago.)
Yes. Like "politically correct" before them, these terms began as congratulatory in-group terms that they used to refer to themselves, and were later abandoned and disavowed once outsiders began to pick up on them and use them to refer to these people in a disparaging way rather than a positive sense.
The exact words may change over time but the basic pattern remains consistent.
I mostly remember PC being used as a pejorative too. I’m not saying people didn’t practice these things, rather I don’t recall anyone proudly saying I’m ‘woke’. Other than Katie Perry.
But think about it, Gunflint. If the likes of Katie Perry were using it, then it was a familiar term, to the audience/demographic she was trying to appeal to, and it was something considered good/desirable/correct, else why jump on the bandwagon?
Like Kamala Harris and brat. I never heard of this Charlie XCX or the album or the term before, like yourself and 'woke', but for a mercifully short while it was out there all over (though I still think *this* riffing off the coconut anecdote was the most embarrassing thing that whole campaign did):
They were used as congratulatory in-group terms for a very short period by a small group of people and have then been used as derogatory terms by a huge amount of people for a long time. Their start as in-group terms might be a point, but it's not a particularly central point vis-a-vis these words.
Yeah pre 2016 “woke” was definitely a complement in lib spaces (I mean I suppose it still technically would be, but would just be a bit blasé to say). My recollection is the cringe-ification went something like black twitter usage -> young lefties in general -> academic types -> the general public.
I feel like with terms like these the more people know what they mean the less value they serve as shibboleths so they’re quickly churned through.
ETA: I have a very distinct memory of being super happy after a friend who was a Palestinian (!) Muslim (!!) bisexual (!!!) woman (!!!!) told me I was woke circa 2014 (after she explained to me what it meant).
I vividly remember the left-wing UK newspaper The Guardian when they defiantly pounced on the self-descriptor "tofu-eating wokerati", originally a criticism from a Conservative politician, and started making merch with that slogan.
I’ve seen this play out before, a group embracing a term meant as an insult.
If I go into my own personal way back machine Richard Nixon’s VP, Spiro Agnew gave a lacerating speech referring to academia as a corps of ‘effete snobs’. Good, hard hitting term penned by a great op-ed turned speech writer, William Safire. The objects of derision embraced the insult and wore it with pride. Things along the line of ‘Effete Snobs Against Nixon’.
For that matter consider the slur against gays, ‘queer’ IIRC some gays also adopted that term as a badge of pride. Kind of a ‘fuck you, well own your damn insult, so there!’ thing. Hence the ‘Q’ in LGBTQ.
Oh, yeah. It started (where I saw it) amongst the black consciousness folks (or I should say, 'folx') e.g. where I first saw a definition of the term was a Tumblr post by someone talking about singing along to a song on the car radio about 'I been woke since the day I was born' and their mother telling them off that they didn't know nothing about being woke, *she* had experienced the real black experience back in the bad old days.
That of course trickled out to the SJW white liberals good allies types, and then was used (as Bob Frank says) as a token of being in the in-group, knowing the up-to-date jargon and using it correctly, and as a term of approbation (we're woke, unlike the rest of the bad white people).
So then people not part of the in-group started using it to refer to the wokies and it became a term of criticism (like Social Justice Warrior and politically correct before it), and then it got dropped and the whole denial mechanism creaked once more into action: we never said that, we never did that, you're lying, you're the ones said it not us, and so forth.
I like Freddie, even though we are opposed on probably every single thing imaginable. But he's had real world experience at the coalface in education, so he often posts things that have me nodding in recognition.
And yeah, he does criticism from the left which gives me some hope that sanity remains on that side of the see-saw 😁
One thing to consider about average comment depth is that Slate Star Codex capped it to around 5, and discussions would often continue at the max depth. So the number you're getting here is probably somewhat smaller it would be on an infinite depth platform like Substack.
Although conversely, substance links to deep comments are often messed up (they've gone back and forth a few times on whether they work), which also has an effect.
SSC capped it at 4, if top-level is considered depth 0. A valid comparison would be to substitute min(comment depth, 4) for comment depth when averaging the depth of ACX comments.
Well, I hope I didn't do anything wrong when I started commenting! (This was early 2016 after finding Scott via UNSONG)
Overall I think the general online discourse shifted a lot around the time of Trump. But also I think it's harder to do meaningful comments on mobile devices especially on Substack. I wonder if there are any data on mobile vs desktop use.
I was going to post that it was probably due to you, so I am glad I found this comment and was saved the trouble! :D
I agree with both your (real) points, but I think the discourse norms, not just online, around the time of Trump is the biggest shift. I was in academia at the time, so kind of a weird spot I will admit, but that kind of struck me at the time when it became ok to treat those who disagree with you as just evil and advocate ostracism and violence against them. That undercurrent was always there of course, humans being what we are, but it seemed to go from something to be actively strived against to fully embraced as a sign you were one of the good people. Even people who had previously been pretty even handed and careful started choosing sides among the violence of faction, as Smith has put it, and as a result the wise and careful thinkers were marginalized. Bad commentating got worse, good got bad, and the best lost interest in dealing with the rest, would be my short version of it.
Mobile made the barriers to low quality drive by comments lower, and higher quality a bit high (harder to quote and type long comments on the phone while on the toilet at work) I suspect. Reading ACX wasn't something you sat down to do with intent, but something you might do for a few moments while waiting for the bus or your coffee. Sort of the difference in quality in a hand written letter vs text messages.
I think this review missed an incredibly important reason that comments per post dropped after April 2016. The first fractional OT was 49.5, the next month. I would be curious how the analysis holds up if that is corrected for, and don't recall things getting worse after that, at least in the OT commentariat.
Edit: OK, this was brought up, but almost as a footnote, and in a way that didn't ping when I was looking to see if it was noticed. "A significant change in how the OTs are handled changed the metrics" is an obvious reason for the breakpoint that doesn't actually have anything to do with the commentariat getting worse at about that point. Throw out that prior, and everything else just looks like noise. Frankly, this is the sort of mistake that usually gets quite a bit of snark here, and while I appreciate the rest of the analysis, I think this fundamentally undermines any discussion of a change in 2016.
First, I can actually think of a reason for a peak in comment length in 2017, and it was my fault. That was when I was running Naval Gazing in the OTs, and was good for a thousand word post in each one, plus we had a bunch of other people who were doing similar things for a while. Naval Gazing went independent at the end of October, and I recall the effortpost boom died down not too long after.
I think the falloff in certain political terms in 2016 was probably as much as anything to do with changes in the sort of stuff Scott was writing, because that was about the time there was a notable shift. (Probably not unaffected by the Trump stuff.) I definitely recall an impression that what he had just written tended to bleed into the OTs some, and it's obviously going to dominate the main posts. But I'm also not sure it was a bad thing, and while there were some very irritating people on politics in that era, it was still reasonably sane.
The other elephant in the room on the SSC/ACX split is DSL, which is pointedly not mentioned, but which captured a reasonable fraction of the OT community, particularly before ACX came back, and definitely kept a lot of people from coming back as actively as they were in early 2020.
Personally, one of the things that I like a lot less about ACX is that I can't see the list of recent comments by poster. My usual technique was to look through that list and see if anyone interesting was talking. The threshold for interesting varied based on how bored I was. This doesn't work any more because I have to know who I am looking for, which means only the very most interesting get looked at.
I was there in April 2016, and the fractional open threads did indeed change people's behavior in a way that dramatically affects these metrics. People would keep talking on the most recent open thread every day, until a new one was posted and then they would move there. So, when Scott suddenly starts posting open threads twice as frequently, that's going to change behavior-as-captured-in-these-metrics even though it isn't actually changing commenters' behavior.
The effortpost boom was indeed a thing, and I'm sorry that's vanished - though it's restarted at Data Secrets Lox (DSL). I don't recall anything Scott did that caused it to vanish. Maybe it was literally you, Bean, no longer leading by example with Naval Gazing?
Yes, my anecdotal experience was that much of the OT community stayed on DSL and never came back to ACX (or, much less than before, like me). One trend I was hoping this review would capture is the continuing "lifespan" of frequent posters - we're the ones who carry forward most of the comment section's culture, and I think there was a huge difference there between late SSC and early ACX. If there're other large changes there, that might explain other changes.
And I agree, the ACX interface is much worse than DSL. If it were better, I might be here more often.
>Maybe it was literally you, Bean, no longer leading by example with Naval Gazing?
My less-arrogant theory is that that period was picking the low-hanging fruit, although I will take credit for starting the trend. Most people (at least the kind who hang around here) have a couple of good effortposts in them, and that period got a lot of them out. I recall that it was trailing off even before I left, and absent something like the DSL contest, it's going to be hard to see it keeping going.
Yeah, that also could've been it! I know that with my blog, it was easier to think of topics to write about early on. We've both found more fruit and metaphorical ladders to pick it, but low-hanging fruit is definitely a thing.
And yes, thank you again for starting the DSL effortpost contest!
Every so often Substack asks me for feature suggestions; if you tell me your top fixable complaints about the Substack interface, I can try to forward them.
Assuming "just load everything quickly and don't be fancy" isn't an option, then probably something like the old top right menu that lists new comments since your last visit by who posted them would be helpful. As it is, it's sometimes hard to see where the actual discussion is, and much harder to keep up with people on my "interesting if I have time" list, as opposed to the much shorter "make time to read this person's stuff" list.
By far my top request is something like the old "~new" / "# comments since {datetime}" feature, where I can ctrl+f for comments I haven't yet read, and tell the system when I last read the whole thread in case I've reloaded it for some reason since then.
I know! I keep meaning to check it out but too busy with the myriad distractions of life and online life, and by the time I remember, it's too late.
You should come back and do a guest post some time, the next time some ship manages to run into a bridge or the US Navy spends billions on something that sinks the moment it leaves dry dock 😀
Hey, if someone wants to offer me a guest-post slot, I would generally be happy to, provided it's something that fits within my remit. Unless you just mean in the OTs, in which case, probably not, because the demands of posting weekly don't stop.
I would like a guest post by you, if there ever comes a topic which you feel you want to write about and there's an open slot. The kind of "this is something I never knew I'd be interested in" content you provide(d) was excellent.
By the same token, if anyone knows stuff about planes and wants to explain why/why not Boeing's planes have had this recent run of misfortune (it's not them, it's just that they're so big a manufacturer every airline flies Boeings and so if their pilots or the wrath of nature screws up, it's a Boeing that will be on the receiving end/yes it's them and their crappy planes and crappy maintenance), I'd be glad to hear about it!
Matt Yglesias Slow Boring comments seems to have absorbed the ethos of SSC/ACX and often have overlapping commenters. His comment section seems to be more polite and less culture war than current ACX threads despite Matt being a much more partisan writer.
I’ve found the UX of SB comments much more annoying than ACX. You can’t open threads/ see all of the comments while still having the article open (there’s a view you see when you get to the bottom of the article, where it shows the top two or three comments with all replies hidden. Then, if you tap into the replies or click to see more comments the article disappears but the comments all show). This makes it a pain to quote the article in ur reply to a comment.
Diving into a thread also makes you lose your place in the whole comment view when you back out, which makes it hard to read the whole comment section. I’m not sure if this is something configurable by the blog owner or to do with paid only comments sections/ articles specifically. The quality of the discourse is unusually good, though!
I agree and asked Substack to suspend their usual commenting format (and have all comments while still having the article open) as a condition for blogging here. I don't understand why they default to the opposite.
Their interface is overdesigned enough, under the hood, that loading the blog post alone (even when it's just text) is a high-bandwidth task. I suppose not requiring it to display all the comments on top of that is their way of mitigating that self-inflicted problem.
I just realized it when I go to other Substack blog, but boy do the comments suck. You do a good job making me think that UI comment here is better than SSC.
> Matt Yglesias Slow Boring comments seems to have absorbed the ethos of SSC/ACX and often have overlapping commenters.
I'm kind of surprised seeing this and how many people are agreeing, because I've always thought of the more "mainstream" (ie bigger than Scott) Substack commentariat like Yglesias and Noahpinion as being really basic and much less interesting than the ACX commentariat, to the point, I don't even try to read either any more, even if the post itself was interesting.
Surprised DSL wasn’t mentioned. A non-trivial number of old SSC commenters never came to ACX, and hang out there instead (frankly think ACX is better for it)
Our evil twin we keep locked in the attic and feed on scraps. I do wish some of the guys would pop back over here occasionally and have a chinwag in the comments.
It is always good to see someone Do The Work; well done and deserving of a finalist.
…but part of the enjoyment of the book (and non-book) review contests is learning about something new, unlocking a new part of the idea map. And, well, we’ve already been here
Thinking back to early SSC reminds me of Scott's article on 90s environmentalism. Many of the issues Scott used to talk about have somehow disappeared from the radar despite not being "solved". 2010s feminism, New Atheism, non-culture war education policy debates, creationism to name 4.
P.S. School Shootings were only a minor topic of SSC posting, but I think they have been solved quietly akin to Whales and the Ozone layer.
Curious why you think school shootings are solved, https://www.cnn.com/us/school-shootings-fast-facts-dg suggests they're worse than ever (although sometimes it's hard to distinguish between gang conflicts at schools and psycho-shoots-random-people)
I spent 30 minutes looking at the data and am none the wiser. Most definitions used seem to be useless and to include accidental discharges and arguments between parents in school parking lots.
I was looking for a comment on this. When I saw recurring posters on substack, my impression was that they were an active member of the community and nothing more. On substack I can't help but feel like some of the recurring posters' MO is to subtly advertise their own substack to the ACX crowd - doesn't help that it's often milquetoast faux AI/ML intellectualism (I AM biased). I do not like the while substack integration. I definitely hate using this godforsaken app and seeing the godawful blogspam every time I open it to read ACX.
The comments section is bad when Scott has Deiseach banned for something or other, and good when she's not banned.
At least, that's the only metric I can come up with off the top of my head. I have other personal favorite commenters who are correlated with quality but they don't catch bans as prolifically.
Well, um, thank you very much, but when Scott bans me I deserve it. It's like smacking the misbehaving dog on the nose with the rolled-up newspaper: I whine and go to my corner and wait until my time is served. Necessary discipline to keep the house in order!
> The Old Ones whisper of a blog that existed before even Slate Star Codex, but since I’m not 100% certain we’re encouraged to talk about the older blog (and nobody dates the golden era of Scott’s writing to pre-2013 anyway)
I don't think talking about the LJ is discouraged? I've seen links to a list of posts there over on /r/slatestarcodex, IINM. Of course, you'd have a hell of a time doing comment analysis on it -- I'm pretty sure a lot of the comments on it, including some quite good ones, are just lost, due to the fact that they wouldn't appear unless you expanded them, and of course those aren't making it into archive sites (I remember there being some comments by Sarah, and some by me, that I wasn't able to find last time I looked). Also, many of the entries filled up with spam comments after the blog went fallow.
Anyway, there's some real good stuff there. Unfortunately, the lack of a title (beyond "Stuff") on many posts often makes it hard to find. But, surely we mustn't forget the first post of Scott's that *really* blew up? :grin: https://archive.fo/5DuiP
> Their leader, Churchill, appeared in a grand total of one episode before, where he was a bumbling general who suffered an embarrassing defeat to the Ottomans of all people in the Battle of Gallipoli.
Is somewhat of an unfair retcon. Churchill did a lot of stuff in british politics (often successfully!) He was in parliament *63 years*, which makes Joe Biden's career look like a spring chicken.
(though I guess Biden can technically still run for another couple of senate terms to try to catch up)
I read the post as describing a History Channel perspective on history, in which only the highlights of past events show up. Thus a lot of apparently surprising things happen because their causes flew under the History Channel's radar.
"Is somewhat of an unfair retcon. Churchill did a lot of stuff in british politics (often successfully!) He was in parliament *63 years*, which makes Joe Biden's career look like a spring chicken."
He also did some personally career-enhancing but party disservice stuff while in Parliament like crossing the floor. His reputation was greatly enhanced post-war, particularly by a set of Americans who suffered from Anglophilia, but I think that maybe we can now come to a more balanced view of who he was and what he achieved. He was a Churchill, and they've always been on the make. I think he did have an enormous stroke of luck that he was in government during the Second World War, and that Chamberlain had to resign as Prime Minister - this allowed him to get into power and of course, while the war was on, remain in power and be the face of British resistance and create that myth of his premiership. That he got turfed out of power in the immediate post-war election says a lot about the views of the populace as to how they really felt about him (even if that was just 'he was good during wartime but a bad pick for peacetime').
He'll never have a great reputation in Ireland, especially due to his father's actions before him, but I think as older generations die off and now we're got the Millennials and Alpha coming up, he'll just be another forgotten name in the history books rather than "I remember him/my parents and/or grandparents used to speak about him and they didn't like him".
"I think he did have an enormous stroke of luck that he was in government during the Second World War, and that Chamberlain had to resign as Prime Minister"
Very true. Before 1945, England had not had a general election for something like nine years, and Churchill never won a general election until the 1950s. After WWII, a huge portion of the British public wanted to change society and rebuild the country in a new way. The public was willing to sacrifice to win the war but didn't want the post-war spoils to accrue to the same old powerful.
The campaign message of the Conservatives - who before 1939, with the exception of Churchill, had promoted appeasement of Hitler - was 'trust us', versus Labour which had specific plans, like nationalizing major industries (a bad plan, imho writing from 2025).
Also, although Churchill was extremely popular throughout the war, the government was not Conservative, rather it was a unity government.
There's also his posts on LessWrong, which reached a broader audience. I'd say that's where Scott "got his start" and early SSC commenters mostly came from there.
I'm surprised the author didn't analyze whether Open Threads had lower quality comments than posts. Without a post to motivate them, I find them to be fairly vacuous (especially the top level comments for some reason).
Didn't Scott start discouraging discussion of certain culture war topics around midway through the SSC era? That might explain some of the changes around 2016.
Specifically, comments just wouldn't appear at all if they had certain words in them. That should affect simple word statistics even more than the actual content of the comments. Meanwhile ACX has no such filter.
I can't remember exactly what words I used, but I think that aside from Gamergate they were mostly slurs and marks of very low-quality discourse. I don't think I intended that to fully ban any topics (except for Gamergate). I can imagine that some people get exasperated when they couldn't use the word "dudebro" in a comment on feminism and eventually gave up though.
One aspect of the ACX-era Commentariat that sucks is all the advertising that people do for their own blogs. That style of post was virtually non-existent on SSC but is very common in the Open threads on substack.
I agree but I also feel bad banning it completely because I'm grateful I had a chance to advertise my blog before it was famous, X is working pretty hard to restrict spreading links to other sites, and somebody has to allow for discovery. Let me know if you have good ideas for how to balance these considerations.
Perhaps every open-thread could have a "please post all blogging self-promotion as replies to *this* comment" master-post like what the classified threads have (but with other types of self-promotion still banned outside classified threads).
Yeah, maybe a dedicated classified thread for self-promotion (at least we seem to now be free of the spambots, until AI learns to be even sneakier at injecting content).
What I've suggested multiple times before, but most people don't seem to like, is requiring people to paste their blog post (or a truncated version or summary) into the Open Thread comment. This way, (a) we're not forced to follow a link to another site just to follow the discussion, and (b) there's no way to use such posts to get unearned clicks--the only way you'll get clicks is if what you put in your comment is good enough that people want to go to your blog to see more stuff like it, *not* having to click just to know what you're even trying to discuss.
The unearned clickbait advertising aspect is what disgusts me about such typical posts more than anything else. And people often (or at least I do) write very long Open Thread comments trying to make a point, and I see people right here now saying they want more of that. Yet when I last proposed it people seemed far more bothered by the annoyance of having to scroll past long posts than the sliminess of "click here to find out" garbage. Which I simply can't understand.
More long OT comments that aren't reposts of LLM output or "this hour's Trump outrage news" would be good. Right? Add a strict rule of "must be genuinely trying to discuss the subject, not just advertise, to Scott's satisfaction" if necessary.
As someone who has occasionally done this sort of thing, it can be harder than it sounds. You're going to lose stuff like formatting and links, and you may need to do some cleanup to stop, say, any image captions from sticking around.
Maybe, but I'm not convinced this isn't a feature. I'm inclined to say the only people who should be advertising on ACX are those willing to put in a bit of effort in order to get feedback from ACX readers on their ideas. If they're not particularly interested in such feedback, not even enough to put in a bit of reformatting effort, they're definitely not the people whose blogs I want to read.
I can understand the rule as a trivial inconvenience to make sure you don't have people doing drive-by linking to try to drive traffic or whatever. I do find the framing of "feedback" to be rather odd, but that may be because I'm pretty sure I have 90% or more of the readers here who are interested in my niche directly. If I am putting something here, it's because I think it may be of general interest to people, not for feedback.
Maybe I'm atpyical but I generally assume the purpose of the Open Threads is to start discussions, and thus get annoyed when people seen to be treating it as "read this thing I wrote!" rather than "what do you think of this thing I wrote?" But this annoyance is very slight when the person doing it isn't linking to their own blog or otherwise self-promoting in the process, and goes way up when they are.
And I also feel like "wanting feedback" is a somewhat clear metric for dividing "genuine use of Open Threads for their actual purpose" from "exploiting them as an opportunity to self-promote", though I'm sure there could be a better one.
It would be such a great self-fulfilling prophecy if this post becomes the new most commented one, and July does become the month with the most comments.
Maybe this is just my personal depression but... I kind of got tired of "discussing serious things on the internet with strangers."
It doesn't solve anything. It usually gets derailed, sometimes by randos who are completely wrong. It takes an ordinate amount of time and effort. It doesn't lead to any real personal connection. It's just a bad habit all around.
The internet is for influencers now. If it's worth saying, it's worth making your own substack/twitter/youtube so you too can be an influencer. No point arguing with random people on the comment section.
I followed the same trajectory, but I don’t think the reason is that the internet changed. Rather it’s that internet debate is quite a small game, and once you’ve played it for a couple of hundred hours, it gets stale. In order to be suitable for online debate, a subject has to be (a) relatively well-understood by large numbers of people; (b) have a stock of facts which are fairly broadly accepted; (c) nonetheless be open to several different interpretations. The number of topics that meet these criteria is tiny, and the number of credible positions on each is very limited. If you go and watch you people going through the same set of debates, it’s cute and frustrating. But the fact we’re no longer into it isn’t a fact about the internet, it’s just a function of our longer experience.
I think this is true of, idk, Israel vs. Palestine, but I'm still excited by things like the Alzheimers review a few weeks ago where you have a chance to learn about a random topic, ask questions of experts/other interested people, and hash out disagreements with other people that you might never have seen anyone talk about before (or that had previously been limited to a few low-bandwidth journals).
Sure. If you're asking questions in good faith and genuinely hoping to learn something, that works great. Especially if you have a way to know that the people really are experts and not just "some guy with a lot of spare time who read a few wikipedia articles." I just don't like the extended back-and-forth slugfests that internet discussions usually turn into.
"I think this is true of, idk, Israel vs. Palestine"
Natural lifecycle of a commentariat? Many years ago, I regularly lurked, and rarely posted, on other forums. After a while, except for unique topics, I could've written the regulars' comments for them, and they could've written each others'. I assume that is true here too.
It's super annoying when you see a discussion online about something and nobody is bringing up what you think is the right perspective though. I usually can't help trying to convince people of that perspective in the comments. But like you said it almost never leads anywhere.
One of the topics where I think the discourse is bad is bullshit jobs. They're not taken seriously enough 95%+ of the times they get mentioned imo. I wrote a long form essay about them for one of the book review contest a while back, and just linking to that essay instead of writing loads comments seems like it's a lot more persuasive to people. The discussion's usually polite and productive at least. Also people are surprisingly willing to read 6k+ word long essays from strangers online. So that might be a more productive alternative to normal commenting if you don't mind spending the time.
I also did one on central planning, which was another topic that I thought the general discourse was really poor on, but for some reason there's never seems to be any good opportunities to link to it. So I think it only works for quite specific topics.
Stuff like that is where i think it's better to just start your own blog or write a book. Or signal boost someone else's, if you can find one. I think most of us have heard the term "bullshit jobs," and personally I've read David Graeber's book about them, but I think I'd need a lot more detail and nuance about it than even a 6k word essay could provide.
I made the mistake of writing this as a comment instead of linking to an essay. So I'm not expecting it to convince anyone.
It basically is writing a blog I suppose and I've seen Scott do the same thing with his posts on twitter. I think a blog post is a good length to link people to, since you can cover things in much more detail than a chain of comments but you can't really expect people to read anything longer.
I thought it was worth writing something on bs jobs myself also because the original book (despite coining the term) by Graeber is pretty bad imo, and I thought I could write something more persuasive, that deflects a bunch of counter arguments I don't think he anticipated. You can read it if you'd like.
Thank you very much for this essay. It’s excellent - friendly, cheerful and lucid. It’s also very funny.
To me, Bean’s point about the change in OT frequency doesn’t affect the quality of the work. Any hypothesis is only going to be fuzzily proved, because the thing being evaluated is so qualitative. I found the various attempts to quantify/identify objective tests very entertaining in themselves. One of the most interesting features of the essay is the attempt to define the factors which make the Commentariat so great in a way which can then be tracked. I don’t think anyone has disagreed with the factors themselves.
A very good post! I also don't want this to win the whole thing lest we be seen as narcissist, but this is top 3 at least.
About UI, I vastly prefer the susbstack UI compared to wordpress, to the point that I dread binging SSC compared to pleasantly seeing all ACX posts. Heavy emphasis that I read this blog exclusively on mobile. I actually can't comprehend why people think wordpress UI is better other than nostalgia. The "pinching and zoom a bit" problem that Vladimir mention in the post, is super annoying to me.
I endorse the hypothesis that Trump killed SSC commentariat. It seems like it kills libertarian online presence in general. I just recently realized a large parallel between this blog with another libertarian online space, Dan Carlin of Hardcore History fame, which also makes another podcast talking about current event in Common Sense. I find his audience also a nice space where people focus on liberty, detached from politics. But Trump election completely broke it. After 2017, only 7 (out of total 324) episodes are released over 8 years. None are even released in 2019. The host himself mentions that the discussion he raised on that podcast becomes useless. With that case in mind, I can see the same thing also happened here.
The big thing about the UI is the lack of an easy way to find new comments. I think this has massive effects on the ability to engage with each other, if you don't know of the ACX Tweaks browser extension (or if you don't use a browser that supports web extensions, which on mobile means almost any browser other than recent Firefox). On SSC you could skim through the comments on a thread to look for interesting ones, then at a later time skim through new comments posted since the last time, then again... On ACX, without the extension, you can't do that without wasting a lot of time looking at comments you've already seen, so likely most people only look at the comments once, so Alice will only see a comment by Bob if Alice randomly happens to look at the comments later than Bob (or if Bob is directly replying to a comment by Alice, in which case Alice gets a notification.
It's also much slower than SSC at loading comments when there are many of them, and comments often disappear for a while while scrolling.
In contrast, SSC may not have been well-optimized for smartphones, but a wordpress blog could be optimized for smartphones with minimal CSS work.
Good point about new comments, I've been struggling with it with both sites. Unluckily I found SSC after it ends, so the comment never updates, so I've never been exposed to that feature anyway. If Scott consents, I'd also like for SSC to be modernized for mobile readers.
I definitely enjoy that this backs up my longstanding belief that we should go back to calling the dominant progressive ideology 'social justice' rather than woke. The old one just encourages better conversations, while the new one is one syllable easily barked and bereft of obvious meaning.
I dislike "social justice" because it tips the scale (how could anyone be against justice?), doesn't form into other parts of speech well (social justicic? socially just? social justiciars?) and ends up abbreviated as SJ or SJW (which is even more cringe than "woke", and unfair to Jesuits and hyperforin enjoyers).
> I dislike "social justice" because it tips the scale (how could anyone be against justice?)
I think ~all political movements play that game in one way or another, so it doesn't really give social justice a unique advantage. How could anyone be against making America great? How could anyone be against Democracy? How could anyone dispute that black people's lives matter?
I think it would be reasonable to disagree about what is and is not social justice. When Warrior gets tacked on it isn’t just cringe, it sounds like mockery. Were there really a bunch of people running around calling themselves SJWs? Or was that Warrior part applied by people who thought those who were doing ‘social justice’ as they saw it were just fuzzy headed do-gooders?
I’ve mentioned I that I pretty much shun Reddit so the only place I saw SJW (with the W) frequently was here at ACX and in that context it always had “this bunch of bozos” connotations.
From what I recall, the 'warrior' part was nearly always appended by enemies, indicating that someone was out looking for a fight about it. It made them out to be overzealous and combative.
And yet the numbers show that conversations were much better before we dropped the term. Maybe we needed it to be a little unwieldy and self-complimentary to balance out the tendency for cringe?
I think point 3 is the most accurate, and not enough weight is being given to the wider culture that we live in. The west's whole pop culture cycle has changed massively over the last 20 years, and the cycle of misery started around 2015 or so, so it's no surprise that people remember it as the last of the good years.
Some trends to note in the broader collapse of public fun / happiness:
- mainstream comedies (Sandler, Stiller, Hangover, Anchorman etc) have completely vanished from the wider pop culture & cinema
- music is less shared across the whole culture (my uninterested parents knew Britney or Rhianna songs, know nothing in the charts today), and pop bands have vanished - all new successful pop stars are solo artists
- politics has moved from the era of Obama HOPE posters to politicians promising tiny changes or negative ones (or no change! Trump 2020 had no platform and just endorsed his 2016 one)
- expectations for individuals and celebs to get involved in silly trends (planking, Harlem shake, flash mobs) replaced with an expectation to use your platform to discuss climate change or Gaza
And along with these, there's been a key change in the internet:
- 2005 to 2015, there was a constant cycle of cool new websites to find, and every few months you'd stumble across something amazing to share with your friends
- last 5 or 10 years, that has massively changed, and people use a smaller set of websites more regularly, and rarely stumble upon an exciting new site
- the whole vibe of the internet has moved from excitement of discovery, to annoyance at what some asshole has commented on twitter
As such, how people interact with this blog is going to match it. The last years of public happiness will see people see it as one of the last times they stumbled across a new blog that they thought was amazing. Now we're all already stressed and jaded when we log on.
This timeline in turn ties to all of Haidt's work that is not (I believe) the cause of the above shift, but in parallel, as around 2014 mental health issues, particularly for teens starts massively rising. Getting stuck to social media and Likes and retweets has made us all more miserable, matching the timeline of the pop culture shift, and people saying SSC was better in 2015 / 2016 than today.
The bad Substack UX can not only make the experience worse, but also act back on the comment section's quality. By far the most important problem is a lack of an easy way to find new comments (without the ACX Tweaks browser extension https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks, which probably only a fraction of the commentariat uses — ~147 people in total according to the Firefox and Chrome extension stores combined).
The result is that most people probably only look at the comment section once, so comments posted after most people have done their one look are read by few people. So top-level comments posted more than a few hours after a blog post appears usually don't get engagement, and replies only get engagement by the people already involved in that thread; on SSC, that timeframe was more like a few days. To me, this is one of the main reasons I mostly stayed on the Data Secrets Lox forum that was made when SSC went down even after ACX came up, and only occasionally comment on ACX.
This may have some further effects via positive feedback loops:
- When there are dozens of top-level comments without any replies, it's hard to judge which ones are worth reading, it discourages reading them; and it discourages replying if you can expect few people to read your reply.
- Since only the first few top-level comments get engagement, people are motivated to post a reply ASAP, without reading the previous replies to see if what they want to say has already been posted, or spending time to write a quality comment.
- If you expect few people to read your comment, and there's less sense of a community of regulars who all read each other's comments, you're less motivated to put effort into your comments.
If having Substack add this feature, or leaving Substack, are not options, at least it should be heavily advertised that this blog is intended to be read with ACX Tweaks installed. Installing it yourself is not enough to solve the above problems if most people don't have it. (Leaving Substack should be an option. For less than the 10% cut Substack takes, Scott could hire a programmer to write a bespoke subscription system for SSC. Hell, he could hire me, or probably any of dozens of us. There seem to be existing solutions for Wordpress too. Or maybe Substack could hire us to either add this feature or, better, add an option for bloggers to add custom JavaScript and CSS.)
----
Some mistakes in the post and confounders/considerations missed:
- SSC had a comment depth limit of 4 (where top-level comments are depth 0), ACX has no limit. To make the depth of engagement comparable, ACX comments below depth 4 should be treated as depth 4. The (lack of) depth limit might also have some effect on how people engage, though I probably not much.
- The charts show almost the entire year of 2020 in white, but SSC actually went down on June 22. Indeed, there was only one post during the hiatus, the very highly commented posts in the first half of 2020 were when SSC was still up.
- Top-level comments not getting replies may mean not that they aren't worth replying to, but that few people read them, perhaps for technical reasons as discussed above.
- Conversely, Substack sends e-mail notifications when someone replies to your post, while on SSC that was only available as a not-well-advertised external service.
----
Another consideration is that much of the commentariat got replaced between SSC and ACX. When ACX came online, there were only a few familiar names and faces^Wavatars, most were new. And not because the commentariat became much bigger: rather, it feels like only a fraction of SSCers came back (though many did). This is the other reason I mostly stayed on DSL; if others feel similarly, there's a feedback loop here too.
There's a moral here: It was a mistake to move to Substack and change the name of the blog at the same time as external factors forced a long hiatus. (Perhaps starting new, frequent thematic series, like Mantic Mondays, which some people find less interesting, around the same time, can be considered here as another change.) They probably made many people percieve ACX as a different blog that happens to be written by the same person, rather than as the same blog as SSC, which made marginally engaged people less likely to come back.
If external factors force a discontinuity in a community, do NOT use that as an occasion to make other major changes. Focus on retaining as much continuity as possible to regather the community. Make changes at any other time BUT when external factors force a break in the community. (I mentioned another bad example of this concept I've encountered towards the end of a previous comment where I discussed this: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/subscrive-drive-2024-free-unlocked/comment/47629419) (In an organization where you don't have absolute power, a discontinuity can be an opportunity to shake things up, but that doesn't apply to a blog where the author can make changes whenever he wants.)
Wanting a revenue source from the blog after the NYT affair was understandable, but renaming the blog was an entirely unforced error.
There's also the thing that after SSC went down, Scott had a form to subscribe to get an e-mail notification when the blog restarts, but that e-mail never arrived, at least to me. Probably because when Scott made the old SSC posts available again a few months into the hiatus, the system sent out hundreds of e-mails to everyone who subscribed, so Scott quickly killed the e-mail notification system, and then when ACX started, he didn't bother to find the list of e-mail addresses and have an e-mail sent to them. There may still be people out there waiting for that e-mail.
"That question is - does ‘the Commentariat’ actually exist?"
While the flattery about "we have the bestest comments on the Innertubes" is very palatable, I doubt it.
What happened? Well, several things:
(1) There's been huge churn over the years, a lot of the original people have left for different reasons, new people have come along.
(2) There were two bumps in the road - first, the breaking off of the sub-reddit due to perceptions around the Culture War and subsequent founding of TheMotte, and second the New York Times story.
The hiatus in both periods between "is SSC still on the road?" and the new set-up (TheMotte and ACX) meant we fissioned like American Protestantism into little denominations into DSL (more right/conservative leaning), TheMotte (1 million witches, leading later on to the departure from Reddit before they could be pushed out the window, as there was a perception that the admins were starting to meddle and it was only a matter of time before it was 'quit before you get fired', and then a while after *that*, a further schism where the left-leaning posters departed to TheSchism), the remainder who kept SSC going, and us wretched hive of scum and villainy on here 😁 Scott tolerates conservatives (social), conservatives (fiscal), and the "in a just world, you guys would be stood up against a wall and shot and, please Marx, come the revolution you will be!" righties (e.g. Steve Sailer, who I can't understand why he has such a bad rep elsewhere but there you go). This means the pretty little wordclouds and Google ngrams shoot for the moon with "bad think" topics like racism etc.
(3) Time. Nothing remains static, change is the rule of the universe, and over the years everything from the climate to politics has heated up. It's no surprise we talk about more hot-button topics, or even that previously neutral to weakly-controversial topics have become hot-button (e.g. HBD going from 'theoretical discussion' to 'that's racism!') Speaking of TheMotte, there's a somewhat unkind (but also somewhat true) view that left-wing posters can't handle disagreement and tend to flounce off with a dramatic last announcement of how toxic the witches all are and this has driven them away. I do think that the tolerance for rough-and-tumble in general on the Innertubes has gone way down, so there is little space anymore for robust disagreement (as this is taken as toxic behaviour, the whole bingo card of "you are terrible people and I'm blocking you" as per Bluesky, which apparently has handy little blocklists so you never, ever have to encounter a bad person at all in your experience there) and thus we all silo into our comfortable little bubbles of harmonious unity where never is heard a discouraging word.
Sailer has written/still writes? for Vdare and the Takimag crowd, which are racist/white nationalist, and he popularized the term
that should not be named here. The three letter acronym.
I came across him when I read Rod Dreher's blog back in the day, the paleocons were another subculture that crowd mingled with. John Derbyshire was a NR columnist who migrated to the Takimag crowd, and fell from grace. That crowd tends to mingle with subcultures-Vox Day/Theodore Beale tried to do with SF normal and Christian.
He has a bad rep for those reasons, and i'm always surprised no one noticed it. That subculture pushes junk scientific racism where ever they can, and it kind of took root in part in here with IQ discussions.
Keep in mind that the stereotype of racists as uneducated yokels is partly false, its a mind virus many smart and rich people latch onto even if they are nice people too. its really only recently we've suppressed it, and smartness can get pressed into its service because its an animal part of us we have to resist.
No scene lasts forever, and no artistic movement goes on for eternity. There are opposing movements and counterrevolutions--ACX isn't *that* famous but it's accreted a Sneer Club of people who hate it along with Less Wrong and rationalism in general. The empire, long divided, must unite; the empire, long united, must divide. So has it ever been.
The commentariat has been able to discuss controversial topics for over a decade and that's honestly a pretty good win in my view. Of course if I were one of its enemies I'd point out it pretty much selected out the major feminist/intersectional category on the left, which means one of the sides in the culture war is largely absent, which helps with not having flamewars and the like. I'm ironically not complaining--everyone else seems to have their safe spaces, why not unwoke nerds?
The other thing that has to be considered is that Scott has two kids, so we can't ethically ask him to neglect his children to post more stuff we find interesting.
As an aside, I can't say I'm too surprised someone on ACX decided to aggregate everyone's comments and apply quantitative metrics, but now that everything I say is preserved for eternity in someone's aggregate file I think I'm going to have to think harder about what I post here.
I remember our host mentioning them a few times at the beginning of open threads, but certainly not as often as once a week. Googling suggests ~40 instances over open threads. But sometimes comments are highlighted without being calling “comment of the week”, so I don’t know what’s their status.
It's spontaneously awarded to effort-comments. Not periodic in any way. The distinction is quite rare. Also, I suspect Scott doesn't read the comments as regularly, now that he's got kids.
Funny, I think Be Nice, At Least Until you can Coordinate Meanness as a particularly bad post, one that prompted me to pretty much give up commenting on SSC proper in favour of the subreddit, mostly the Culture War thread thereof. If others felt the same that would be an explanation.
Many people have mentioned "the bad Substack UX", but I think that a lot of it depends on the psychology of the person who is doing the reading:
- Substack *as a newsletter* was not conceived as a place for discussions. Therefore, people who read Scott from their emails are peak lurkers.
- Substack *as a mobile app* is designed to leave only a short comment (i.e. loved this/hated this), and is shitty for anything longer. However, people who read from their app are likely to be lurkers too.
- Substack *as a website* is the only place from where you can leave an actually worthy comment, but it sadly gets broken when you have +1k comments.
Now, which commenter is most likely to leave high-quality comments at all?
The one who accesses Substack as a website:
- He probably has more "free time" than others, because he needs to turn on his PC or laptop, instead of just reaching for his pocket.
- He can have other tabs open where he can research his arguments.
Sadly, the ratio of people who own a personal PC or laptop is way less that those who own a smartphone. Therefore, Substack *as a business* is incentivized to optimize for their app, not for their website.
This is really impressive data analysis, and the graphs are very pretty!
I think the only place it falls short is that it fails to convince me there's a clear connection between "the average toxicity score decreased from 0.03 to 0.02 and then rebounded to 0.025" and my actual experience as a commenter.
(It's possible I don't comment enough, but my actual experience as a commenter doesn't feel like it's changed much over the years.)
This is an excellent write-up but I wish you would have talked more about the paid subscriber factor. If memory serves, there was no paid subscriber option on SSC. Anyone could read or comment on any of the content (I do remember the hidden open threads, but you just had to look for them, they weren't locked or anything). I'd be very curious to know if people who are talking about the decline in the Commentariat are subscribers or non-subscribers, and what differences there are between the two groups. Are the subscriber-only comment threads more satisfactory and robust? (I am not a paid subscriber myself). You talked a little bit about how Substack's model reaches a different audience and it would be nice to explore that in greater detail. I think it matters that even though not everything is paywalled, it still has the effect of discouraging the casual visitor. I would also predict that those who are subscribers would show higher investment in terms of their engagement and the quality of their posts.
A second interesting point of comparison would be to compare the commenter base over at the other place (The Motte, am I allowed to say the name)? The formation of that site has a complicated timeline that I can't remember the details of, but it started as an offshoot of the SSC community and launched its own site sometime around 2021 I believe. I wouldn't be surprised if there are other folks like me who comment both places. Although that one is purely community driven at this point. There's not much posting of original content or essays like Scott does here. So the comparison wouldn't really be apples-to-apples unless you just singled out the open threads.
It is a great shame that so many of these graphs are trending downwards. To rectify this, I propose a few modest changes to our habits:
In order to improve engagement metrics and average comment chain depth, we should avoid posting top-level comments to which few will respond. Prioritize controversial or subtly wrong comments whenever possible, to increase the probability that someone corects you.
The best way to emphasize free speech norms is to make sure controversial topics are discussed frequently. Therefore, besides using words like "racism" and "transalpine Gaul", I strongly recommend we make a habit of injecting culture war topics into seemingly unrelated conversations, in the same way as American liberals can make any news item about Trump.
The politeness scores are already quite good, but to avoid letting them get worse, we should take a page from TikTok and make sure to self-censor words like "dum**ss". With a few more posts on meditation, we might be able to attract non-Blockchain-using enlightened beings, which should further solidify our position of high politeness.
In order to maximize comment complexity, we can utilize a few strategies. Comments can be made longer by repeating themselves, treading the same ground several times, and generally ensuring redundancy. Verbosity can also be enhanced by judicious use of superfluous terminology and polysyllabic jargon. Such loquacious discussion will have the additional benefit of enhancing the comments' Flesh-Kincaid grade level.
Overall, although these metrics might look bad, I'm sure we can turn it around with just a little bit of care in how our comments are crafted.
It's a stroke economy. Crafting a comment probably has a value in its own right, collecting one's thoughts, but if it isn't replied to at all or only replied to by people who have a problem, well life is short.
(Uh, you say we can feel free to ask for our comment count and ranking; where and when do we do so? After the contest ends? I'm quite annoyed at how Substack doesn't list my comments and I'd like to take up that offer...)
One thing I think is missing, though, from a lot of this discussion of whether SSC was better than ACX is...a very subjective and polarising thing, but a potentially very important one: the cult-like feel of SSC. Note that I'm not saying it *was* cult-like, just that it could have that look or feel, to some people.
I discovered Scott in 2021 so my impression is entirely from reading the archives, but a lot of SSC seems to stand out in how much narrower the culture and opinion space was, compared to ACX. Two examples:
First, there's all this talk about SSC being "anti-woke" but I think it was much more specific than that. It seemed, as partly noted in the review, to have a hyperfixation on opposing feminism, but this was coupled with an almost complete lack of interest in opposing or even questioning the trans movement (even the most extreme parts of it). I feel I've seen this bizarre combination of enthusiastic support for the latter and frothing hatred for the former more times than I can count in those archives (and attitudes to racial wokeness were somewhere between the two). This wasn't anti-woke, this was a very specific ideological perspective that was anti-woke on some axes and quite pro-woke on others.
Second, the community seemed much, much more "orthodox rationalist" for want of a better term. Regular, enormously reverent links to The Sequences. Quotes from them used the same way Christians would use Bible verses. A lot of commenters going out of their way to shoehorn Less Wrong jargon into their comments at every oppprtunity.
ACX has both these things to a vastly lesser extent. And I think that's good, because as the review argues (and I fully agree with) this community has such value because of its uniquely high standards in norms of discussion. Free speech, politeness, complexity of thought, in a combination so extremely rare on the internet. And...why should these norms be reserved only for people who share a very ideosyncratic set of views? The very specific ideology dominant on SSC is surely going to repel a lot of people who don't share those views, and thus deprive them of the benefits that the high-standard discussion norms of the site can provide.
Having ACX, with the same norms, but a much more diverse opinion space (and this can seem a "dilution" of the SSC values when it's really only a dilution of the largely or entirely orthogonal unofficial ideological orthodoxy) seems to me to have a strong argument for being a significant improvement.
I am an occasional reader, and so I liked your mentions of posts that were special in one way or another. I hope to read them. Has there been a discussion of "best posts ever", or "best post of each year"?
"Also, in February 2019 the Culture Wars Thread was euthanised (link) but there is no corresponding uptick in comment section engagement as people migrated back from the Culture Wars thread to the SSC comments section."
Could this be explained by people going elsewhere? There were a couple spinoffs when the CW thread was euthanized which exist to this day.
The quality of the comments on a given post are directly proportional to David Friedman's volume of contributions. Sorry, those are just the facts! Don't @me bro!
"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded!"
This is probably part of the lifecycle of any internet platform. Plenty of old heads still pine for the "old" internet, pre-FB, -MySpace, -AOL, -whatever.
Pre-social media optimized for smartphones. Blogs are better https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2023/03/14/blogs-twitter-part-the-umpteenth/
August 1993 was the best Internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Heck, I remember that September when everything changed. That's the first time I saw spam on Usenet.
I don't engage in the ACX comments very often, but I do spend much more time on r/slatestarcodex. I haven't been there long enough to observe any long-term trends in comment quality, but I like it for the reasons you write about—people engage on that subreddit with a relatively reasonable amount of good faith and even more thoughtfulness (especially if you avoid being smarmy).
More interestingly, I almost never see Scott comment or post on his own account on that subreddit. All of his main ACX posts get reposted by someone, but it really does seem like r/slatestarcodex is this relatively agenda-less posting board for people to discuss whatever they want so long as it's reasonably thoughtful and interesting. I'll occasionally post one of my own blog posts there and usually get decent results, I'll comment out longer and more thoughtful takes than I usually do in response to other people, and I've seen many people summon really good comments from the ether just by asking something sincerely. I think this is my second comment in the actual ACX blog, but I've left many on the subreddit—it really feels like r/slatestarcodex is filling the "purposeless thoughtful internet person" void that Less Wrong has lost a little as it has become more AI-forward (and also as the "inner circle" of highly regarded voices gained more prominence and influence).
There's also something to be said for Substack's design as an email newsletter subscription forward service. There are probably a lot of people who subscribe to Astral Codex Ten and primarily read from their emails, and you can't engage with Substack comments from your email—you need to take the extra effort to go to the app or the blog itself. This is probably not the case for the old SlateStarCodex blog, where if you read a post on the blog, you would physically be on the blog, and thus your chance of engaging in the comments would be higher just because it would be easier and more convenient to do so.
Or the opposite could be the case. I used to read SSC in deliberate lurker mode, reading new articles together with their comments days or weeks later once the hubbub had died down. Most of my active engagement was with the subreddits. But I registered a Substack account to be able to comment at ACX and to get the full dopamine experience. (Insofar as the occasional response to a comment qualifies as any kind of experience.) Unfortunately the app actively makes it tricky to write effortful comments or to quote from the article or other comments or to provide links to substantiate one's assertions. So short responses without heft or substance are the result.
I second r/slatestarcodex . It’s my favorite source of new blogs and interesting stuff more generally.
Scott will occasionally comment there, although rarely. Almost exclusively on his posts, or those specifically responding to him. There are repost bots like u/dwaxe that will repost automatically, so there’s really no need for him to do it himself.
Most internet discussions of complex topics seem to fall into the trap of non-central tangents. That is to say that the general experience of myself and observed happening to many others is that there will be long comment chains that start off being about some detail, and quickly veer off into various conflicts and arguments that are uninteresting. Alongside this are orphaned comments substantively engaging with the main point. If this happens a few times I mostly stop engaging, and I imagine it is similar for others.
I don't see that non-central tangents are an issue in themselves if they are interesting and original. If they end in discussions of history, etymology, theology or some interesting observations about the world that actually enlightens readers. They can be problematic if they are stale political/culture war debates or dull non-toxic threads on personal experience of the commenters.
Even though I enjoyed this review, I almost want it not too win at risk of all of us coming across as way too narcissistic (even if the final conclusion is one of decline)
One thing I'm curious about is the level of polarization on ACX in the Trump era. I have never blocked anyone on any platform in my entire life, until I started more earnestly commenting on ACX and realized that a small but noticeable group of people were advocating for positions that I just did not want to engage with. The decline of Trump related conversation in 2024 could be because everyone already sorted out their block lists
Does the ACX-era data include Hidden Open Threads, or other subscriber-only posts?
No (can't have paid subscriber only posts without paid subscriptions). Or heck, maybe they did but I wasn't cool enough to be invited.
Brilliant work, almost suspiciously so. The rigor, the digressions, the weirdly poignant affection for long stale sentences…has anyone checked whether Scott himself ghostwrote this under a nom de data?
More seriously: the evaporative cooling theory rings true, but I also wonder whether the move to Substack imposed a subtle cognitive shift. SSC comment sections felt like salons, public squares for weirdos. ACX, being structurally an email-first platform, feels more like receiving missives from a trusted priest. Less agora, more liturgy.
P.S. Whoever wrote this: if you're not Scott, you're doing an uncanny impression of someone who once hallucinated him in a dream and built a spreadsheet about it.
"So I asked AI to write a Scott Alexander post critiquing Scott Alexander..."
Exactly, but the twist is it passed the Turing Test by accusing itself of failing it. Classic Scott move. Or classic not-Scott. Hard to say, really.
Whoa....(mind blown)
We're deep enough in the hall of mirrors now that even the reflections have imposter syndrome.
And people say we don't need upvotes!
Every so often, a comment really does need to be upvoted...
And even the imposters wonder sadly whether they're just playing at being imposters in order to feel edgy.
And the edginess, of course, was just a desperate cry for pattern recognition.
I don't think this is Scott. Scott is way too good at knowing how studies break to have treated the shift in OT frequency as a minor footnote, when I strongly suspect that was the entirety of the 2016 breakpoint.
Good point, and if Scott actually were the author it’d probably break contest rules, or at least feel a little like rigging his own eulogy.
I'm pretty sure he's done it before, so it wouldn't be unprecedented. He didn't win, and I think he said if he had, the prize would have gone to the runner up instead.
Now I want a meta-review of all past finalists, scored for latent Scott-ishness.
I usually am nervous about being complimented. But I told a friend last night that this was a good post but should have come out stronger about the shift in OT frequency being the entirety of the 2016 breakpoint, so I'll accept this one :)
I originally signed up to Substack because it was email-first. But the app makes the email aspect invisible, and I don't think I've looked at my ACX email archive for over a year. No liturgies here.
I’m 99.9% sure this isn’t a Scott post.
One of the shared files has the name of the sharer on it, and it’s the same name as an account that occasionally comments on LessWrong.
I agree. Stuff like
“I myself am the 799th most prolific contributor to the comments section (225 comments).”
would be CIA/KGB level of deception. A very unScott thing.
I'm pretty sure Scott would not be able to do the coding and analysis the author of this piece did. I've never heard Scott talk about doing something like this, either conversationally or by mentioning in a post that he analyzed something relevant to his topic by coding a tool.
"We enjoy your films. Particularly the earlier, funny ones"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vinjXo_qlHg&ab_channel=IanRosen
[which movie, btw, was a giant meta-joke, deliberately designed to make you come out of the theater saying, you guessed it . . . . ]
Thanks for reminding me of this film.
Immediate thought from a reader who's only been here for ACX: wow toxoplasmosis of rage sure was prescient back in 2014. Also, did luxury beliefs actually start on SSC and not from Rob Henderson?
This made me incredibly nostalgic for SSC comment section. I really feel like the back and forth there helped me learn how to think critically. I’m glad you mentioned the Gupta post. Nothing has ever made me laugh as hard as the first time I read Deiseach response to Gupta threatening to break her arm:
““Warrior background” my arse. You think verbal bullying backed up with nebulous physical threats is going to impress anyone? I can boast of my family lineage as well – do you want to try casting curses and inflicting losses by the power of the glám dícenn and the aer? My family line is that of the fílí who were more powerful than kings, as we can raise blisters on the face by our imprecations and physical imperfection on a king disbars him from the kingship. The legendary king who tore out his only remaining eye to give it to a poet who requested it bears witness to our power and status in society, why then should I be intimidated by a buffoon and bully who huffs and puffs over bone-breaking (he would, an he dared, so he could!)? Those of my derbfine and even closer kindred even to this day are poets, musicians and creative makers, you envious little braggart!
If you are half-Scottish, then we have a share of blood in distant common, and as far-sundered kindred I rebuke you – mo náire thú!”
Oh, that was fun, but the wrong kind of fun. I got a little too much into it, and charity went right out the window. And if it truly wasn't Gupta but someone pretending to be him, then I should be even more ashamed of taking his name in vain.
I try to be nicer nowadays (doesn't work but I do try).
Oh, it was hilarious, and it's not wrong that it really should be part of the canon. I regret that I didn't actually post "You do realize that there are a lot of us familiar enough with the defense world that waving around a blue ribbon from the DoD science fair isn't going to work, right?" Because that's basically what he had, and while that's not of zero impressiveness, it's also not what he was making it out to be.
(Plus, it gave us the picture of you fighting him on Giant's Causeway, which I still love. https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,9003.msg371749.html#msg371749 )
I shall refrain from comment on the picture 😁
If it was the real Gupta, he was a bit too full of himself but I should have been a little more tactful. If it was someone trolling us all, I feel slightly better about that, because it was braggadocio on both sides and a fine exchange of flyting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyting
Yeah I think you are nicer. But I do miss the wicked tongue lashings you'd deliver. It truly was a large part of my enjoyment. If Scott is the Grand Caliph, (or whatever it is you name him) then I'd always seen you as the court jester. (The experience would be less without you. Thx.)
Great analysis! I myself tried to use stylometric neural networks to analyze why LLMs can't replicate Scott's writing style no matter what I try. The biggest help was adding the LISA model with 768 interpretable features.
Some features LISA found to be enriched in Scott's writing:
- able to view the situation in a balanced way
- clear and direct in their opinion
- focusing on the facts
- expressing skepticism
- confrontational
Some features that AI slop was enriched in:
- thought-provoking
- using scholarly words
- the author uses a critical tone
- using punctuation to create a sense of tension and suspense
- uses a combination of short, simple sentences and longer, more complex sentences
It can also highlight the passages particularly enriched in the feature in question. Would be curious to see if someone wants to apply LISA to the commentariat analysis.
Scott is funny and smart and has an original take on things and relevant experience, and he's weird (not WEIRD) in the way that chimes with a lot of us weirdoes (insert relevant The Onion t-shirt here: https://store.theonion.com/collections/the-kartoonist-kelly-kollection/products/sickos-are-calling-and-i-must-go-t-shirt).
The day some heap of chips can replicate that, I'm praying for the sweet meteor o'death to take us all out.
> I have already mentioned that April 2016 marked an extreme high-water mark for usage of the term ‘SJW’. From what I can see, there’s no particular reason for this specific to SSC – April 2016 has two threads with significant usage of the token, but they are completely random threads – OT47 and Links 4/16 (Links 4/16 does have a link about social justice warriors so that makes some sense, but OT47 doesn’t, so my conclusion is that there is just something that was in the water around that time).
Here's a theory worth considering: Try analyzing the combined usage of the terms 'SJW' and 'woke' and see if this combination doesn't show a bit more continuity. This was around the point when the SJWs started abandoning the former term and adopting the latter. (Which of course they they turned around and abandoned too, not to many years later, as people outside their ingroup picked up on the fact that these were the same toxic people with the same toxic ideology as the SJWs that everyone got sick of years ago.)
Were ‘SJW’ or ‘woke’ ever often used as anything other than terms of disparagement?
I mean the only time I recall ‘woke’ being used as a positive term was by Katie Perry - Katie fucking Perry. How could I ever take that seriously?
https://theonion.com/katy-perry-teases-new-single-stop-making-fun-of-me/
Probably should say once again the only subreddits i subscribe to are for fishing and electric snowblowers. I just don’t need the aggravation.
Yes. Like "politically correct" before them, these terms began as congratulatory in-group terms that they used to refer to themselves, and were later abandoned and disavowed once outsiders began to pick up on them and use them to refer to these people in a disparaging way rather than a positive sense.
The exact words may change over time but the basic pattern remains consistent.
I mostly remember PC being used as a pejorative too. I’m not saying people didn’t practice these things, rather I don’t recall anyone proudly saying I’m ‘woke’. Other than Katie Perry.
But think about it, Gunflint. If the likes of Katie Perry were using it, then it was a familiar term, to the audience/demographic she was trying to appeal to, and it was something considered good/desirable/correct, else why jump on the bandwagon?
Like Kamala Harris and brat. I never heard of this Charlie XCX or the album or the term before, like yourself and 'woke', but for a mercifully short while it was out there all over (though I still think *this* riffing off the coconut anecdote was the most embarrassing thing that whole campaign did):
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GTqU8sOXkAA035W.jpg:large
They were used as congratulatory in-group terms for a very short period by a small group of people and have then been used as derogatory terms by a huge amount of people for a long time. Their start as in-group terms might be a point, but it's not a particularly central point vis-a-vis these words.
Yeah pre 2016 “woke” was definitely a complement in lib spaces (I mean I suppose it still technically would be, but would just be a bit blasé to say). My recollection is the cringe-ification went something like black twitter usage -> young lefties in general -> academic types -> the general public.
I feel like with terms like these the more people know what they mean the less value they serve as shibboleths so they’re quickly churned through.
ETA: I have a very distinct memory of being super happy after a friend who was a Palestinian (!) Muslim (!!) bisexual (!!!) woman (!!!!) told me I was woke circa 2014 (after she explained to me what it meant).
If your friend was neurodivergent and/or differently abled, you'd have gotten the entire bingo card and would have qualified for a free toaster oven 😁
I vividly remember the left-wing UK newspaper The Guardian when they defiantly pounced on the self-descriptor "tofu-eating wokerati", originally a criticism from a Conservative politician, and started making merch with that slogan.
I’ve seen this play out before, a group embracing a term meant as an insult.
If I go into my own personal way back machine Richard Nixon’s VP, Spiro Agnew gave a lacerating speech referring to academia as a corps of ‘effete snobs’. Good, hard hitting term penned by a great op-ed turned speech writer, William Safire. The objects of derision embraced the insult and wore it with pride. Things along the line of ‘Effete Snobs Against Nixon’.
For that matter consider the slur against gays, ‘queer’ IIRC some gays also adopted that term as a badge of pride. Kind of a ‘fuck you, well own your damn insult, so there!’ thing. Hence the ‘Q’ in LGBTQ.
Oh, yeah. It started (where I saw it) amongst the black consciousness folks (or I should say, 'folx') e.g. where I first saw a definition of the term was a Tumblr post by someone talking about singing along to a song on the car radio about 'I been woke since the day I was born' and their mother telling them off that they didn't know nothing about being woke, *she* had experienced the real black experience back in the bad old days.
That of course trickled out to the SJW white liberals good allies types, and then was used (as Bob Frank says) as a token of being in the in-group, knowing the up-to-date jargon and using it correctly, and as a term of approbation (we're woke, unlike the rest of the bad white people).
So then people not part of the in-group started using it to refer to the wokies and it became a term of criticism (like Social Justice Warrior and politically correct before it), and then it got dropped and the whole denial mechanism creaked once more into action: we never said that, we never did that, you're lying, you're the ones said it not us, and so forth.
That last sentence reminds me of this [https://open.substack.com/pub/freddiedeboer/p/please-just-fucking-tell-me-what] fun Freddie De Boer piece
I like Freddie, even though we are opposed on probably every single thing imaginable. But he's had real world experience at the coalface in education, so he often posts things that have me nodding in recognition.
And yeah, he does criticism from the left which gives me some hope that sanity remains on that side of the see-saw 😁
One thing to consider about average comment depth is that Slate Star Codex capped it to around 5, and discussions would often continue at the max depth. So the number you're getting here is probably somewhat smaller it would be on an infinite depth platform like Substack.
Although conversely, substance links to deep comments are often messed up (they've gone back and forth a few times on whether they work), which also has an effect.
SSC capped it at 4, if top-level is considered depth 0. A valid comparison would be to substitute min(comment depth, 4) for comment depth when averaging the depth of ACX comments.
Well, I hope I didn't do anything wrong when I started commenting! (This was early 2016 after finding Scott via UNSONG)
Overall I think the general online discourse shifted a lot around the time of Trump. But also I think it's harder to do meaningful comments on mobile devices especially on Substack. I wonder if there are any data on mobile vs desktop use.
I was going to post that it was probably due to you, so I am glad I found this comment and was saved the trouble! :D
I agree with both your (real) points, but I think the discourse norms, not just online, around the time of Trump is the biggest shift. I was in academia at the time, so kind of a weird spot I will admit, but that kind of struck me at the time when it became ok to treat those who disagree with you as just evil and advocate ostracism and violence against them. That undercurrent was always there of course, humans being what we are, but it seemed to go from something to be actively strived against to fully embraced as a sign you were one of the good people. Even people who had previously been pretty even handed and careful started choosing sides among the violence of faction, as Smith has put it, and as a result the wise and careful thinkers were marginalized. Bad commentating got worse, good got bad, and the best lost interest in dealing with the rest, would be my short version of it.
Mobile made the barriers to low quality drive by comments lower, and higher quality a bit high (harder to quote and type long comments on the phone while on the toilet at work) I suspect. Reading ACX wasn't something you sat down to do with intent, but something you might do for a few moments while waiting for the bus or your coffee. Sort of the difference in quality in a hand written letter vs text messages.
I think this review missed an incredibly important reason that comments per post dropped after April 2016. The first fractional OT was 49.5, the next month. I would be curious how the analysis holds up if that is corrected for, and don't recall things getting worse after that, at least in the OT commentariat.
Edit: OK, this was brought up, but almost as a footnote, and in a way that didn't ping when I was looking to see if it was noticed. "A significant change in how the OTs are handled changed the metrics" is an obvious reason for the breakpoint that doesn't actually have anything to do with the commentariat getting worse at about that point. Throw out that prior, and everything else just looks like noise. Frankly, this is the sort of mistake that usually gets quite a bit of snark here, and while I appreciate the rest of the analysis, I think this fundamentally undermines any discussion of a change in 2016.
Other thoughts:
First, I can actually think of a reason for a peak in comment length in 2017, and it was my fault. That was when I was running Naval Gazing in the OTs, and was good for a thousand word post in each one, plus we had a bunch of other people who were doing similar things for a while. Naval Gazing went independent at the end of October, and I recall the effortpost boom died down not too long after.
I think the falloff in certain political terms in 2016 was probably as much as anything to do with changes in the sort of stuff Scott was writing, because that was about the time there was a notable shift. (Probably not unaffected by the Trump stuff.) I definitely recall an impression that what he had just written tended to bleed into the OTs some, and it's obviously going to dominate the main posts. But I'm also not sure it was a bad thing, and while there were some very irritating people on politics in that era, it was still reasonably sane.
The other elephant in the room on the SSC/ACX split is DSL, which is pointedly not mentioned, but which captured a reasonable fraction of the OT community, particularly before ACX came back, and definitely kept a lot of people from coming back as actively as they were in early 2020.
Personally, one of the things that I like a lot less about ACX is that I can't see the list of recent comments by poster. My usual technique was to look through that list and see if anyone interesting was talking. The threshold for interesting varied based on how bored I was. This doesn't work any more because I have to know who I am looking for, which means only the very most interesting get looked at.
I emphatically agree with most of your points.
I was there in April 2016, and the fractional open threads did indeed change people's behavior in a way that dramatically affects these metrics. People would keep talking on the most recent open thread every day, until a new one was posted and then they would move there. So, when Scott suddenly starts posting open threads twice as frequently, that's going to change behavior-as-captured-in-these-metrics even though it isn't actually changing commenters' behavior.
The effortpost boom was indeed a thing, and I'm sorry that's vanished - though it's restarted at Data Secrets Lox (DSL). I don't recall anything Scott did that caused it to vanish. Maybe it was literally you, Bean, no longer leading by example with Naval Gazing?
Yes, my anecdotal experience was that much of the OT community stayed on DSL and never came back to ACX (or, much less than before, like me). One trend I was hoping this review would capture is the continuing "lifespan" of frequent posters - we're the ones who carry forward most of the comment section's culture, and I think there was a huge difference there between late SSC and early ACX. If there're other large changes there, that might explain other changes.
And I agree, the ACX interface is much worse than DSL. If it were better, I might be here more often.
>Maybe it was literally you, Bean, no longer leading by example with Naval Gazing?
My less-arrogant theory is that that period was picking the low-hanging fruit, although I will take credit for starting the trend. Most people (at least the kind who hang around here) have a couple of good effortposts in them, and that period got a lot of them out. I recall that it was trailing off even before I left, and absent something like the DSL contest, it's going to be hard to see it keeping going.
Yeah, that also could've been it! I know that with my blog, it was easier to think of topics to write about early on. We've both found more fruit and metaphorical ladders to pick it, but low-hanging fruit is definitely a thing.
And yes, thank you again for starting the DSL effortpost contest!
Every so often Substack asks me for feature suggestions; if you tell me your top fixable complaints about the Substack interface, I can try to forward them.
Assuming "just load everything quickly and don't be fancy" isn't an option, then probably something like the old top right menu that lists new comments since your last visit by who posted them would be helpful. As it is, it's sometimes hard to see where the actual discussion is, and much harder to keep up with people on my "interesting if I have time" list, as opposed to the much shorter "make time to read this person's stuff" list.
Seconded. I used to search for "~new~" to navigate through comments since my last visit and I miss being able to do that.
By far my top request is something like the old "~new" / "# comments since {datetime}" feature, where I can ctrl+f for comments I haven't yet read, and tell the system when I last read the whole thread in case I've reloaded it for some reason since then.
I appreciated Naval Gazing, bean, and still today I see things about boats and ships and wonder what your view on it would be!
Thanks. It is still a thing, you know.
I know! I keep meaning to check it out but too busy with the myriad distractions of life and online life, and by the time I remember, it's too late.
You should come back and do a guest post some time, the next time some ship manages to run into a bridge or the US Navy spends billions on something that sinks the moment it leaves dry dock 😀
Hey, if someone wants to offer me a guest-post slot, I would generally be happy to, provided it's something that fits within my remit. Unless you just mean in the OTs, in which case, probably not, because the demands of posting weekly don't stop.
I would like a guest post by you, if there ever comes a topic which you feel you want to write about and there's an open slot. The kind of "this is something I never knew I'd be interested in" content you provide(d) was excellent.
By the same token, if anyone knows stuff about planes and wants to explain why/why not Boeing's planes have had this recent run of misfortune (it's not them, it's just that they're so big a manufacturer every airline flies Boeings and so if their pilots or the wrath of nature screws up, it's a Boeing that will be on the receiving end/yes it's them and their crappy planes and crappy maintenance), I'd be glad to hear about it!
Matt Yglesias Slow Boring comments seems to have absorbed the ethos of SSC/ACX and often have overlapping commenters. His comment section seems to be more polite and less culture war than current ACX threads despite Matt being a much more partisan writer.
I believe those are exclusively for paying subscribers.
That is correct.
True, that probably explains a lot of it. Thought other Substacks with that rule have much worse comment sections.
They also pretty heavily moderate; it's a much less open open expression forum.
I’ve found the UX of SB comments much more annoying than ACX. You can’t open threads/ see all of the comments while still having the article open (there’s a view you see when you get to the bottom of the article, where it shows the top two or three comments with all replies hidden. Then, if you tap into the replies or click to see more comments the article disappears but the comments all show). This makes it a pain to quote the article in ur reply to a comment.
Diving into a thread also makes you lose your place in the whole comment view when you back out, which makes it hard to read the whole comment section. I’m not sure if this is something configurable by the blog owner or to do with paid only comments sections/ articles specifically. The quality of the discourse is unusually good, though!
I agree and asked Substack to suspend their usual commenting format (and have all comments while still having the article open) as a condition for blogging here. I don't understand why they default to the opposite.
Their interface is overdesigned enough, under the hood, that loading the blog post alone (even when it's just text) is a high-bandwidth task. I suppose not requiring it to display all the comments on top of that is their way of mitigating that self-inflicted problem.
I just realized it when I go to other Substack blog, but boy do the comments suck. You do a good job making me think that UI comment here is better than SSC.
> Matt Yglesias Slow Boring comments seems to have absorbed the ethos of SSC/ACX and often have overlapping commenters.
I'm kind of surprised seeing this and how many people are agreeing, because I've always thought of the more "mainstream" (ie bigger than Scott) Substack commentariat like Yglesias and Noahpinion as being really basic and much less interesting than the ACX commentariat, to the point, I don't even try to read either any more, even if the post itself was interesting.
Surprised DSL wasn’t mentioned. A non-trivial number of old SSC commenters never came to ACX, and hang out there instead (frankly think ACX is better for it)
What is DSL?
Data Secrets Lox
Basically all open threads (users can create threads of their own), more right wing than ACX or SSC.
Our evil twin we keep locked in the attic and feed on scraps. I do wish some of the guys would pop back over here occasionally and have a chinwag in the comments.
Occasionally I do...
... but only occasionally. If the comments were formatted more like old SSC, I might more often.
And we miss you at DSL too!
It is always good to see someone Do The Work; well done and deserving of a finalist.
…but part of the enjoyment of the book (and non-book) review contests is learning about something new, unlocking a new part of the idea map. And, well, we’ve already been here
Thinking back to early SSC reminds me of Scott's article on 90s environmentalism. Many of the issues Scott used to talk about have somehow disappeared from the radar despite not being "solved". 2010s feminism, New Atheism, non-culture war education policy debates, creationism to name 4.
P.S. School Shootings were only a minor topic of SSC posting, but I think they have been solved quietly akin to Whales and the Ozone layer.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/01/what-happened-to-90s-environmentalism/
Curious why you think school shootings are solved, https://www.cnn.com/us/school-shootings-fast-facts-dg suggests they're worse than ever (although sometimes it's hard to distinguish between gang conflicts at schools and psycho-shoots-random-people)
I spent 30 minutes looking at the data and am none the wiser. Most definitions used seem to be useless and to include accidental discharges and arguments between parents in school parking lots.
Something that might be interesting to see about the ACX era is what percentage of commenters, over time, have their own substacks.
I was looking for a comment on this. When I saw recurring posters on substack, my impression was that they were an active member of the community and nothing more. On substack I can't help but feel like some of the recurring posters' MO is to subtly advertise their own substack to the ACX crowd - doesn't help that it's often milquetoast faux AI/ML intellectualism (I AM biased). I do not like the while substack integration. I definitely hate using this godforsaken app and seeing the godawful blogspam every time I open it to read ACX.
The comments section is bad when Scott has Deiseach banned for something or other, and good when she's not banned.
At least, that's the only metric I can come up with off the top of my head. I have other personal favorite commenters who are correlated with quality but they don't catch bans as prolifically.
Well, um, thank you very much, but when Scott bans me I deserve it. It's like smacking the misbehaving dog on the nose with the rolled-up newspaper: I whine and go to my corner and wait until my time is served. Necessary discipline to keep the house in order!
> The Old Ones whisper of a blog that existed before even Slate Star Codex, but since I’m not 100% certain we’re encouraged to talk about the older blog (and nobody dates the golden era of Scott’s writing to pre-2013 anyway)
I don't think talking about the LJ is discouraged? I've seen links to a list of posts there over on /r/slatestarcodex, IINM. Of course, you'd have a hell of a time doing comment analysis on it -- I'm pretty sure a lot of the comments on it, including some quite good ones, are just lost, due to the fact that they wouldn't appear unless you expanded them, and of course those aren't making it into archive sites (I remember there being some comments by Sarah, and some by me, that I wasn't able to find last time I looked). Also, many of the entries filled up with spam comments after the blog went fallow.
Anyway, there's some real good stuff there. Unfortunately, the lack of a title (beyond "Stuff") on many posts often makes it hard to find. But, surely we mustn't forget the first post of Scott's that *really* blew up? :grin: https://archive.fo/5DuiP
A random aside but
> Their leader, Churchill, appeared in a grand total of one episode before, where he was a bumbling general who suffered an embarrassing defeat to the Ottomans of all people in the Battle of Gallipoli.
Is somewhat of an unfair retcon. Churchill did a lot of stuff in british politics (often successfully!) He was in parliament *63 years*, which makes Joe Biden's career look like a spring chicken.
(though I guess Biden can technically still run for another couple of senate terms to try to catch up)
I read the post as describing a History Channel perspective on history, in which only the highlights of past events show up. Thus a lot of apparently surprising things happen because their causes flew under the History Channel's radar.
"Is somewhat of an unfair retcon. Churchill did a lot of stuff in british politics (often successfully!) He was in parliament *63 years*, which makes Joe Biden's career look like a spring chicken."
He also did some personally career-enhancing but party disservice stuff while in Parliament like crossing the floor. His reputation was greatly enhanced post-war, particularly by a set of Americans who suffered from Anglophilia, but I think that maybe we can now come to a more balanced view of who he was and what he achieved. He was a Churchill, and they've always been on the make. I think he did have an enormous stroke of luck that he was in government during the Second World War, and that Chamberlain had to resign as Prime Minister - this allowed him to get into power and of course, while the war was on, remain in power and be the face of British resistance and create that myth of his premiership. That he got turfed out of power in the immediate post-war election says a lot about the views of the populace as to how they really felt about him (even if that was just 'he was good during wartime but a bad pick for peacetime').
He'll never have a great reputation in Ireland, especially due to his father's actions before him, but I think as older generations die off and now we're got the Millennials and Alpha coming up, he'll just be another forgotten name in the history books rather than "I remember him/my parents and/or grandparents used to speak about him and they didn't like him".
"I think he did have an enormous stroke of luck that he was in government during the Second World War, and that Chamberlain had to resign as Prime Minister"
Very true. Before 1945, England had not had a general election for something like nine years, and Churchill never won a general election until the 1950s. After WWII, a huge portion of the British public wanted to change society and rebuild the country in a new way. The public was willing to sacrifice to win the war but didn't want the post-war spoils to accrue to the same old powerful.
The campaign message of the Conservatives - who before 1939, with the exception of Churchill, had promoted appeasement of Hitler - was 'trust us', versus Labour which had specific plans, like nationalizing major industries (a bad plan, imho writing from 2025).
Also, although Churchill was extremely popular throughout the war, the government was not Conservative, rather it was a unity government.
Technically true, but biologically unlikely.
There's also his posts on LessWrong, which reached a broader audience. I'd say that's where Scott "got his start" and early SSC commenters mostly came from there.
I'm surprised the author didn't analyze whether Open Threads had lower quality comments than posts. Without a post to motivate them, I find them to be fairly vacuous (especially the top level comments for some reason).
Didn't Scott start discouraging discussion of certain culture war topics around midway through the SSC era? That might explain some of the changes around 2016.
Specifically, comments just wouldn't appear at all if they had certain words in them. That should affect simple word statistics even more than the actual content of the comments. Meanwhile ACX has no such filter.
I can't remember exactly what words I used, but I think that aside from Gamergate they were mostly slurs and marks of very low-quality discourse. I don't think I intended that to fully ban any topics (except for Gamergate). I can imagine that some people get exasperated when they couldn't use the word "dudebro" in a comment on feminism and eventually gave up though.
One aspect of the ACX-era Commentariat that sucks is all the advertising that people do for their own blogs. That style of post was virtually non-existent on SSC but is very common in the Open threads on substack.
I agree but I also feel bad banning it completely because I'm grateful I had a chance to advertise my blog before it was famous, X is working pretty hard to restrict spreading links to other sites, and somebody has to allow for discovery. Let me know if you have good ideas for how to balance these considerations.
The obvious answer is to make the classified threads more frequent, say every month or two instead of every ~6 months.
(I'm not sure if I am the worst offender ever on this in the SSC OTs or was doing something different because of the rather odd history of NG.)
Perhaps every open-thread could have a "please post all blogging self-promotion as replies to *this* comment" master-post like what the classified threads have (but with other types of self-promotion still banned outside classified threads).
Yeah, maybe a dedicated classified thread for self-promotion (at least we seem to now be free of the spambots, until AI learns to be even sneakier at injecting content).
What I've suggested multiple times before, but most people don't seem to like, is requiring people to paste their blog post (or a truncated version or summary) into the Open Thread comment. This way, (a) we're not forced to follow a link to another site just to follow the discussion, and (b) there's no way to use such posts to get unearned clicks--the only way you'll get clicks is if what you put in your comment is good enough that people want to go to your blog to see more stuff like it, *not* having to click just to know what you're even trying to discuss.
The unearned clickbait advertising aspect is what disgusts me about such typical posts more than anything else. And people often (or at least I do) write very long Open Thread comments trying to make a point, and I see people right here now saying they want more of that. Yet when I last proposed it people seemed far more bothered by the annoyance of having to scroll past long posts than the sliminess of "click here to find out" garbage. Which I simply can't understand.
More long OT comments that aren't reposts of LLM output or "this hour's Trump outrage news" would be good. Right? Add a strict rule of "must be genuinely trying to discuss the subject, not just advertise, to Scott's satisfaction" if necessary.
As someone who has occasionally done this sort of thing, it can be harder than it sounds. You're going to lose stuff like formatting and links, and you may need to do some cleanup to stop, say, any image captions from sticking around.
Maybe, but I'm not convinced this isn't a feature. I'm inclined to say the only people who should be advertising on ACX are those willing to put in a bit of effort in order to get feedback from ACX readers on their ideas. If they're not particularly interested in such feedback, not even enough to put in a bit of reformatting effort, they're definitely not the people whose blogs I want to read.
I can understand the rule as a trivial inconvenience to make sure you don't have people doing drive-by linking to try to drive traffic or whatever. I do find the framing of "feedback" to be rather odd, but that may be because I'm pretty sure I have 90% or more of the readers here who are interested in my niche directly. If I am putting something here, it's because I think it may be of general interest to people, not for feedback.
Maybe I'm atpyical but I generally assume the purpose of the Open Threads is to start discussions, and thus get annoyed when people seen to be treating it as "read this thing I wrote!" rather than "what do you think of this thing I wrote?" But this annoyance is very slight when the person doing it isn't linking to their own blog or otherwise self-promoting in the process, and goes way up when they are.
And I also feel like "wanting feedback" is a somewhat clear metric for dividing "genuine use of Open Threads for their actual purpose" from "exploiting them as an opportunity to self-promote", though I'm sure there could be a better one.
It would be such a great self-fulfilling prophecy if this post becomes the new most commented one, and July does become the month with the most comments.
I agree. I noticed that Scott posted this review the day before the projected peak, and cannot help but think that was on purpose to further this end.
Maybe this is just my personal depression but... I kind of got tired of "discussing serious things on the internet with strangers."
It doesn't solve anything. It usually gets derailed, sometimes by randos who are completely wrong. It takes an ordinate amount of time and effort. It doesn't lead to any real personal connection. It's just a bad habit all around.
The internet is for influencers now. If it's worth saying, it's worth making your own substack/twitter/youtube so you too can be an influencer. No point arguing with random people on the comment section.
I agree. When I was younger I would also way too easily get sucked into an online argument, it was kinda addictive, it took up a lot of time.
I followed the same trajectory, but I don’t think the reason is that the internet changed. Rather it’s that internet debate is quite a small game, and once you’ve played it for a couple of hundred hours, it gets stale. In order to be suitable for online debate, a subject has to be (a) relatively well-understood by large numbers of people; (b) have a stock of facts which are fairly broadly accepted; (c) nonetheless be open to several different interpretations. The number of topics that meet these criteria is tiny, and the number of credible positions on each is very limited. If you go and watch you people going through the same set of debates, it’s cute and frustrating. But the fact we’re no longer into it isn’t a fact about the internet, it’s just a function of our longer experience.
I think this is true of, idk, Israel vs. Palestine, but I'm still excited by things like the Alzheimers review a few weeks ago where you have a chance to learn about a random topic, ask questions of experts/other interested people, and hash out disagreements with other people that you might never have seen anyone talk about before (or that had previously been limited to a few low-bandwidth journals).
Sure. If you're asking questions in good faith and genuinely hoping to learn something, that works great. Especially if you have a way to know that the people really are experts and not just "some guy with a lot of spare time who read a few wikipedia articles." I just don't like the extended back-and-forth slugfests that internet discussions usually turn into.
"I think this is true of, idk, Israel vs. Palestine"
Natural lifecycle of a commentariat? Many years ago, I regularly lurked, and rarely posted, on other forums. After a while, except for unique topics, I could've written the regulars' comments for them, and they could've written each others'. I assume that is true here too.
It's super annoying when you see a discussion online about something and nobody is bringing up what you think is the right perspective though. I usually can't help trying to convince people of that perspective in the comments. But like you said it almost never leads anywhere.
One of the topics where I think the discourse is bad is bullshit jobs. They're not taken seriously enough 95%+ of the times they get mentioned imo. I wrote a long form essay about them for one of the book review contest a while back, and just linking to that essay instead of writing loads comments seems like it's a lot more persuasive to people. The discussion's usually polite and productive at least. Also people are surprisingly willing to read 6k+ word long essays from strangers online. So that might be a more productive alternative to normal commenting if you don't mind spending the time.
I also did one on central planning, which was another topic that I thought the general discourse was really poor on, but for some reason there's never seems to be any good opportunities to link to it. So I think it only works for quite specific topics.
Stuff like that is where i think it's better to just start your own blog or write a book. Or signal boost someone else's, if you can find one. I think most of us have heard the term "bullshit jobs," and personally I've read David Graeber's book about them, but I think I'd need a lot more detail and nuance about it than even a 6k word essay could provide.
I made the mistake of writing this as a comment instead of linking to an essay. So I'm not expecting it to convince anyone.
It basically is writing a blog I suppose and I've seen Scott do the same thing with his posts on twitter. I think a blog post is a good length to link people to, since you can cover things in much more detail than a chain of comments but you can't really expect people to read anything longer.
I thought it was worth writing something on bs jobs myself also because the original book (despite coining the term) by Graeber is pretty bad imo, and I thought I could write something more persuasive, that deflects a bunch of counter arguments I don't think he anticipated. You can read it if you'd like.
https://claycubeomnibus.substack.com/p/bullshit-jobs-review
Thank you very much for this essay. It’s excellent - friendly, cheerful and lucid. It’s also very funny.
To me, Bean’s point about the change in OT frequency doesn’t affect the quality of the work. Any hypothesis is only going to be fuzzily proved, because the thing being evaluated is so qualitative. I found the various attempts to quantify/identify objective tests very entertaining in themselves. One of the most interesting features of the essay is the attempt to define the factors which make the Commentariat so great in a way which can then be tracked. I don’t think anyone has disagreed with the factors themselves.
A very good post! I also don't want this to win the whole thing lest we be seen as narcissist, but this is top 3 at least.
About UI, I vastly prefer the susbstack UI compared to wordpress, to the point that I dread binging SSC compared to pleasantly seeing all ACX posts. Heavy emphasis that I read this blog exclusively on mobile. I actually can't comprehend why people think wordpress UI is better other than nostalgia. The "pinching and zoom a bit" problem that Vladimir mention in the post, is super annoying to me.
I endorse the hypothesis that Trump killed SSC commentariat. It seems like it kills libertarian online presence in general. I just recently realized a large parallel between this blog with another libertarian online space, Dan Carlin of Hardcore History fame, which also makes another podcast talking about current event in Common Sense. I find his audience also a nice space where people focus on liberty, detached from politics. But Trump election completely broke it. After 2017, only 7 (out of total 324) episodes are released over 8 years. None are even released in 2019. The host himself mentions that the discussion he raised on that podcast becomes useless. With that case in mind, I can see the same thing also happened here.
The big thing about the UI is the lack of an easy way to find new comments. I think this has massive effects on the ability to engage with each other, if you don't know of the ACX Tweaks browser extension (or if you don't use a browser that supports web extensions, which on mobile means almost any browser other than recent Firefox). On SSC you could skim through the comments on a thread to look for interesting ones, then at a later time skim through new comments posted since the last time, then again... On ACX, without the extension, you can't do that without wasting a lot of time looking at comments you've already seen, so likely most people only look at the comments once, so Alice will only see a comment by Bob if Alice randomly happens to look at the comments later than Bob (or if Bob is directly replying to a comment by Alice, in which case Alice gets a notification.
It's also much slower than SSC at loading comments when there are many of them, and comments often disappear for a while while scrolling.
In contrast, SSC may not have been well-optimized for smartphones, but a wordpress blog could be optimized for smartphones with minimal CSS work.
Good point about new comments, I've been struggling with it with both sites. Unluckily I found SSC after it ends, so the comment never updates, so I've never been exposed to that feature anyway. If Scott consents, I'd also like for SSC to be modernized for mobile readers.
I definitely enjoy that this backs up my longstanding belief that we should go back to calling the dominant progressive ideology 'social justice' rather than woke. The old one just encourages better conversations, while the new one is one syllable easily barked and bereft of obvious meaning.
I dislike "social justice" because it tips the scale (how could anyone be against justice?), doesn't form into other parts of speech well (social justicic? socially just? social justiciars?) and ends up abbreviated as SJ or SJW (which is even more cringe than "woke", and unfair to Jesuits and hyperforin enjoyers).
> I dislike "social justice" because it tips the scale (how could anyone be against justice?)
I think ~all political movements play that game in one way or another, so it doesn't really give social justice a unique advantage. How could anyone be against making America great? How could anyone be against Democracy? How could anyone dispute that black people's lives matter?
"unfair to Jesuits"
This right here is why I love this place and love you guys, even when I'm yelling abuse at you 😁
I genuinely, honestly, do not get this type of content elsewhere.
I think it would be reasonable to disagree about what is and is not social justice. When Warrior gets tacked on it isn’t just cringe, it sounds like mockery. Were there really a bunch of people running around calling themselves SJWs? Or was that Warrior part applied by people who thought those who were doing ‘social justice’ as they saw it were just fuzzy headed do-gooders?
I’ve mentioned I that I pretty much shun Reddit so the only place I saw SJW (with the W) frequently was here at ACX and in that context it always had “this bunch of bozos” connotations.
From what I recall, the 'warrior' part was nearly always appended by enemies, indicating that someone was out looking for a fight about it. It made them out to be overzealous and combative.
And yet the numbers show that conversations were much better before we dropped the term. Maybe we needed it to be a little unwieldy and self-complimentary to balance out the tendency for cringe?
I think point 3 is the most accurate, and not enough weight is being given to the wider culture that we live in. The west's whole pop culture cycle has changed massively over the last 20 years, and the cycle of misery started around 2015 or so, so it's no surprise that people remember it as the last of the good years.
Some trends to note in the broader collapse of public fun / happiness:
- mainstream comedies (Sandler, Stiller, Hangover, Anchorman etc) have completely vanished from the wider pop culture & cinema
- music is less shared across the whole culture (my uninterested parents knew Britney or Rhianna songs, know nothing in the charts today), and pop bands have vanished - all new successful pop stars are solo artists
- politics has moved from the era of Obama HOPE posters to politicians promising tiny changes or negative ones (or no change! Trump 2020 had no platform and just endorsed his 2016 one)
- expectations for individuals and celebs to get involved in silly trends (planking, Harlem shake, flash mobs) replaced with an expectation to use your platform to discuss climate change or Gaza
And along with these, there's been a key change in the internet:
- 2005 to 2015, there was a constant cycle of cool new websites to find, and every few months you'd stumble across something amazing to share with your friends
- last 5 or 10 years, that has massively changed, and people use a smaller set of websites more regularly, and rarely stumble upon an exciting new site
- the whole vibe of the internet has moved from excitement of discovery, to annoyance at what some asshole has commented on twitter
As such, how people interact with this blog is going to match it. The last years of public happiness will see people see it as one of the last times they stumbled across a new blog that they thought was amazing. Now we're all already stressed and jaded when we log on.
This timeline in turn ties to all of Haidt's work that is not (I believe) the cause of the above shift, but in parallel, as around 2014 mental health issues, particularly for teens starts massively rising. Getting stuck to social media and Likes and retweets has made us all more miserable, matching the timeline of the pop culture shift, and people saying SSC was better in 2015 / 2016 than today.
The bad Substack UX can not only make the experience worse, but also act back on the comment section's quality. By far the most important problem is a lack of an easy way to find new comments (without the ACX Tweaks browser extension https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks, which probably only a fraction of the commentariat uses — ~147 people in total according to the Firefox and Chrome extension stores combined).
The result is that most people probably only look at the comment section once, so comments posted after most people have done their one look are read by few people. So top-level comments posted more than a few hours after a blog post appears usually don't get engagement, and replies only get engagement by the people already involved in that thread; on SSC, that timeframe was more like a few days. To me, this is one of the main reasons I mostly stayed on the Data Secrets Lox forum that was made when SSC went down even after ACX came up, and only occasionally comment on ACX.
This may have some further effects via positive feedback loops:
- When there are dozens of top-level comments without any replies, it's hard to judge which ones are worth reading, it discourages reading them; and it discourages replying if you can expect few people to read your reply.
- Since only the first few top-level comments get engagement, people are motivated to post a reply ASAP, without reading the previous replies to see if what they want to say has already been posted, or spending time to write a quality comment.
- If you expect few people to read your comment, and there's less sense of a community of regulars who all read each other's comments, you're less motivated to put effort into your comments.
If having Substack add this feature, or leaving Substack, are not options, at least it should be heavily advertised that this blog is intended to be read with ACX Tweaks installed. Installing it yourself is not enough to solve the above problems if most people don't have it. (Leaving Substack should be an option. For less than the 10% cut Substack takes, Scott could hire a programmer to write a bespoke subscription system for SSC. Hell, he could hire me, or probably any of dozens of us. There seem to be existing solutions for Wordpress too. Or maybe Substack could hire us to either add this feature or, better, add an option for bloggers to add custom JavaScript and CSS.)
----
Some mistakes in the post and confounders/considerations missed:
- SSC had a comment depth limit of 4 (where top-level comments are depth 0), ACX has no limit. To make the depth of engagement comparable, ACX comments below depth 4 should be treated as depth 4. The (lack of) depth limit might also have some effect on how people engage, though I probably not much.
- The charts show almost the entire year of 2020 in white, but SSC actually went down on June 22. Indeed, there was only one post during the hiatus, the very highly commented posts in the first half of 2020 were when SSC was still up.
- AFAICT the new comment highlighting feature on SSC existed since 2014 August, for as long as bakkot's script existed (https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://bakkot.github.io/SlateStarComments/ssc.js), rather than since later than 2016. (I definitely know it existed by mid-2017, when I started reading SSC.)
- Top-level comments not getting replies may mean not that they aren't worth replying to, but that few people read them, perhaps for technical reasons as discussed above.
- Conversely, Substack sends e-mail notifications when someone replies to your post, while on SSC that was only available as a not-well-advertised external service.
----
Another consideration is that much of the commentariat got replaced between SSC and ACX. When ACX came online, there were only a few familiar names and faces^Wavatars, most were new. And not because the commentariat became much bigger: rather, it feels like only a fraction of SSCers came back (though many did). This is the other reason I mostly stayed on DSL; if others feel similarly, there's a feedback loop here too.
There's a moral here: It was a mistake to move to Substack and change the name of the blog at the same time as external factors forced a long hiatus. (Perhaps starting new, frequent thematic series, like Mantic Mondays, which some people find less interesting, around the same time, can be considered here as another change.) They probably made many people percieve ACX as a different blog that happens to be written by the same person, rather than as the same blog as SSC, which made marginally engaged people less likely to come back.
If external factors force a discontinuity in a community, do NOT use that as an occasion to make other major changes. Focus on retaining as much continuity as possible to regather the community. Make changes at any other time BUT when external factors force a break in the community. (I mentioned another bad example of this concept I've encountered towards the end of a previous comment where I discussed this: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/subscrive-drive-2024-free-unlocked/comment/47629419) (In an organization where you don't have absolute power, a discontinuity can be an opportunity to shake things up, but that doesn't apply to a blog where the author can make changes whenever he wants.)
Wanting a revenue source from the blog after the NYT affair was understandable, but renaming the blog was an entirely unforced error.
There's also the thing that after SSC went down, Scott had a form to subscribe to get an e-mail notification when the blog restarts, but that e-mail never arrived, at least to me. Probably because when Scott made the old SSC posts available again a few months into the hiatus, the system sent out hundreds of e-mails to everyone who subscribed, so Scott quickly killed the e-mail notification system, and then when ACX started, he didn't bother to find the list of e-mail addresses and have an e-mail sent to them. There may still be people out there waiting for that e-mail.
"That question is - does ‘the Commentariat’ actually exist?"
While the flattery about "we have the bestest comments on the Innertubes" is very palatable, I doubt it.
What happened? Well, several things:
(1) There's been huge churn over the years, a lot of the original people have left for different reasons, new people have come along.
(2) There were two bumps in the road - first, the breaking off of the sub-reddit due to perceptions around the Culture War and subsequent founding of TheMotte, and second the New York Times story.
The hiatus in both periods between "is SSC still on the road?" and the new set-up (TheMotte and ACX) meant we fissioned like American Protestantism into little denominations into DSL (more right/conservative leaning), TheMotte (1 million witches, leading later on to the departure from Reddit before they could be pushed out the window, as there was a perception that the admins were starting to meddle and it was only a matter of time before it was 'quit before you get fired', and then a while after *that*, a further schism where the left-leaning posters departed to TheSchism), the remainder who kept SSC going, and us wretched hive of scum and villainy on here 😁 Scott tolerates conservatives (social), conservatives (fiscal), and the "in a just world, you guys would be stood up against a wall and shot and, please Marx, come the revolution you will be!" righties (e.g. Steve Sailer, who I can't understand why he has such a bad rep elsewhere but there you go). This means the pretty little wordclouds and Google ngrams shoot for the moon with "bad think" topics like racism etc.
(3) Time. Nothing remains static, change is the rule of the universe, and over the years everything from the climate to politics has heated up. It's no surprise we talk about more hot-button topics, or even that previously neutral to weakly-controversial topics have become hot-button (e.g. HBD going from 'theoretical discussion' to 'that's racism!') Speaking of TheMotte, there's a somewhat unkind (but also somewhat true) view that left-wing posters can't handle disagreement and tend to flounce off with a dramatic last announcement of how toxic the witches all are and this has driven them away. I do think that the tolerance for rough-and-tumble in general on the Innertubes has gone way down, so there is little space anymore for robust disagreement (as this is taken as toxic behaviour, the whole bingo card of "you are terrible people and I'm blocking you" as per Bluesky, which apparently has handy little blocklists so you never, ever have to encounter a bad person at all in your experience there) and thus we all silo into our comfortable little bubbles of harmonious unity where never is heard a discouraging word.
Sailer has written/still writes? for Vdare and the Takimag crowd, which are racist/white nationalist, and he popularized the term
that should not be named here. The three letter acronym.
I came across him when I read Rod Dreher's blog back in the day, the paleocons were another subculture that crowd mingled with. John Derbyshire was a NR columnist who migrated to the Takimag crowd, and fell from grace. That crowd tends to mingle with subcultures-Vox Day/Theodore Beale tried to do with SF normal and Christian.
He has a bad rep for those reasons, and i'm always surprised no one noticed it. That subculture pushes junk scientific racism where ever they can, and it kind of took root in part in here with IQ discussions.
Keep in mind that the stereotype of racists as uneducated yokels is partly false, its a mind virus many smart and rich people latch onto even if they are nice people too. its really only recently we've suppressed it, and smartness can get pressed into its service because its an animal part of us we have to resist.
If anyone else is curious about the big Flesch-Kincaid outlier in 2013, it's 'I Myself Am A Scientismist' (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/25/i-myself-am-a-scientismist/), which I haven't read before but will now.
Although it turns out that it's topped by the 2023 book review of _On the Marble Cliffs_ (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-on-the-marble-cliffs), which is entirely off the F-K chart at 18.46.
No scene lasts forever, and no artistic movement goes on for eternity. There are opposing movements and counterrevolutions--ACX isn't *that* famous but it's accreted a Sneer Club of people who hate it along with Less Wrong and rationalism in general. The empire, long divided, must unite; the empire, long united, must divide. So has it ever been.
The commentariat has been able to discuss controversial topics for over a decade and that's honestly a pretty good win in my view. Of course if I were one of its enemies I'd point out it pretty much selected out the major feminist/intersectional category on the left, which means one of the sides in the culture war is largely absent, which helps with not having flamewars and the like. I'm ironically not complaining--everyone else seems to have their safe spaces, why not unwoke nerds?
The other thing that has to be considered is that Scott has two kids, so we can't ethically ask him to neglect his children to post more stuff we find interesting.
As an aside, I can't say I'm too surprised someone on ACX decided to aggregate everyone's comments and apply quantitative metrics, but now that everything I say is preserved for eternity in someone's aggregate file I think I'm going to have to think harder about what I post here.
Agree with this, can't risk the reputation of "Anonymous Dude"
This is great. I appreciate the data-analysis perspective, but curious if you also tried “random sampling” with human evaluation?
Is comment of the week an actual thing?
I remember our host mentioning them a few times at the beginning of open threads, but certainly not as often as once a week. Googling suggests ~40 instances over open threads. But sometimes comments are highlighted without being calling “comment of the week”, so I don’t know what’s their status.
It's spontaneously awarded to effort-comments. Not periodic in any way. The distinction is quite rare. Also, I suspect Scott doesn't read the comments as regularly, now that he's got kids.
Funny, I think Be Nice, At Least Until you can Coordinate Meanness as a particularly bad post, one that prompted me to pretty much give up commenting on SSC proper in favour of the subreddit, mostly the Culture War thread thereof. If others felt the same that would be an explanation.
Many people have mentioned "the bad Substack UX", but I think that a lot of it depends on the psychology of the person who is doing the reading:
- Substack *as a newsletter* was not conceived as a place for discussions. Therefore, people who read Scott from their emails are peak lurkers.
- Substack *as a mobile app* is designed to leave only a short comment (i.e. loved this/hated this), and is shitty for anything longer. However, people who read from their app are likely to be lurkers too.
- Substack *as a website* is the only place from where you can leave an actually worthy comment, but it sadly gets broken when you have +1k comments.
Now, which commenter is most likely to leave high-quality comments at all?
The one who accesses Substack as a website:
- He probably has more "free time" than others, because he needs to turn on his PC or laptop, instead of just reaching for his pocket.
- He can have other tabs open where he can research his arguments.
Sadly, the ratio of people who own a personal PC or laptop is way less that those who own a smartphone. Therefore, Substack *as a business* is incentivized to optimize for their app, not for their website.
This is really impressive data analysis, and the graphs are very pretty!
I think the only place it falls short is that it fails to convince me there's a clear connection between "the average toxicity score decreased from 0.03 to 0.02 and then rebounded to 0.025" and my actual experience as a commenter.
(It's possible I don't comment enough, but my actual experience as a commenter doesn't feel like it's changed much over the years.)
FYI the dropbox link deanonymizes the author.
This is an excellent write-up but I wish you would have talked more about the paid subscriber factor. If memory serves, there was no paid subscriber option on SSC. Anyone could read or comment on any of the content (I do remember the hidden open threads, but you just had to look for them, they weren't locked or anything). I'd be very curious to know if people who are talking about the decline in the Commentariat are subscribers or non-subscribers, and what differences there are between the two groups. Are the subscriber-only comment threads more satisfactory and robust? (I am not a paid subscriber myself). You talked a little bit about how Substack's model reaches a different audience and it would be nice to explore that in greater detail. I think it matters that even though not everything is paywalled, it still has the effect of discouraging the casual visitor. I would also predict that those who are subscribers would show higher investment in terms of their engagement and the quality of their posts.
A second interesting point of comparison would be to compare the commenter base over at the other place (The Motte, am I allowed to say the name)? The formation of that site has a complicated timeline that I can't remember the details of, but it started as an offshoot of the SSC community and launched its own site sometime around 2021 I believe. I wouldn't be surprised if there are other folks like me who comment both places. Although that one is purely community driven at this point. There's not much posting of original content or essays like Scott does here. So the comparison wouldn't really be apples-to-apples unless you just singled out the open threads.
It is a great shame that so many of these graphs are trending downwards. To rectify this, I propose a few modest changes to our habits:
In order to improve engagement metrics and average comment chain depth, we should avoid posting top-level comments to which few will respond. Prioritize controversial or subtly wrong comments whenever possible, to increase the probability that someone corects you.
The best way to emphasize free speech norms is to make sure controversial topics are discussed frequently. Therefore, besides using words like "racism" and "transalpine Gaul", I strongly recommend we make a habit of injecting culture war topics into seemingly unrelated conversations, in the same way as American liberals can make any news item about Trump.
The politeness scores are already quite good, but to avoid letting them get worse, we should take a page from TikTok and make sure to self-censor words like "dum**ss". With a few more posts on meditation, we might be able to attract non-Blockchain-using enlightened beings, which should further solidify our position of high politeness.
In order to maximize comment complexity, we can utilize a few strategies. Comments can be made longer by repeating themselves, treading the same ground several times, and generally ensuring redundancy. Verbosity can also be enhanced by judicious use of superfluous terminology and polysyllabic jargon. Such loquacious discussion will have the additional benefit of enhancing the comments' Flesh-Kincaid grade level.
Overall, although these metrics might look bad, I'm sure we can turn it around with just a little bit of care in how our comments are crafted.
It's a stroke economy. Crafting a comment probably has a value in its own right, collecting one's thoughts, but if it isn't replied to at all or only replied to by people who have a problem, well life is short.
I really enjoyed this analysis, thank you.
(Uh, you say we can feel free to ask for our comment count and ranking; where and when do we do so? After the contest ends? I'm quite annoyed at how Substack doesn't list my comments and I'd like to take up that offer...)
One thing I think is missing, though, from a lot of this discussion of whether SSC was better than ACX is...a very subjective and polarising thing, but a potentially very important one: the cult-like feel of SSC. Note that I'm not saying it *was* cult-like, just that it could have that look or feel, to some people.
I discovered Scott in 2021 so my impression is entirely from reading the archives, but a lot of SSC seems to stand out in how much narrower the culture and opinion space was, compared to ACX. Two examples:
First, there's all this talk about SSC being "anti-woke" but I think it was much more specific than that. It seemed, as partly noted in the review, to have a hyperfixation on opposing feminism, but this was coupled with an almost complete lack of interest in opposing or even questioning the trans movement (even the most extreme parts of it). I feel I've seen this bizarre combination of enthusiastic support for the latter and frothing hatred for the former more times than I can count in those archives (and attitudes to racial wokeness were somewhere between the two). This wasn't anti-woke, this was a very specific ideological perspective that was anti-woke on some axes and quite pro-woke on others.
Second, the community seemed much, much more "orthodox rationalist" for want of a better term. Regular, enormously reverent links to The Sequences. Quotes from them used the same way Christians would use Bible verses. A lot of commenters going out of their way to shoehorn Less Wrong jargon into their comments at every oppprtunity.
ACX has both these things to a vastly lesser extent. And I think that's good, because as the review argues (and I fully agree with) this community has such value because of its uniquely high standards in norms of discussion. Free speech, politeness, complexity of thought, in a combination so extremely rare on the internet. And...why should these norms be reserved only for people who share a very ideosyncratic set of views? The very specific ideology dominant on SSC is surely going to repel a lot of people who don't share those views, and thus deprive them of the benefits that the high-standard discussion norms of the site can provide.
Having ACX, with the same norms, but a much more diverse opinion space (and this can seem a "dilution" of the SSC values when it's really only a dilution of the largely or entirely orthogonal unofficial ideological orthodoxy) seems to me to have a strong argument for being a significant improvement.
I am an occasional reader, and so I liked your mentions of posts that were special in one way or another. I hope to read them. Has there been a discussion of "best posts ever", or "best post of each year"?
Related: does Scott ever recycle and improve posts? A good piece of writing is improveable, especially if you get a lot of good comments.
"Also, in February 2019 the Culture Wars Thread was euthanised (link) but there is no corresponding uptick in comment section engagement as people migrated back from the Culture Wars thread to the SSC comments section."
Could this be explained by people going elsewhere? There were a couple spinoffs when the CW thread was euthanized which exist to this day.
Why are blog posts still happening in the white area where the blog was supposedly on hiatus?
The quality of the comments on a given post are directly proportional to David Friedman's volume of contributions. Sorry, those are just the facts! Don't @me bro!