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.
Blogs are better, sure, but check out wiby (the web is better yesterday) [url is: wiby.me]
"Surprise me" on there, and you get... the craziest list of "what someone was TRULY passionate about." (and some screamingly bad design, occasionally).
Some nice blasts from the past, including this one mocking people stuck even further in the past than the page itself http://rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_floppies.shtml I actually do remember both the small/rigid and large/flexible floppies.
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
I don't want to overly unduly influence other people's votes, but at the risk of having some impact, I read all the finalists before selection, and all of my personal top picks are yet to be posted.
I think I don't want this to win because after noticing the open thread frequency discontinuity, the author should have redone everything without the open threads.
One of his main conclusions was that the increased frequency of open threads alongside increased discussion of trump caused the decline of magic sauce in comments. What would redoing the stats change?
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.
There's a significant fraction of the internet that is bots. I do not believe this comment section free of them, or of people mindlessly repeating bot-comments, even if they are meatpeople themselves.
There's one site on the internet that hunts bots relentlessly. No bots live there (because they are horrible at generating content). It even managed to convert a Chinese meatpeople "bot" (paid to post Chinese propaganda) into a more contentful "okay, but what can you tell us about how China really works" person (he's apparently allowed to post about all of that, so long as he also puts the official party propaganda up).
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 :)
It is interesting that both you and bean came down so strongly on this. OT frequency is clearly important so perhaps I should have given it a separate subheading, but I also very strongly felt the explanation for the 2016 change would have to have at least one more epicycle than just the OT frequency change - OT frequency is obviously linked to engagement / comment volume but not so obviously linked to other markers of comment quality, which also declined at around the same time (or maybe a year later).
I concluded that whichever way you sliced it I needed to explain what was special about the OT frequency change that it affected comment quality when other admin / moderation changes didn't seem to, and ironically I worried that an inadequate consideration of this effect was going to be the thing that got me dinged in the comments! I guess in hindsight I could have said, "This defies explanation but it surely must be the reason", but at that point the data had nerd-sniped me and I was convinced it must have something to do with politics saturation.
I can see how that would nerd-snipe you but sometimes the obvious answer wins by being too boring to believe. Maybe the real epicycle was the friends made along the Open Threads.
My basic critique of this is that you seem to have rejected the possibility that there were multiple different drivers at work without even mentioning it. Yes, there's a pretty sharp break in April 2016 for comments per post, but that is literally the month before fractional OTs started. The obvious test is to see if comments per non-OT post show a similar pattern, although even there, I could easily see changes in that being downstream of changes in the type of post Scott is writing. I know that hits per post varied widely with topic, and I suspect that the same is true of comments.
There's some change in politics at about the same time, but the obvious confounder there is Trump and the less obvious confounder is changes in what Scott was writing, although I don't know exactly how strongly the second one affected it. In any case, I'm not sure why we would assume that less discussion of "SJW" is worse.
Depth of engagement is the only other metric where the graph shows an obvious breakpoint in 2016, and that one is probably also downstream of the OT change. People migrate to the new OT and stop checking the old one, and with that happening four times as often, you're going to have a lot more short discussions and posts going unanswered. That's slightly frustrating when it happens to you, but when the comment software is straining under the weight of the OTs, it's a price worth paying. (Cite: I was running a blog in the OTs through most of 2017 and got a chance to be a lot more systematic about this.)
Which just leaves complexity of thought, peaking a year later than everything else. Most of these look pretty gentle, with maybe 20% change or whatever, so I'm not sure how much we should actually care about the changes they represent. And there's the alternative hypothesis that it was because that was the effortpost boom, and the dropoff happened when I took my work elsewhere and other people stopped doing effortposts nearly as frequently. Maybe that's arrogant to say, but it does correlate with the actual time and would explain some of the lexical stuff (effortposts are going to use the same words a lot). And there's the fact that nobody who was there in 2016 is speaking up to say that they noticed a change, whereas everybody noticed the 2021 one.
> The obvious test is to see if comments per non-OT post show a similar pattern
This is exactly what you should try next! Just repeat the 5-10 most important graphs again on a subset of the data that does not include Open Threads at all, and see which trends do or don't hold.
As I see it there's basically two major possible criticisms of the OT Frequency Change handling in the data
The first would be really bad if true, and that is that the OT Change *alone* accounts for the observation - that I've just failed to notice that the measure has changed. If I rerun the data without the OT threads, I'd be able to rule that possibility out - that's the test you propose here and I agree it is a good one (I increasingly agree I should have shown more of my work here)
Fortunately, we see exactly the same pattern with OTs in vs out (albeit the pattern is noisier with OTs excluded, especially for results which are already noisy). So we can be quite confident that this isn't just a measurement error like SSC switching from feet to metres and me not picking up on it. I'm therefore satisfied that any approach which 'corrects' for OT frequency will find functionally the same result I did when I presented the results 'uncorrected'
The other possibility is that the OT frequency change did cause a genuine change in behaviour, but the OT frequency change alone was enough to account for that behaviour change and I didn't need to go seeking another epicycle. This is consistent with the results we see, because if OT Frequency changes behaviour then removing OT entries from the data will still reflect that behaviour change on other posts.
I can't think of a way to test this hypothesis vs the one I eventually landed on, absent another massive change to OT frequency that could be used as a control. Given no definitive test, I'm fairly happy with my model of OT-plus-Trump as being parsimonious and yet still explaining why we don't see any other moderation change cause any lasting impact like the OT Frequency Change did, but if you can think of a definitive test I'll try to do it and report back
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.
Ah, spreadsheets. The bane of all writers. Switch a positive sign to a negative, and you get an entirely different world. (The negative sign was "The Magic Goes Away"... can you get the positive sign?)
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.)
So in the court of the Real Caliph, I am the mentally challenged person in mismatched garb who has licence to deliver enraged babble for the amusement of my superiors?
Ahh yeah you don't have to wear the funny clothes or bells on your shoes. But the court jester is also there with biting commentary that cannot be expressed by others. (Mostly because we lack the wit to pull it off and the chutzpah to try.)
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.
Wasn't "politically correct" a ~1917 Soviet term, originally? So it's adoption by non-Soviets was equivalent to calling someone "tovarisch," implying that they were like adherents to an authoritarian regime.
> Wasn't "politically correct" a ~1917 Soviet term, originally?
Was it? I haven't heard that before. Do you have a source for that? IIRC the first known use in America was in some court ruling, but I'd have to look that up.
None of the following sources are deeply authoritative, but this should at least provide some evidence that what I'm saying did not originate with me. There are earlier uses than 1917, but for the purposes of the modern meaning and its derivation, I believe that's a reasonable point at which to start the discussion.
"The term first appeared in Marxist-Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917. At that time it was used to describe adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (that is, the party line). During the late 1970s and early 1980s the term began to be used wittily by liberal politicians to refer to the extremism of some left-wing issues, particularly regarding what was perceived as an emphasis on rhetoric over content. In the early 1990s the term was used by conservatives to question and oppose what they perceived as the rise of liberal left-wing curriculum and teaching methods on university and college campuses in the United States. "
"The notion of political correctness came into use among Communists in the 1930s as a semi-humorous reminder that the Party’s interest is to be treated as a reality that ranks above reality itself."
The term first appeared in the Marxist-Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution (really, a coup) of 1917 to describe strict adherence to policies and principles of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party.
The term political correctness first appeared in Marxist–Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917. At that time, it was used to describe strict adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, that is, the party line.[24] Later in the United States, the phrase came to be associated with accusations of dogmatism in debates between communists and socialists. According to American educator Herbert Kohl, writing about debates in New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The term "politically correct" was used disparagingly, to refer to someone whose loyalty to the CP line overrode compassion, and led to bad politics. It was used by Socialists against Communists, and was meant to separate out Socialists who believed in egalitarian moral ideas from dogmatic Communists who would advocate and defend party positions regardless of their moral substance.
— "Uncommon Differences", The Lion and the Unicorn
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.
Also, the depth on substack is different because the platform changed - nesting and sorting suck here, and so crappy comments near the top attract attention, and more nested discussion, rather than having a good way to filter.
Given that, Scott - given your prominence on the platform, is there any way you could get them to implement some basic forum-like commenting features; ratings, or at least likes and smart sorting?
It supports likes ("hearts") by default, Scott specifically asked them to disable (hide) them on ACX. Idk why exactly, my reason would be that they lead to groupthink. There were no likes on SSC either.
My understanding is that there is a plug-in that lets you do and see likes here. I think the reason Scott turned them off was not because of groupthink but because the endorphin rush from getting likes can lead to cheap-take commenting. My own experience on other substacks makes me believe this; it takes real discipline to avoid it and I don’t always succeed. Not true for everybody, I’m sure, but true for enough that I’m glad Scott did that, and I’ve never tracked down the plug-in.
It's the ACX Tweaks browser extension. Early on it offered an option to hide likes; when Scott asked Substack to hide them on ACX by default, the extension switched to offering an option to show them anyway. It has many features besides this, such as showing new comments since you last visited a page.
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.
Mobile devices are great as a kind of digital Swiss army knife. But writing a long - and hopefully thoughtful - post on my smartphone seems like a horrible thing to even try. I used to do pretty much everything on a notebook computer, then switched to notebook computer with external keyboard and mouse and stayed there for years. I really valued the mobility. In the last few years I prefer a regular desktop PC with a big monitor. May have something to do with my declining eyesight, though.
Another issue of substack on mobile devices is the reading itself. Since there is no zooming, deep comments threads get squeezed to a point where they are not legible. Fliping the phone in landscape looses the focus to some other parts of the page.
That would be acceptable as well. I am not a hardware guy and I find an old fashioned PC a lot easier to deal with in that respect. But things have gotten a lot better in the last few years. I had to repeatedly take apart my daughter's notebook computer to add/replace SSDs, RAM etc. and it was a lot easier than before. I remember when I got my first computer (a Taiwan clone of an Apple ][+ with a Z80 card) - it died when the letter "a" on the keyboard didn't work anymore. The company that had made it was no more and there was no other keyboard which fit my computer.
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!
Even the DSL contest has declined dramatically in average quality over time. There's only so many people who can write interesting things about their specialty.
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.
Yes, and even the kludge I used to use on ACX (browse at about the same time each day and search for "hrs ago") no longer works. It's hard to engage with comments If the biggest part of the experience is a repetitive slog of "no, wait, I already engaged with that one yesterday. And that, and that, and now I'm seeing stuff I engaged with three days ago".
Just load everything and don't be fancy would be my #1 option too. I hate it when badly-written webshites require me to download megashites of JavaShit to read static text.
My other wish-list items:
* allow writing/editing posts in markdown
* an API to automatically upload posts to the site
* RSS feeds, and federate using ActivityPub and similar
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.
Fourthing a way to identify new comments as the most important feature request in a practical sense. It's the one feature I can think of whose absence or presence has effects on how commenters engage with each other, so installing the ACX Tweaks extension myself to fix its absence doesn't fix the effects of its absence on the community.
But my #1 *technical* feature request would be to let bloggers add custom JavaScript and CSS. With that, we could do almost anything we need ourselves, including new comments. Ideally there should be a small per-user-per-blog storage area the custom JavaScript can access, to make it easier to do stuff like new comments on a per-user, rather than per-browser, basis (e.g. keep track of when you last looked at a post across a desktop and a mobile browser).
My #2 feature request would be loading comments faster, and not having comments sometimes disappear for a while when scrolling. I suspect this is due to all comments being somehow rendered in JavaScript, in contrast to SSC where comment rendering was done entirely on the server side. The ability to load new comments via JavaScript is nice, but loading the initial set of comments, and scrolling, shouldn't require any JavaScript at all. This is the one feature request that can't be done via custom JavaScript.
2. Let us use rich text formatting in comments (e.g. bold, inline hyperlinks, quote blocks). Even just Markdown support (e.g. **bold**, [link](example.com)) would be good.
3. When revisiting a post with comments we already read, give us an easy way to hide/collapse the old comments and focus on the new comments. It's okay if this is limited to top-level comments only (or to top-level replies to a subthread you are viewing).
Easiest problems to fix, low hanging fruit:
1. Add a simple workaround to highlight all posts created after a certain date, e.g. adding &after=1573212345 to the URL. Polish it later by replacing it with a cookies check for the last time the user visited this page.
2. When a comment is collapsed, hide its "Reply" and "Share" buttons, and instead of "Show replies" change that button to a more generic "Show"
3. Add a user setting to control how many comments get loaded immediately when opening a post, and don't use the same behavior in Desktop and in Mobile
The archive system. I want the SSC archive system or something like it, and the lack of that is the chief reason I haven't started blogging on Substack.
If I click on the "Archive" button on ACX, I get a list of the latest posts, with names, images, descriptive text and release dates and the option to instead sort by "top" or "discussions". If I control-f "open thread 212" (to pick an arbitrary example) it doesn't appear; only the recent posts are loaded and I need to use their (very slow) search mechanism to find it.
If I click on the "Archives" button on SSC, a page instantly loads listing just the names of every SSC post ever made and I can control-f "meditations" and instantly get Meditations on Moloch before I finish typing the name.
SSC is wildly more useful for me, and if I want to blog fiction or essays, I need a permanent archive like the one SSC has or everything I write will instantly vanish into the mists.
Yeah, so people are going to be less likely to work on an 'effort-post', when the OT threads are twice as often and so you get less engagement for your long post. And then many of the long posting people started their own blog. Which I want to say I enjoy more. Mostly because the discussion has a longer lifetime when the long post has it's own blog.
So one reason I don't like the OT's is that the engagement in some topic dies out too quickly. I don't 'check in' to the blog that often and the OT threads seem like a waste of time. I recall somewhat fondly Usenet, where threads could go on for weeks or more. That gave you time to think about things and respond later. I'm not sure when I started reading SSC, but it was only a few years before the end. I was more involved with Usenet (via google groups) and so that was my formative internet template for discussion.
So I see the spawning of new blogs from the original SSC as mostly a good thing. More enduring content out there. This seems somewhat analogous to the spawning of new podcasts from those people who went on Joe Rogan, and then Joe saying something to the effect of, "You should do your own podcast."
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!
> "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..."
I note that a system with that "recent comments by poster" list comes with its very own feedback loop with motivation to become an interesting-to-read commenter!!
I wanted to thank you for this very thoughtful critique. I've responded upthread to the point about OT Frequency, but I see not directly to you.
I reckon I could probably test for the presence of effortposts (say, top level comments above a certain length). It would be great if I could prove Naval Gazing had a physical impact on the data footprint of SSC, I enjoyed the series immensely
I would be extremely interested in that. The DSL standard is 700 words, if we need a threshold that wasn't picked arbitrarily today. (It was arbitrary 5 years ago, but now we have tradition.)
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.
> 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
Preach - my main request was going to be "find any of the 6 million devs that can load 100kb of text without loading ~100mb of javascript libraries and BS, and then constantly polling / refreshing that with yet more tens of mb of calls every minute or two."
Any bright high schooler who understands CSS could whip up a better framework and comments section.
But sadly, Scott specified "fixable," and I suppose we have to assume that this is not fixable, for inscrutable and ill defined reasons.
The "need a supercomputer to load Substack comments" issue has definitely prevented me from posting before. Also Substack's "login with email" feature is completely broken for some reason.
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.
I've linked to posts I've written on Noahpinion and here, and judging from the questions they ask in the comments the commenters from ACX have a noticeably higher reading comprehension than the ones from Noahpinion.
Like, the majority of the post will be about explaining [concept X]. Then some Noahpinion commenter will ask "I liked the post but can you explain what you mean by [concept X]."
I'll make sure to anticipate [counter argument Y] in the post, and a Noahpinion commenter will comment exactly [counter argument Y] with nothing added.
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.
I will lurk on DSL sometimes. But not often. It's more right wing than ACX, and I do wish there were more right wing voices here. And maybe it's wrong to say Trump caused this split. Maybe both are just signs of the political divide that just seems to be getting sharper here in the US.
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.
If you aren't getting a reasonably high number of "child brings knife to school and stabs other child" you're probably getting scrubbed data (that's a deliberately suppressed story, because it benefits neither side of the "gun control" debate).
Which is to say: looking at data delivered by CNN is a good way to look at some biased data -- and sometimes in non-intuitive ways.
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.
UNSONG (Dec 2015-May 2017) also overlapped the critical period and several of these graphs' bulges, and one might wonder its effects on both public perception of Scott's writing quality, and levels of commenter engagement (if comments there were to be included).
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).
If we're talking about stuff like that: I propose each Links thread should have a pre-made top-level comment about each link, REPEATING THE DESCRIPTION OF THE LINK. I go crazy when I'm 500 comments in and the thread starts "On #22, I think..."
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.
You could alternate between Strict Open Threads and Lax Open Threads. In SOTs, you forbid politics and culture war topics, you forbid that people advertise their own blogs/work, and perhaps you could add other restrictive rules if people also find other things annoying. In LOTs, all of those are allowed.
I think you had a similar concept with political vs non-political OT for a while. Did you abandon it because the non-political ones were not better? Or because it was annoying to have the increased complexity? Or because people didn't stick to it?
For the last one, you could try to have it community-enforced. Like, have a rule that no one should answer to forbidden topics except for a comment "no XYZ on Strict Open Threads", and that if someone posts something or does answer accidentally, they should delete the post.
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 find my position on I/P to be ... very much in the minority. It makes me more willing to engage on that subject than I'd otherwise be.
I have found, growing older, that engaging on debates "that someone else is going to take my side anyway" is not worth my time. Someone is always wrong on the internet, after all.
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.
> I think this is true of, idk, Israel vs. Palestine
Which make up, oh a third of all open threads now and for a while, and is the number one argument for banning political topics, to my mind.
Everyone here is complaining about people advertising their own Substacks - I actually like that, I've discovered at least 3 Substacks I really enjoy reading that way. But politics? Politics are entirely taking over and ruining the Open Threads. I don't even read them any more, I skim, and end up scrolling past 50-66% of them, because it's trite back and forth political sniping.
Obviously a minority opinion, and I'm clearly the weird one in the room, but I thought I should put that out here, because I'm probably not the only one that feels that way - we might be a whole 10-15% of the commentariat!
In theory, we could have a rational-ish debate on politics, where people would focus on posting evidence and try to figure out things rather than out-yell the opposition. But in practice, I think we don't have this here, so...
I would prefer having 50% politics-free Open Thread, like we used to have once.
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 only ever read this blog on a desktop computer, or a laptop if I'm traveling. The Wordpress UI worked great for that. and the Substack one is at least slightly less frustrating in that format.
There may be a correlation between comment quality/depth/engagement and device usage. High-grade comment engagement takes time and focus, far more than does stuff like "+1" and drive-by twitter-dunks. If you're sitting at a desk, or at least at a coffee shop with a laptop on the table in front of you, you are probably in a position to focus on your efforts. A phone, you're maybe using in a few spare minutes when you're standing in a line somewhere, or otherwise prone to distraction.
Or maybe you're alone and focused for a good length of time and a phone is all you have, in which case you do the best you can (and scream at Wordpress for their thoughtlessness). But, averaged over the commentariat at large, I wouldn't be surprised if selecting against phone-users improved comment quality by the OP's metrics.
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?
Some other instances where both sides of the conflict have loaded names that make themselves sound better:
-Pro choice vs pro life
-Trans rights vs gender critical
-Gay liberation vs Moral Majority
-Protectionism vs free markets
-Liberal vs conservative
-Catholic vs Protestant
-Gun rights vs gun control
-Democrat vs Republican
And, of course, opposed to the social justice movement itself we have free speech activists.
Basically this is everywhere if you start thinking about it for a little while. I would go so far as to say the exceptions are cases where this does *not* happen.
Black Lives Matter was entirely concerned with black deaths, anyway. It wasn't like the movement was about "blacks living better" or even "blacks getting all the nikes and legos they want."
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.
“(or no change! Trump 2020 had no platform and just endorsed his 2016 one)”
It bugs me that people harp on this. I don’t consider Trump a conservative, but I’m one, and to me it seems that a proper conservative shouldn’t need to change his platform at all, let alone every four years.
Not just a conservative, but an incumbent. The default platform of every incumbent is basically "N more years of the same", and while it may be traditional to put out a "new" platform that says basically the same thing as the old one but tweaked to address new issues. it's hardly mandatory and Trump has never been traditional.
In what way was Obama's 2012 platform significantly different than his 2008 one?
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 subthread; 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.
> For less than the 10% cut Substack takes, Scott could hire a programmer to write a bespoke subscription system for SSC.
Sounds like a great business idea: "Substack, but made by technically competent people. Comments load 100x faster, and won't crash your browser if you open multiple tabs."
I understand that the technical aspect is low priority for Substack. Most bloggers here are probably technically illiterate; the important thing is to make a system where they can copy-paste a document, drag-and-drop a youtube video, and send the slop to all subscribers, with as little effort as possible. And yet, it is so embarassing, and fixing it would probably be relatively cheap, compared to the entire budget. It might even save Substack some money, because all those unnecessary gigabytes go through their servers.
In hindsight, I had given very little thought even over an extended period of time to contribution of The Commentariat to my perceived value of SSC/ACX. But it is genuinely and overwhelmingly true. Curious blind spot.
In no way a novel hypothesis but worth restating: ACX remains solid, and the Substack guys seem earnest and genuine in building something helpful and rewarding for authors. But ACX on Substack is not as engaging as SSC in the full sense of engaging:
- more posts and comment sections than a not-on-sabbatical reader can read,
- the various Substack functional gaps _within the structure of a post-with-comments_,
- and overwhelmingly the aggregate notification and badge attention-noise from the other authors I’ve subscribed to on Substack.
Oh, as well as the noise coming from, and within Substack from other authors and author-commenters I have _not_ subscribed to.
Apparatus notes: 97% of my usage of ACX on Substack is on my phone in the app. Zero percent on my phone in the browser. Only 3% on MacOS in a browser. Perhaps I should change that, if the ACX Tweaks plugin is a game changer.
Note: if you want an Android browser with support for arbitrary extensions (including ACX Tweaks), use Firefox, or a fork like IceRaven. (I'm not sure there's any browser on iOS with good extension support; all browsers there have to use Safari's engine, which limits their options.)
"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.
Bigotry is the mindpoison, not racism. Reducing other people to mere stage props. Assuming you know anything about a person because they've got tits, or ... many other things.
Not really, I don't think "racism" has any fixed definition these days. It might have started off as a subset of bigotry but now it's just a messy cluster of vaguely-related concepts that people with political power wish to clamp down upon.
I get you don't like how the woke have redefined racism to be a sin only white people can commit, but there is no need to accept the authority of the woke.
There's nothing wrong with being more specific. Calling something cerulean doesn't mean it's not blue. Racism is a form of bigotry; bigotry is bad, and so is racism.
Yeah, there really is. Trainings that teach people about "unconscious bias" teach people to be bigoted against people who haven't taken the training yet.
Bigotry, the broader, bigger term, is the problem. Taking shortcuts with others is the problem. If you restrict the "badness" down to racism, you obscure how many "bad things" exist. A black lady's car broke down in WV, and she was sweatin' about it -- not sure exactly what hill country mores were, with someone who was a clear stranger there. That's bigotry. Bigotry is makin' assumptions about people based on very little data.
Yes, racism is a problem. But it's not "the" problem because people "aren't natively racists." Lazy people are natively bigots, and the higher calling is to "be less lazy."
a person racist for two reasons: you are either a bigot who needs the superiority racism
gives you, or a rube for someone who is because you like them and you explain it away or me too it because the alternative is too much to bear.
there is no "empty" racism without motive like this. if a person talks about abolishing private property, he is either a thief or follows one, because you don't hold these kind of beliefs dispassionately. They are pointless otherwise.
I've never liked Taki, but this dislike started way before he was ever associated with racism or reaction or whatever.
Vox Day - that's another tangled association. The Rabid Puppies were alongside the Sad Puppies in the Hugo Wars, so there's a certain allies-by-necessity there (I was a supporter of the Sad Puppies).
So the guilt-by-association thing isn't quite pulled off; if Mr. Sailer is guilty by virtue of the company he keeps, then so am I!
He's always been perfectly agreeable on here, even when I've disagreed with him. The online attributions I've read have him to be a roaring, ranting, foaming at the mouth while dressed up in his KKK robes, nogoodnik. And that's not how he comes across here.
Deiseach, he was doing it 15 years ago or more i think; i think i used to read/post on Dreher's blog then, and his substack mentions Charles Murray, who published The Bell Curve in 1994. Those debates go back pretty far, and Paleocons kind of previewed Trump in how conservatives were changing. Dreher was more of a sane paleocon, but part of why Pat Buchanan is no longer talked about is he was the vdare type and was open about it. not sure how long ago you mean.
and...look, the way subcultures like this get people is that first you meet a nice guy who happens to be smart, explainative, and possessed of novel ideas. You read more, and you find you agree a lot.
then you find the deep writings, and boom, he thinks you should torture puppies or something, or all your wives are belong to him. And people will have to wrestle with "he might have a point" with the puppy thing, because he was so smart and accurate before right?
For example, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a supporter of racial preferences for you but not for her. She was too important to accept less than the most brilliant clerks. She hired approximately 159 law clerks during her forty years as a federal judge, but only one black was ever meritocratically good enough to clerk for her, Paul J. Watford, an outstanding legal mind who was long on Obama’s short list of Supreme Court nominees.
Being a Supreme Court law clerk is one of those jobs where you can see the arguments both for meritocracy (it’s really hard) and for racial representation (it’s really influential).
Very few non-elites realize that in a purely fair hiring and promotion meritocracy, blacks would tend to be underrepresented by about an order of magnitude at the highest end. I’ve often joked that the Harvard Presidents’ Book of Secrets would turn out to be a padlocked yet heavily dog-eared copy of The Bell Curve.
***
from your review on sinners in the same place:
"Sure, a lot of gory stuff happens during the horror part of the movie, but none of it is in the least bit terrifying.
Why not?
For one thing, vampires are intensely European and aristocratic, so they don’t work well in a rural African-American movie."
*
"So there are horrifying (if also comic) aspects to West African superstition.
But Coogler, a racial loyalist, isn’t going to go there. Hence, there’s nothing terrifying in Sinners"
***
some examples i could find. vdare crashes my phone so i can't really link to it.
The current top post by other authors on takimag is "Black Knives Matter" which starts off with "If black people were consumer products, you'd have to ban them." and goes on from there with an uk based anti-immigration screed.
thats the company you keep and editors that pay you approve that. When someone talks to the faithful their speech often differs. they don't push back as much.
A classic example from a Steve Hater: My comment on the excellent Paul J. Watford being considered by Ruth Bader Ginsburg the only black good enough to clerk for her, and then suggesting both meritocracy and affirmative action have their merits in extreme right end of the bell curve jobs like Supreme Court clerk would seem like a model of why the world needs more of my commentary, but the Steve Hater assumes it's obvious proof to Good People like himself or herself that I need to be shut down.
I'm planning to quit posting here, so I'll say it: I certainly don't share all their political views, but I think they're probably right about the three-letter acronym. There are too many disparities that pop up across different nations and places and despite all attempts to fix them. It just explains too much about the world and better than the standard liberal argument that it's all socially constructed and the result of history.
I totally get why leftists want to bury it, and I don't blame you guys at all given the unpleasant implications and our own nation's history, but things keep happening the way they say. The left that figures out a way to deal with that and the reality of sexual differences, even if implicitly as a kluge, will carry the day.
They always go on about african americans but native americans pretty much have similar issues or worse, and no one is fool enough to imply THEIR iq differences explains it. Or other aboriginal peoples; the vdare crowd is very specific in their subjects.
Plus rationalists are dumb sometimes in a specific way: they heavily reduce people to semi-machines acted on by singular or specific impersonal forces that can be isolated and explain their behavior. The idea that people are not like that even in aggregate: that it is significantly more tangled and a basket of things is hated because there is uncertainty and no elegant way to address or solve problems.
Problem is racists can tap into that, as well as other hucksters. and it doesnt help how isolated people are these days or how powerful narratives are.
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.
Can we ethically ask Scott to raise his children to the point where *they* can post stuff we'll find interesting, as quickly as possible?
Hmm, if "Kai" and "Lyra" are really named "Peter" and "Valentine", and Scott is secretly using the Polgar Method to raise them as precocious supergenius bloggers, how long do we have to wait for the Codex Utopia?
> 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
In hindsight, it seems like quite a miracle that we actually could have debates with this group for a while. I mean, their modus operandi is: "either you ban everyone I don't like, or I will leave in protest and try to burn down this place". If they leave, you don't have a debate; but to make them stay, you have to ban everyone who disagrees with them, and then you don't have a debate either.
I guess the only way to keep them is to balance on the edge of "maybe they can win and then purge their opponents, maybe they can't", so they keep trying... but that sounds like something that is easy to say but very hard to actually do, especially for a longer time.
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.
> an almost complete lack of interest in opposing or even questioning the trans movement
Perhaps useful context: I believe Scott was dating a trans person for a while during the SSC period. So highly negative stuff about trans people probably would have been looked askance more, and maybe policed more (by both Scott and other commentariat members).
I have you at 194th most prolific, with 803 comments. If you trust my comment quality algorithm (I would be a bit sceptical!) your mathematically best comment is this one:
(That's a lot higher than I expected, I guess the comments really add up. Also, I would call that one of my more ranty comments, that I don't know how much of which I even still endorse. October every four years is like looking at two very different possible futures the Western world might branch into...)
More generally, I think your review was very good and was one of the few I voted for in the preliminaries, but I think you've collected a lot of data that could be of great further value to everyone here (and that people who don't read the review posts might not even know about). Maybe you should get in touch with Scott about making its existence and/or availability widely known?
> 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?
Well, it is not a coincidence that these norms have appeared in the community of people who share the idiosyncratic views. Even if those views are in a minority among the commenters, a significant minority can still change the tone of the debate, especially when the moderator is on their side.
Scott can ban people who are rude, but if most commenters adopted the internet norm of "evidence doesn't matter, the most important thing is to out-comment the other side", the discussion would quickly go to hell. And it's an interesting empirical question how long the norms could protect themselves in absence of people who defend them for specific reasons.
I agree with you in general, but I think there's a great big conflation of the general norms about being unbiased, valuing evidence, being willing to provide reasons, being willing to change your mind, and so on...and the much more specific set of object-level beliefs I was talking about. A major motte-and-bailey about the term "Rationalism".
For example, I can't even *imagine* how a committment to productive discourse would be actively advanced (as opposed to just being unaffected) by widespread support for polyamory, or by belief in a near-term singularity, or by a love for evopsych explanations of behaviour, or by adherance to the MWI of quantum mechanics. Maybe there's a way, but I can't see it...
I think the causal relation is in the opposite direction.
As an analogy, you can have free speech without atheism. Technically, there is no reason why thousand deeply religious people couldn't start their own server and commit to norms of free speech.
But one day, the idea of atheism might appear on the forum randomly (for example, one member had a crisis of faith and deconverted), and now that the idea is out there in the open, by committing to norms of free speech you have lost the most efficient way to get rid of it.
So it's not like you need atheism for free speech, but more like free speech allows the meme of atheism to flourish in a religious society. It doesn't necessarily mean that all members, or even a majority of them will become atheists. It just means that the annoying meme of atheism will stay there, irritating some people, forever.
Maybe it is the same with the rational norms of discourse and polyamory / Singularity / MWI. You could start with a group of 100% monogamous people who believe in collapse and that nothing new ever happens. And it would work okay for a while. But when the heretical idea of polyamory / Singularity / MWI appears... it may turn out that the rest of the group doesn't have a devastating rational response to it. In the sense that most of them will remain unconvinced, but the annoying ideas will remain there.
So you would start with a rational forum without polyamory and Singularity, but would soon end up with a rational forum with (minority, but visible) polyamory and Singularity, and everyone else would complain about why did you have to start a forum with all this memetic baggage.
For the record, "not having a devastating rational response to an idea" does not necessarily mean that the idea is true. It might be the case that the idea is wrong, but wrong in a way that is non-trivial to demonstrate, and that people are used to dismiss it using extra-rational methods so much that without those methods they are lost in the debate. (Analogically, there were religious defendants of free speech who believed that atheism was wrong, but that religious people should keep exercising their "debating against atheists" muscles, rather then get lazy and forget how to defend their religion properly.)
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"?
Yes, or at least he used to, unannounced. There was some grumbling about his editing old SSC posts, and a lot of people (including me) think the old versions were at least sometimes better.
Famously, "Meditations on Moloch" used to begin with a reference to Nick Land, and end (before the final Ginsberg quote) with "Moloch is the demon god of Carthage. And there is only one thing we say to Carthage: 'Carthago delenda est.'"
"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.
Yes, and also look at the Substack archive. There were only 3 posts across both sites between blog deletion and "Still Alive", yet the chart shows 6 dots.
You are right to flag this as an error - the data are coded correctly in the analysis but the colour box I drew over the different eras in the visualisation wasn't positioned quite correctly. Sorry!
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!
Regarding "In February 2016, Scott requested that all Culture Wars topics be quarantined to a single Culture Wars thread on the r/slatestarcodex subreddit (link). This seems like the most common-sense explanation for the observation that the comment section changes dramatically around this time"
That applied only to discussing Culture War topics *on the subreddit*; it didn't apply to SSC proper. There was for a long time a norm or rule that CW stuff (originally "race or gender") should be discussed only on e.g. alternating Open Threads, and that rule got tweaked a few times but I don't recall anything substantial in early 2016. Certainly there was plenty of CW discussion in SSC proper in 2016, 2017, 2018...
I think it was somewhat reflective of a broader shift where Scott pulled away from a lot of the CW-ish stuff he'd been doing. Using the "things I will regret writing" tag as an easy proxy, I see 6 posts in 2014, 4 in 2015. 2 in 2016, 6 in 2017, 3 in 2018 and 2 in 2019. The obvious counter is 2017, but most of that is gender differences discourse, which has an extremely strong "someone is wrong on the internet" flavor, and which he closed comments on a lot of.
But: I hate the comment section of substack - at least on the phone, where I read things 99.9% of the time. It's slow loading, bloated, threads are cut off on the right side, when I want to drive into a thread and come back to the main thread it loses track and I'm back at the beginning. Tried to get around Witz all the issues the first couple of articles u til I gave up. Now I'm back on Reddit and some classic forums using modern forum software.
PS: login was a pain in the b* as well right now - took me 3 minutes and I was nearly giving up - but just wanted to send the message...
I only found Scott 2 years ago so I'm not a long term reader or follower.
But: older articles on SSC had the curiosity of a young intelligent human trying to make sense of our world. That was mostly very interesting. I read only some of the fictional pieces - and liked some.
But since Scotts outing and the move to ACT I got the feeling all got less and less interesting, mostly harmless like Douglas Adams would say. Like the author has already fully built it's internal world prediction model and now fully has switched to predicting the world based on his inner model instead of just being curious and watching our funny, interesting, worth living live unfold. I rarely find an interesting post these days, its mostly Open Thread, Reviews, Grants and Bets on some things I do t care or Doomsday things I try to ignore (when will AI overlords kill humanity - 1 2 or 5 years?)
I think this is why I enjoyed the SSC articles as well. I was drawn to SSC because it showed me that there was a way to oppose social justice, which I had become incredibly frustrated and disillusioned with, without being conservative, and I think the articles elaborately reasoned through that in the way they did because Scott was trying to work through the same inner conflict himself. For the record, my favorite relatively recent post was The Psychopolitics of Trauma; that's one of the better all-time ones in my opinion.
Hard to evaluate / check hypothesis: the recent drop in Flesch-Kincaid level of comments is due to people using LLMs to help compose posts, and or influencing their writing style indirectly. Specifically, I notice that they improve writing in ways that lower the level. (For example, shorter sentences with similar complexity via splitting compound/complex sentences.)
I guess one way to get marginal evidence about my intuition is to ask LLMs to rewrite a set of previous comments with low/high Flesch-Kincaid reading levels. My hypothesis is that they tend towards middle-school level, raising the lowest ones but reducing the higher-scoring ones. (Only the latter half is critical for evaluation of the claim here.)
Personally, I think the quality of Scott's writing has declined. It seems less thoughtful than it used to be, and he appears more arrogant. I think success has gone to his head. The writing used to be a hobby and a passion, and now it is a job.
I believe Scott is also a new father, and I am sure that is very challenging and stressful.
From memory, incidents of arrogance:
- his lack of owning his endorsement of an untested medical intervention (the mouth bacteria thing)
- his America centric discussion of housing, drugs and crime. He seemed incredibly triggered by anyone pointing out that America could potentially take inspiration from other countries. He just waved his hands dismissed those who disagreed, insulted them, and refused to provide any argument or rational (not even, e.g., linking a previous articulation of why such a discussion might be unproductive).
- various strange slightly reader antagonist posts
- the whole being to lazy to actually articulate a reasoned support of Harris over Trump. In short his endorsement was: I am deeply concerned by the Democrats, but [handwave] so there. His approach speaks to two forms of arrogance a. Alienating a reasonably large section of readers and b. Not bothering to properly articulate his own thoughts.
Overall the vibe I get, is he just puts in less effort, and holds himself to lower standards of both writing and intellectual honesty. I asked around at one of the meets up, and many people seemed to share this overall impression, and nobody disagreed.
To be fair, it could be Scot reacting to a worse comment section. E.g., if there is more disagreement and if on average the disagreement is of lower quality, Scott may feel less inclined to engage well with the comment community.
I think it was quite revealing the AI bet apology where Scott didn't really respect or consider the commenter he had the bet with, instead considering other public intellectuals.
I think perhaps Scott just not longer really respects or engaged with his everyday readers and commentators, like he used to, and sees his blog more as a conversation with other public intellectuals
I'm a relative newbie to the rationalist space. I wasn't around for the glory days of SSC, but I've peeked at the its threads, and I'd say the ACX commentariat is more *focused* on making convincing arguments than the SSC commentariat was, but that's my subjective impression. I wasn't there commenting day in and day out like I am here.
And I'm not sure if Scott is less engaged with the ACX commentariat than he was with his SSC commentariat, but I agree that he seems to focus on conversing with public intellectuals (and pseudo-intellectuals) rather than with his followers, and I don't see a high engagement with his followers at least on the public open threads.
I haven't commented much here, and it's 2:04 pm, July 27th, here in the Eastern US as I'm reading the review.
Anyways, I just wanted to say that when I got to the line, "If this initial trend continues, the ACX Commentariat will surpass the peak of SSC Commentariat around lunchtime on the 27th July this year", it cracked me up a little.
I am sorry, but I think this is such a perfect example of everything I think that is wrong with with the Rationalist community:
- You think you have to solve a question yourself alone, like how Einstein or Maxwell did, i.e. to do classical science, which is possible in physics, but in the humanities not
- So you go good Bayesian and bring evidence, numerical evidence
- You cannot be sure you are actually measuring things correctly, you cannot be sure your measurements are anything like a measurement like "three kilograms"
- So you bring up a lot of numbers, graphs, measurements, based on... whatever. You are not measuring any kind of solid units, like "kilograms", your measurement criteria, your units of measure are made up.
- So you have fake science or scientism, which is bad, because it makes your opinion look more reliable than it actually is, because good science is good, but bad science is worse than opinions, because it looks more reliable than opinions, and it is not. False sense of security / reliability.
- It is better to look less reliable than to look more reliable, this should be really some sort of a corollary to the Bayes Theorem, when in doubt, round the probablity down, not up, it is the best to look very very modest "just my opinion" and not to look the super confident "look at my science!"
- As you are not doing this, scientism, fake science, unreliable numbers makes it a dark art, obviously
- Seriously, I don't think even world hunger / nutrition is measurable, even though that is based on biology. And you seriously propose to be able to measure *comment quality* ? I call this hubris.
The alternative is:
- You do not have to solve every question yourself, you can simply contribute a well-reasoned opinion to a community, and after many such well-reasoned opinions a hivemind, a sensus communis, a common sense appears
- For example, we cannot measure world hunger, nutrition, so we offer a cash prize to families in Bangladesh to take a pic of their dinners, and then the whole community engages with it, and after much back and forth, a sensus communis, a common-sense hivemind opinion emerges
My opinion: the old and new commentariat are good in different ways:
- Oldies like nywdracu were crazy geniuses, brilliant, creative, original, but not of this Earth, not practical
- Newbies feel normie, having a marriage, kids, even gasp a religion, less creative, less original, but more practical and down-to-Earth
Early adopters are more sophisticated. It's the same for every education intervention, psychotherapy school, internet platform, underground band, etc. You don't really need to go searching for other explanations with this prior.
262th comment, so I surely repeat "Very fine review; yes: sometimes sounding like Scott, but no: not Scott" Just one thing: The last "datapoint does more than the entire preceding essay at expressing how much I value the ACX Commentariat" - sure, but I do not get the "0.07" value: their is hardly one comment there that is not outspokenly all "positive emotion"! Even more than the comments to "In the long run, we are all dad" - which should be a visible outlier, nonetheless.
So, what would a value of "1" look like?!? Love, love , love - all the way down? And 0.07 as opposed to 0.04 does not adequately reflect the comments, which were as close to "Love, love, love" as possible in full sentences: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/09/11/update-on-my-situation/
In 2014 Scott wrote "I Can Tolerate Everything Except the Outgroup" and appended to it the admonition to "Try to keep this off Reddit and other similar sorts of things." But I thought the essay deserved to be shared, and posted it, if not to Reddit, then to places similar to Reddit as I was specifically warned not to do. After that, a lower quality of commentariat flooded into the Rationalist sphere following those links and everything just went down hill from there.
I'm sorry, Scott. I was your accidental Ephialtes. Mea Culpa.
Have a tentative theory-- some of what happened is the power of entropy. Scott has a wide range of interests and ideas, but we've also come to know what the usual is. Social Justice excesses was a rich vein, but it's mined out.
Unless I've missed something, there isn't a lot new in rationalism. The early hope that thinking about thinking could make people a lot smarter turned out to be wrong, though I still believe that cleaning up bad mental habits can make people somewhat more efficient.
ACX is still a pleasure, but the early excitement isn't there any more.
Yeah, both LW and ACX think that AI is by far the most important and interesting thing these days. And while the "important" part isn't necessarily wrong, current stuff just doesn't seem that interesting to me.
To be clear upfront: I enjoyed this review and I think it's deeply charming.
That said, I have a lot of beef with the methodology and interpretation in this review (e.g. viewing the peaks in the engagement as something other than necessarily temporary peaks precipitated by some salient topic), but the most striking one are the language-based metrics (especially the one on word complexity). Not everyone is a native speaker, and there's no particular way I can think of that a trend "the blog has started attracting more interest from outside the anglosphere" (random claim, not an actual thing that's happening, necessarily; in fact, absent data, I don't think it is) would reflect any sort of decline in the comment section.
To give an example of what other beef I have with the methodology: I don't think comments that aren't engaged with are necessarily low-effort. They could just be saying something that everyone is nodding along with. (Note that I don't think that necessarily explains the data, it's certainly at least mildly suspicious that that has any sort of curve, but it makes me highly sceptical that the metric is capturing anything of importance.)
But I need to draw attention to one thing in particular, which is that Scott has a phenomenal sense of humour (which we knew, but bears repeating):
> If this initial trend continues, the ACX Commentariat will surpass the peak of SSC Commentariat around lunchtime on the 27th July this year, so mark that in your calendars.
Bravo for posting this up so it would be commented on in that window!
I'm a pretty recent reader of the blog, finding out about Scott through the famous "Meditations on Moloch" post through a google search in late 2023. From there, I read about him further and found ACX, and I've been reading it pretty consistently ever since. I've also hardly ever read/engaged with any comments at all outside the open threads, and when I have, I don't feel like it shapes my views on the posts in any considerable way.
As I've read the blog, I'm always surprised when past SSC posts are linked to, because to me they do always seem more interesting to read. They don't seem like they are better quality in terms of writing; it seems more like either the topic is something that's more interesting to me in general, or maybe that Scott was more interested in what he was writing about. Even going back to look at some of the last posts on SSC, they give me the same feeling overall as ACX.
There have been ACX posts that do interest me as much as SSC posts that I have read, and those are mainly his AI-focused ones. Otherwise, I keep reading mostly out of habit, waiting to read contest reviews, or see if he's made another in-depth post on AI. The latest post I've really enjoyed from the blog is "On Priesthoods" from this January https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/on-priesthoods
Something I've noticed in writing, at least in music, is that the best writing tends to be when the writer is very passionate about a topic to the point where the words come from a place where they can't be contained. As a result, for many bands that I like, the first ten years seem to be the best of their music. The first albums usually being pretty good, then the ones after being even better once the artist has a better handle on how they like doing things. After that, though, even though quality doesn't necessarily go down, something seems to be lacking. It usually feels like, either the artist grew personally and solved their issues that they used to write music about (I like this even though I don't like the music afterwards), or else they didn't grow personally and they're stuck writing the same music (cringe and a little sad). Whether they are at peace now or have little personal development, they now write new songs because it's what they do, and have lost the spark of inspiration. Or, like Billy Joel, they realize they're losing their spark and just quit writing new music and then they go on tour with just the good stuff.
I wonder if the same kind of thing has happened for Scott, and maybe he's at a point in his life where whatever original emotional reasons that caused him to want to write a blog are gone, and he does it for other reasons now (because what he writes is still good, it just doesn't seem as inspired).
Other reasons I could think of for the perceived change of quality of Scott's posts in someone who doesn't engage with reading/writing comments hardly at all (me) are:
-His writing hasn't changed; he just used to write about things that are personally interesting to me more often, and now he doesn't.
-Basically, the only SSC posts I've read are because someone posted a link recommending them. Naturally, those posts would all be of a superior enough quality for someone to link to them after so many years, and there's probably a lot of other SSC posts that are as semi-interesting to me as most ACX posts.
Whatever the case, I'm not so sure that the commentariat has as much of an impact on what people think of Scott's posts over time as this review suggests, as I don't read very many comments at all on regular posts and have personally thought there was a shift in his writing, not realizing it was a common thought among his readers.
EDIT: It looks like Scott more or less addressed everything I just commented about in the "Why Do I Suck?" post linked at the beginning of this review. Whoops.
You used chatgpt to write your comment analysis code but didn't ask chatgpt to rate the "intellectual depth" or various other qualities of posts? Someone get this man some LLM API credits or something! Asking llms to summarize and rate text on various dimensions soundly beats finetuned bert and any other legacy analytics.
I have found the blog and commentary less useful over time, but the reason isn't exotic and has nothing to do with either becoming worse. I'm not a newb who just started out on my intellectual journey anymore so it's just much harder to blow my mind than it used to be.
I started my ideas journey later than most intellectually curious people because I spent most of my time until age 25 or so using all my energy on fantasy/sci-fic fandom. A more typical trajectory for people who hang out here seems to be they were intellectually ravenous in a non-fiction direction starting in their late teens. Most such teens get galaxy brained by something - Ayn Rand, the communist Manifesto, the Selfish Gene, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, etc. They then (hopefully) get exposure to more things, and their galaxy brain fades some as they realize how complicated the world really is. My galaxy brain is an old galaxy at this point. There's not a lot of stars winking into life anymore. Now, I experience intellectual growth more as refinement than revolution. It's *very* rare for somebody to pop some idea on me that's truly, categorically new and like nothing I ever considered before.
I am one of those readers, my limited experience with the quality of comments here was exceedingly negative. I found the commenters here absolutely insufferable, with that distinct mix of smugness, superiority and holier-than-you attitute that is hard to describe but impossible to miss. If Reddit is your average worst of humanity to 11, then acx is same but cranked up to 31.
As for the posts, I started reading Scott way back after a few short stories from SSC went viral. For me Scott was always Unsong writer/psychiatry blogger. ACX posts for the most part been unrelatable, I have zero interest in EA, prediction markets and guest posts, etc. In the last few years there been maybe a few posts like old SSC, namely original bay area party story and Lumia post.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think all the measures for "depth of engagement" are somewhat degenerate with the outcome variable of comments per post. In other words, more comments per thread will generally lead to more comments overall, so using the former as an explanatory variable for the latter seems problematic.
I also think it would have been important to separate open threads from proper posts, and carry out all the analysis in parallel for both. Not only would this somewhat get around the big problem where density of open threads doubled at exactly the point where comments per post went down, but the dynamics of commenting on open threads compared to proper posts could be very different.
If the writer is reading this, though, despite my few quibbles, I appreciate the hard work that has gone into this post, and overall I think it's great!
Skipping ahead, I feel like a possible explanation for post-2016 decline is similar to the idea that Scott's writing has gotten worse, but I think there's a chance that he "used up" most of the really interesting topics, and now is stuck writing well written posts about stuff that people don't care as much about, or have as much else to say. That would explain all the early hits, as well as the fact that he's still a good writer. In fact, what if scott has gotten so good at writing that now he's preemptively making more of the points that used to get explored in the comments, so people don't feel as much need to comment?
I should note that I haven't read Scott's post "Why do I suck", and while I've read some of the early hits, I subscribed after the move to substack, and I'm usually just a drive by commenter
""A feature which many people appreciate about the SSC/ACX comments section is the freedom to discuss socially or professionally sensitive ideas (i.e. ideas which could get you sacked from a University if you expressed them publicly). ""
Maybe we need to get back to this.
Pre 2016, the "sensitive" issues some would like to discuss with more nuance like SJW, this was the place.
Now, in 2025. Where do you go for 'nuanced' discussion of such sensitive topics like "are we fascist?", or "do humans naturally tend towards fascism?", or "Does anybody even care that the United States is opening concentration camps?". What would a late 1930's person feel towards Hitler, he was popular, what can we infer? --- >
These are actually real questions, but since they are hot-button, inflammatory, it is hard to find someplace to have some real discussion about them. ACX should confront some of the SJW issues of 2025, which are now right-wing issues.
2016 issue was SJW. "Do Black Lives Matter".
2025 are now MAGA issues. "Should we just kill people to save money?".
After mulling over this review for a week, I'm recording my thoughts here for future reference. I loved the high ambition: let's scrape all the posts and comments into a giant dataset! I don't love the half-baked data analysis: let's notice some weird stuff, mention it, then hop along blithely; let's not do much serious data cleaning or look at the outliers, let's not check the results from the LLM code even if they look weird, let's just wing it in the writeup and create a sense that most of this could have been an LLM artifact, one we didn't care enough about to spot-check or revise. So much missed opportunity. Please give the dataset to Scott to look at, a future ACX intern could spend weeks slicing and dicing this data in different ways. Or maybe put in an ACX grant to spend more time with the data?
This was a pretty interesting an in-depth analysis. I'm surprised at the lack of mention of DSL though. It seems like the right wingers mostly exiling themselves to DSL could help explain changes in the 2021 era (though of course Substack UI and influx of new readers were much bigger confounder).
The ACX comment section continues to be unusable for me, in the strict sense of “the page hangs for seconds at a time and randomly turns into a blank screen while scrolling around, on both mobile and desktop, across several distinct browsers”.
"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.
Blogs are better, sure, but check out wiby (the web is better yesterday) [url is: wiby.me]
"Surprise me" on there, and you get... the craziest list of "what someone was TRULY passionate about." (and some screamingly bad design, occasionally).
Some nice blasts from the past, including this one mocking people stuck even further in the past than the page itself http://rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_floppies.shtml I actually do remember both the small/rigid and large/flexible floppies.
Dude, we're still using 8inch floppies.
Where and for what?
That's classified. : - ) Government insists there's still someone making them though, so it's gotta be important.
Ah, the days of green on black walls of text! And one orange on white, which did indeed surprise me 😁
The webpage on strawberries is eyeshattering. that's prints.pink/strawberries
I warned you before you clicked on it.
If you weren't red/green colour blind before you looked at it you will be afterwards!
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
I don't want to overly unduly influence other people's votes, but at the risk of having some impact, I read all the finalists before selection, and all of my personal top picks are yet to be posted.
I think I don't want this to win because after noticing the open thread frequency discontinuity, the author should have redone everything without the open threads.
One of his main conclusions was that the increased frequency of open threads alongside increased discussion of trump caused the decline of magic sauce in comments. What would redoing the stats change?
> The decline of Trump related conversation in 2024 could be because everyone already sorted out their block lists
Another possible explanation is that most of the right-wingers exiled themselves to Data Secrets Lox.
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.
There's a significant fraction of the internet that is bots. I do not believe this comment section free of them, or of people mindlessly repeating bot-comments, even if they are meatpeople themselves.
There's one site on the internet that hunts bots relentlessly. No bots live there (because they are horrible at generating content). It even managed to convert a Chinese meatpeople "bot" (paid to post Chinese propaganda) into a more contentful "okay, but what can you tell us about how China really works" person (he's apparently allowed to post about all of that, so long as he also puts the official party propaganda up).
Like
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 :)
If we get a director’s cut, I’ll expect three extra charts on Open Thread proliferation and cultural entropy.
It is interesting that both you and bean came down so strongly on this. OT frequency is clearly important so perhaps I should have given it a separate subheading, but I also very strongly felt the explanation for the 2016 change would have to have at least one more epicycle than just the OT frequency change - OT frequency is obviously linked to engagement / comment volume but not so obviously linked to other markers of comment quality, which also declined at around the same time (or maybe a year later).
I concluded that whichever way you sliced it I needed to explain what was special about the OT frequency change that it affected comment quality when other admin / moderation changes didn't seem to, and ironically I worried that an inadequate consideration of this effect was going to be the thing that got me dinged in the comments! I guess in hindsight I could have said, "This defies explanation but it surely must be the reason", but at that point the data had nerd-sniped me and I was convinced it must have something to do with politics saturation.
I can see how that would nerd-snipe you but sometimes the obvious answer wins by being too boring to believe. Maybe the real epicycle was the friends made along the Open Threads.
Emerging from lurkerdom to say that this comment wins the internet.
My basic critique of this is that you seem to have rejected the possibility that there were multiple different drivers at work without even mentioning it. Yes, there's a pretty sharp break in April 2016 for comments per post, but that is literally the month before fractional OTs started. The obvious test is to see if comments per non-OT post show a similar pattern, although even there, I could easily see changes in that being downstream of changes in the type of post Scott is writing. I know that hits per post varied widely with topic, and I suspect that the same is true of comments.
There's some change in politics at about the same time, but the obvious confounder there is Trump and the less obvious confounder is changes in what Scott was writing, although I don't know exactly how strongly the second one affected it. In any case, I'm not sure why we would assume that less discussion of "SJW" is worse.
Depth of engagement is the only other metric where the graph shows an obvious breakpoint in 2016, and that one is probably also downstream of the OT change. People migrate to the new OT and stop checking the old one, and with that happening four times as often, you're going to have a lot more short discussions and posts going unanswered. That's slightly frustrating when it happens to you, but when the comment software is straining under the weight of the OTs, it's a price worth paying. (Cite: I was running a blog in the OTs through most of 2017 and got a chance to be a lot more systematic about this.)
Which just leaves complexity of thought, peaking a year later than everything else. Most of these look pretty gentle, with maybe 20% change or whatever, so I'm not sure how much we should actually care about the changes they represent. And there's the alternative hypothesis that it was because that was the effortpost boom, and the dropoff happened when I took my work elsewhere and other people stopped doing effortposts nearly as frequently. Maybe that's arrogant to say, but it does correlate with the actual time and would explain some of the lexical stuff (effortposts are going to use the same words a lot). And there's the fact that nobody who was there in 2016 is speaking up to say that they noticed a change, whereas everybody noticed the 2021 one.
> The obvious test is to see if comments per non-OT post show a similar pattern
This is exactly what you should try next! Just repeat the 5-10 most important graphs again on a subset of the data that does not include Open Threads at all, and see which trends do or don't hold.
As I see it there's basically two major possible criticisms of the OT Frequency Change handling in the data
The first would be really bad if true, and that is that the OT Change *alone* accounts for the observation - that I've just failed to notice that the measure has changed. If I rerun the data without the OT threads, I'd be able to rule that possibility out - that's the test you propose here and I agree it is a good one (I increasingly agree I should have shown more of my work here)
Fortunately, we see exactly the same pattern with OTs in vs out (albeit the pattern is noisier with OTs excluded, especially for results which are already noisy). So we can be quite confident that this isn't just a measurement error like SSC switching from feet to metres and me not picking up on it. I'm therefore satisfied that any approach which 'corrects' for OT frequency will find functionally the same result I did when I presented the results 'uncorrected'
The other possibility is that the OT frequency change did cause a genuine change in behaviour, but the OT frequency change alone was enough to account for that behaviour change and I didn't need to go seeking another epicycle. This is consistent with the results we see, because if OT Frequency changes behaviour then removing OT entries from the data will still reflect that behaviour change on other posts.
I can't think of a way to test this hypothesis vs the one I eventually landed on, absent another massive change to OT frequency that could be used as a control. Given no definitive test, I'm fairly happy with my model of OT-plus-Trump as being parsimonious and yet still explaining why we don't see any other moderation change cause any lasting impact like the OT Frequency Change did, but if you can think of a definitive test I'll try to do it and report back
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.
Ah, spreadsheets. The bane of all writers. Switch a positive sign to a negative, and you get an entirely different world. (The negative sign was "The Magic Goes Away"... can you get the positive sign?)
"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.)
So in the court of the Real Caliph, I am the mentally challenged person in mismatched garb who has licence to deliver enraged babble for the amusement of my superiors?
At last! Recognition!
Ahh yeah you don't have to wear the funny clothes or bells on your shoes. But the court jester is also there with biting commentary that cannot be expressed by others. (Mostly because we lack the wit to pull it off and the chutzpah to try.)
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.
Wasn't "politically correct" a ~1917 Soviet term, originally? So it's adoption by non-Soviets was equivalent to calling someone "tovarisch," implying that they were like adherents to an authoritarian regime.
> Wasn't "politically correct" a ~1917 Soviet term, originally?
Was it? I haven't heard that before. Do you have a source for that? IIRC the first known use in America was in some court ruling, but I'd have to look that up.
None of the following sources are deeply authoritative, but this should at least provide some evidence that what I'm saying did not originate with me. There are earlier uses than 1917, but for the purposes of the modern meaning and its derivation, I believe that's a reasonable point at which to start the discussion.
"The term first appeared in Marxist-Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917. At that time it was used to describe adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (that is, the party line). During the late 1970s and early 1980s the term began to be used wittily by liberal politicians to refer to the extremism of some left-wing issues, particularly regarding what was perceived as an emphasis on rhetoric over content. In the early 1990s the term was used by conservatives to question and oppose what they perceived as the rise of liberal left-wing curriculum and teaching methods on university and college campuses in the United States. "
https://www.britannica.com/topic/political-correctness
"The notion of political correctness came into use among Communists in the 1930s as a semi-humorous reminder that the Party’s interest is to be treated as a reality that ranks above reality itself."
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-rise-of-political-correctness/
The term first appeared in the Marxist-Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution (really, a coup) of 1917 to describe strict adherence to policies and principles of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party.
https://www.telegram.com/story/opinion/columns/guest/2020/01/14/roberta-schaefer-history-of-political-correctness-and-why-its-gone-way-too-far/1904805007/
The term political correctness first appeared in Marxist–Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917. At that time, it was used to describe strict adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, that is, the party line.[24] Later in the United States, the phrase came to be associated with accusations of dogmatism in debates between communists and socialists. According to American educator Herbert Kohl, writing about debates in New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The term "politically correct" was used disparagingly, to refer to someone whose loyalty to the CP line overrode compassion, and led to bad politics. It was used by Socialists against Communists, and was meant to separate out Socialists who believed in egalitarian moral ideas from dogmatic Communists who would advocate and defend party positions regardless of their moral substance.
— "Uncommon Differences", The Lion and the Unicorn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness#:~:text=The%20term%20political%20correctness%20first,that%20is%2C%20the%20party%20line.
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.
I believe the MAGAs did it with "basket of deplorables" as well.
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.
Also, the depth on substack is different because the platform changed - nesting and sorting suck here, and so crappy comments near the top attract attention, and more nested discussion, rather than having a good way to filter.
Given that, Scott - given your prominence on the platform, is there any way you could get them to implement some basic forum-like commenting features; ratings, or at least likes and smart sorting?
It supports likes ("hearts") by default, Scott specifically asked them to disable (hide) them on ACX. Idk why exactly, my reason would be that they lead to groupthink. There were no likes on SSC either.
Hmm. Maybe we'd want them enabled, but the information not to be visible to anyone except for sorting comments as a function of newness + likes.
My understanding is that there is a plug-in that lets you do and see likes here. I think the reason Scott turned them off was not because of groupthink but because the endorphin rush from getting likes can lead to cheap-take commenting. My own experience on other substacks makes me believe this; it takes real discipline to avoid it and I don’t always succeed. Not true for everybody, I’m sure, but true for enough that I’m glad Scott did that, and I’ve never tracked down the plug-in.
It's the ACX Tweaks browser extension. Early on it offered an option to hide likes; when Scott asked Substack to hide them on ACX by default, the extension switched to offering an option to show them anyway. It has many features besides this, such as showing new comments since you last visited a page.
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.
Mobile devices are great as a kind of digital Swiss army knife. But writing a long - and hopefully thoughtful - post on my smartphone seems like a horrible thing to even try. I used to do pretty much everything on a notebook computer, then switched to notebook computer with external keyboard and mouse and stayed there for years. I really valued the mobility. In the last few years I prefer a regular desktop PC with a big monitor. May have something to do with my declining eyesight, though.
Another issue of substack on mobile devices is the reading itself. Since there is no zooming, deep comments threads get squeezed to a point where they are not legible. Fliping the phone in landscape looses the focus to some other parts of the page.
Why not a laptop with a big external monitor when you're home?
That would be acceptable as well. I am not a hardware guy and I find an old fashioned PC a lot easier to deal with in that respect. But things have gotten a lot better in the last few years. I had to repeatedly take apart my daughter's notebook computer to add/replace SSDs, RAM etc. and it was a lot easier than before. I remember when I got my first computer (a Taiwan clone of an Apple ][+ with a Z80 card) - it died when the letter "a" on the keyboard didn't work anymore. The company that had made it was no more and there was no other keyboard which fit my computer.
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!
Even the DSL contest has declined dramatically in average quality over time. There's only so many people who can write interesting things about their specialty.
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.
Yes, and even the kludge I used to use on ACX (browse at about the same time each day and search for "hrs ago") no longer works. It's hard to engage with comments If the biggest part of the experience is a repetitive slog of "no, wait, I already engaged with that one yesterday. And that, and that, and now I'm seeing stuff I engaged with three days ago".
Just load everything and don't be fancy would be my #1 option too. I hate it when badly-written webshites require me to download megashites of JavaShit to read static text.
My other wish-list items:
* allow writing/editing posts in markdown
* an API to automatically upload posts to the site
* RSS feeds, and federate using ActivityPub and similar
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.
Fourthing a way to identify new comments as the most important feature request in a practical sense. It's the one feature I can think of whose absence or presence has effects on how commenters engage with each other, so installing the ACX Tweaks extension myself to fix its absence doesn't fix the effects of its absence on the community.
But my #1 *technical* feature request would be to let bloggers add custom JavaScript and CSS. With that, we could do almost anything we need ourselves, including new comments. Ideally there should be a small per-user-per-blog storage area the custom JavaScript can access, to make it easier to do stuff like new comments on a per-user, rather than per-browser, basis (e.g. keep track of when you last looked at a post across a desktop and a mobile browser).
My #2 feature request would be loading comments faster, and not having comments sometimes disappear for a while when scrolling. I suspect this is due to all comments being somehow rendered in JavaScript, in contrast to SSC where comment rendering was done entirely on the server side. The ability to load new comments via JavaScript is nice, but loading the initial set of comments, and scrolling, shouldn't require any JavaScript at all. This is the one feature request that can't be done via custom JavaScript.
Most important problems to fix:
1. Let us see the comment history of other users.
2. Let us use rich text formatting in comments (e.g. bold, inline hyperlinks, quote blocks). Even just Markdown support (e.g. **bold**, [link](example.com)) would be good.
3. When revisiting a post with comments we already read, give us an easy way to hide/collapse the old comments and focus on the new comments. It's okay if this is limited to top-level comments only (or to top-level replies to a subthread you are viewing).
Easiest problems to fix, low hanging fruit:
1. Add a simple workaround to highlight all posts created after a certain date, e.g. adding &after=1573212345 to the URL. Polish it later by replacing it with a cookies check for the last time the user visited this page.
2. When a comment is collapsed, hide its "Reply" and "Share" buttons, and instead of "Show replies" change that button to a more generic "Show"
3. Add a user setting to control how many comments get loaded immediately when opening a post, and don't use the same behavior in Desktop and in Mobile
Most important 3.: No, it's not okay if it's limited to top-level comments.
The archive system. I want the SSC archive system or something like it, and the lack of that is the chief reason I haven't started blogging on Substack.
What do you mean by archive system?
If I click on the "Archive" button on ACX, I get a list of the latest posts, with names, images, descriptive text and release dates and the option to instead sort by "top" or "discussions". If I control-f "open thread 212" (to pick an arbitrary example) it doesn't appear; only the recent posts are loaded and I need to use their (very slow) search mechanism to find it.
If I click on the "Archives" button on SSC, a page instantly loads listing just the names of every SSC post ever made and I can control-f "meditations" and instantly get Meditations on Moloch before I finish typing the name.
SSC is wildly more useful for me, and if I want to blog fiction or essays, I need a permanent archive like the one SSC has or everything I write will instantly vanish into the mists.
Let me see/get notified of replies to my posts, even though I'm not subscribed to the blog.
Also not freezing the whole page for half a minute would be nice.
Yeah, so people are going to be less likely to work on an 'effort-post', when the OT threads are twice as often and so you get less engagement for your long post. And then many of the long posting people started their own blog. Which I want to say I enjoy more. Mostly because the discussion has a longer lifetime when the long post has it's own blog.
So one reason I don't like the OT's is that the engagement in some topic dies out too quickly. I don't 'check in' to the blog that often and the OT threads seem like a waste of time. I recall somewhat fondly Usenet, where threads could go on for weeks or more. That gave you time to think about things and respond later. I'm not sure when I started reading SSC, but it was only a few years before the end. I was more involved with Usenet (via google groups) and so that was my formative internet template for discussion.
So I see the spawning of new blogs from the original SSC as mostly a good thing. More enduring content out there. This seems somewhat analogous to the spawning of new podcasts from those people who went on Joe Rogan, and then Joe saying something to the effect of, "You should do your own podcast."
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!
> "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..."
I note that a system with that "recent comments by poster" list comes with its very own feedback loop with motivation to become an interesting-to-read commenter!!
(A virtuous cycle, so to speak.)
I wanted to thank you for this very thoughtful critique. I've responded upthread to the point about OT Frequency, but I see not directly to you.
I reckon I could probably test for the presence of effortposts (say, top level comments above a certain length). It would be great if I could prove Naval Gazing had a physical impact on the data footprint of SSC, I enjoyed the series immensely
I would be extremely interested in that. The DSL standard is 700 words, if we need a threshold that wasn't picked arbitrarily today. (It was arbitrary 5 years ago, but now we have tradition.)
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.
> 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
Preach - my main request was going to be "find any of the 6 million devs that can load 100kb of text without loading ~100mb of javascript libraries and BS, and then constantly polling / refreshing that with yet more tens of mb of calls every minute or two."
Any bright high schooler who understands CSS could whip up a better framework and comments section.
But sadly, Scott specified "fixable," and I suppose we have to assume that this is not fixable, for inscrutable and ill defined reasons.
The "need a supercomputer to load Substack comments" issue has definitely prevented me from posting before. Also Substack's "login with email" feature is completely broken for some reason.
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.
It is surprising.
I've linked to posts I've written on Noahpinion and here, and judging from the questions they ask in the comments the commenters from ACX have a noticeably higher reading comprehension than the ones from Noahpinion.
Like, the majority of the post will be about explaining [concept X]. Then some Noahpinion commenter will ask "I liked the post but can you explain what you mean by [concept X]."
I'll make sure to anticipate [counter argument Y] in the post, and a Noahpinion commenter will comment exactly [counter argument Y] with nothing added.
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!
agree. I think this is a point in the "Trump broke us." column and we should recover from that.
Did you put this in the wrong spot, or are you somehow blaming DSL on Trump?
I will lurk on DSL sometimes. But not often. It's more right wing than ACX, and I do wish there were more right wing voices here. And maybe it's wrong to say Trump caused this split. Maybe both are just signs of the political divide that just seems to be getting sharper here in the US.
I blame the New York Times. During the pause, DSL took off, and people tend to pick the forum they find most amenable between ASX, DSL, and Reddit.
You've seen me here every so often... (also, what Evan-of-the-Sideways-Tongue said)
I don't know why it is, but I just don't enjoy posting here as much as I did on SSC. I do miss all y'all though!
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.
If you aren't getting a reasonably high number of "child brings knife to school and stabs other child" you're probably getting scrubbed data (that's a deliberately suppressed story, because it benefits neither side of the "gun control" debate).
Which is to say: looking at data delivered by CNN is a good way to look at some biased data -- and sometimes in non-intuitive ways.
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.
UNSONG (Dec 2015-May 2017) also overlapped the critical period and several of these graphs' bulges, and one might wonder its effects on both public perception of Scott's writing quality, and levels of commenter engagement (if comments there were to be included).
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).
That sounds good, and then ban the spam in the rest of the open thread.
If we're talking about stuff like that: I propose each Links thread should have a pre-made top-level comment about each link, REPEATING THE DESCRIPTION OF THE LINK. I go crazy when I'm 500 comments in and the thread starts "On #22, I think..."
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.
A summary, yes. The entire blog post, no; especially not on Substack where it would add extra gigabytes that would be reloaded each second.
You could alternate between Strict Open Threads and Lax Open Threads. In SOTs, you forbid politics and culture war topics, you forbid that people advertise their own blogs/work, and perhaps you could add other restrictive rules if people also find other things annoying. In LOTs, all of those are allowed.
I think you had a similar concept with political vs non-political OT for a while. Did you abandon it because the non-political ones were not better? Or because it was annoying to have the increased complexity? Or because people didn't stick to it?
For the last one, you could try to have it community-enforced. Like, have a rule that no one should answer to forbidden topics except for a comment "no XYZ on Strict Open Threads", and that if someone posts something or does answer accidentally, they should delete the post.
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.
Yeah, it's such a useless waste of time. I keep trying to spend less time on online arguments, and have partially succeeded.
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 find my position on I/P to be ... very much in the minority. It makes me more willing to engage on that subject than I'd otherwise be.
I have found, growing older, that engaging on debates "that someone else is going to take my side anyway" is not worth my time. Someone is always wrong on the internet, after all.
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.
> I think this is true of, idk, Israel vs. Palestine
Which make up, oh a third of all open threads now and for a while, and is the number one argument for banning political topics, to my mind.
Everyone here is complaining about people advertising their own Substacks - I actually like that, I've discovered at least 3 Substacks I really enjoy reading that way. But politics? Politics are entirely taking over and ruining the Open Threads. I don't even read them any more, I skim, and end up scrolling past 50-66% of them, because it's trite back and forth political sniping.
Obviously a minority opinion, and I'm clearly the weird one in the room, but I thought I should put that out here, because I'm probably not the only one that feels that way - we might be a whole 10-15% of the commentariat!
Yeah I agree, regardless of which way you swing, Trump broke us is my answer. Let's be better than that now. Let's talk about ideas. not smack.
I'll engage on I/P, primarily because I have a relatively unique position (but also because I have more information than most.)
In theory, we could have a rational-ish debate on politics, where people would focus on posting evidence and try to figure out things rather than out-yell the opposition. But in practice, I think we don't have this here, so...
I would prefer having 50% politics-free Open Thread, like we used to have once.
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.
Thank you for pointing out that extension's existence! I just installed it and it's so much nicer to have the old formatting back :)
I only ever read this blog on a desktop computer, or a laptop if I'm traveling. The Wordpress UI worked great for that. and the Substack one is at least slightly less frustrating in that format.
There may be a correlation between comment quality/depth/engagement and device usage. High-grade comment engagement takes time and focus, far more than does stuff like "+1" and drive-by twitter-dunks. If you're sitting at a desk, or at least at a coffee shop with a laptop on the table in front of you, you are probably in a position to focus on your efforts. A phone, you're maybe using in a few spare minutes when you're standing in a line somewhere, or otherwise prone to distraction.
Or maybe you're alone and focused for a good length of time and a phone is all you have, in which case you do the best you can (and scream at Wordpress for their thoughtlessness). But, averaged over the commentariat at large, I wouldn't be surprised if selecting against phone-users improved comment quality by the OP's metrics.
Rise of smartphone usage should definitely be one of the hypothesis
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?
Some other instances where both sides of the conflict have loaded names that make themselves sound better:
-Pro choice vs pro life
-Trans rights vs gender critical
-Gay liberation vs Moral Majority
-Protectionism vs free markets
-Liberal vs conservative
-Catholic vs Protestant
-Gun rights vs gun control
-Democrat vs Republican
And, of course, opposed to the social justice movement itself we have free speech activists.
Basically this is everywhere if you start thinking about it for a little while. I would go so far as to say the exceptions are cases where this does *not* happen.
Black Lives Matter was entirely concerned with black deaths, anyway. It wasn't like the movement was about "blacks living better" or even "blacks getting all the nikes and legos they want."
"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?
An excellent point!
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.
“(or no change! Trump 2020 had no platform and just endorsed his 2016 one)”
It bugs me that people harp on this. I don’t consider Trump a conservative, but I’m one, and to me it seems that a proper conservative shouldn’t need to change his platform at all, let alone every four years.
Not just a conservative, but an incumbent. The default platform of every incumbent is basically "N more years of the same", and while it may be traditional to put out a "new" platform that says basically the same thing as the old one but tweaked to address new issues. it's hardly mandatory and Trump has never been traditional.
In what way was Obama's 2012 platform significantly different than his 2008 one?
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 subthread; 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.
> For less than the 10% cut Substack takes, Scott could hire a programmer to write a bespoke subscription system for SSC.
Sounds like a great business idea: "Substack, but made by technically competent people. Comments load 100x faster, and won't crash your browser if you open multiple tabs."
I understand that the technical aspect is low priority for Substack. Most bloggers here are probably technically illiterate; the important thing is to make a system where they can copy-paste a document, drag-and-drop a youtube video, and send the slop to all subscribers, with as little effort as possible. And yet, it is so embarassing, and fixing it would probably be relatively cheap, compared to the entire budget. It might even save Substack some money, because all those unnecessary gigabytes go through their servers.
Very helpful to learn these exist:
- ACX Tweaks
- Data Secrets Lox
In hindsight, I had given very little thought even over an extended period of time to contribution of The Commentariat to my perceived value of SSC/ACX. But it is genuinely and overwhelmingly true. Curious blind spot.
In no way a novel hypothesis but worth restating: ACX remains solid, and the Substack guys seem earnest and genuine in building something helpful and rewarding for authors. But ACX on Substack is not as engaging as SSC in the full sense of engaging:
- more posts and comment sections than a not-on-sabbatical reader can read,
- the various Substack functional gaps _within the structure of a post-with-comments_,
- and overwhelmingly the aggregate notification and badge attention-noise from the other authors I’ve subscribed to on Substack.
Oh, as well as the noise coming from, and within Substack from other authors and author-commenters I have _not_ subscribed to.
Apparatus notes: 97% of my usage of ACX on Substack is on my phone in the app. Zero percent on my phone in the browser. Only 3% on MacOS in a browser. Perhaps I should change that, if the ACX Tweaks plugin is a game changer.
Note: if you want an Android browser with support for arbitrary extensions (including ACX Tweaks), use Firefox, or a fork like IceRaven. (I'm not sure there's any browser on iOS with good extension support; all browsers there have to use Safari's engine, which limits their options.)
"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.
Bigotry is the mindpoison, not racism. Reducing other people to mere stage props. Assuming you know anything about a person because they've got tits, or ... many other things.
Calling it Racism is losing the plot.
Racism is a subset of bigotry.
Not really, I don't think "racism" has any fixed definition these days. It might have started off as a subset of bigotry but now it's just a messy cluster of vaguely-related concepts that people with political power wish to clamp down upon.
I get you don't like how the woke have redefined racism to be a sin only white people can commit, but there is no need to accept the authority of the woke.
Yes, exactly! The boorish behavior is bigotry. Calling it racism unnecessarily narrows what the problem is.
There's nothing wrong with being more specific. Calling something cerulean doesn't mean it's not blue. Racism is a form of bigotry; bigotry is bad, and so is racism.
Yeah, there really is. Trainings that teach people about "unconscious bias" teach people to be bigoted against people who haven't taken the training yet.
Bigotry, the broader, bigger term, is the problem. Taking shortcuts with others is the problem. If you restrict the "badness" down to racism, you obscure how many "bad things" exist. A black lady's car broke down in WV, and she was sweatin' about it -- not sure exactly what hill country mores were, with someone who was a clear stranger there. That's bigotry. Bigotry is makin' assumptions about people based on very little data.
Yes, racism is a problem. But it's not "the" problem because people "aren't natively racists." Lazy people are natively bigots, and the higher calling is to "be less lazy."
a person racist for two reasons: you are either a bigot who needs the superiority racism
gives you, or a rube for someone who is because you like them and you explain it away or me too it because the alternative is too much to bear.
there is no "empty" racism without motive like this. if a person talks about abolishing private property, he is either a thief or follows one, because you don't hold these kind of beliefs dispassionately. They are pointless otherwise.
I've never liked Taki, but this dislike started way before he was ever associated with racism or reaction or whatever.
Vox Day - that's another tangled association. The Rabid Puppies were alongside the Sad Puppies in the Hugo Wars, so there's a certain allies-by-necessity there (I was a supporter of the Sad Puppies).
So the guilt-by-association thing isn't quite pulled off; if Mr. Sailer is guilty by virtue of the company he keeps, then so am I!
He's always been perfectly agreeable on here, even when I've disagreed with him. The online attributions I've read have him to be a roaring, ranting, foaming at the mouth while dressed up in his KKK robes, nogoodnik. And that's not how he comes across here.
Deiseach, he was doing it 15 years ago or more i think; i think i used to read/post on Dreher's blog then, and his substack mentions Charles Murray, who published The Bell Curve in 1994. Those debates go back pretty far, and Paleocons kind of previewed Trump in how conservatives were changing. Dreher was more of a sane paleocon, but part of why Pat Buchanan is no longer talked about is he was the vdare type and was open about it. not sure how long ago you mean.
and...look, the way subcultures like this get people is that first you meet a nice guy who happens to be smart, explainative, and possessed of novel ideas. You read more, and you find you agree a lot.
then you find the deep writings, and boom, he thinks you should torture puppies or something, or all your wives are belong to him. And people will have to wrestle with "he might have a point" with the puppy thing, because he was so smart and accurate before right?
Works more than you think.
"then you find the deep writings, and boom, he thinks you should torture puppies or something, or all your wives are belong to him."
Where might I find these putative "deep writings" of mine that I've often seen presumed to exist but have never seen quoted?
https://www.takimag.com/article/a-matter-of-preference/
For example, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a supporter of racial preferences for you but not for her. She was too important to accept less than the most brilliant clerks. She hired approximately 159 law clerks during her forty years as a federal judge, but only one black was ever meritocratically good enough to clerk for her, Paul J. Watford, an outstanding legal mind who was long on Obama’s short list of Supreme Court nominees.
Being a Supreme Court law clerk is one of those jobs where you can see the arguments both for meritocracy (it’s really hard) and for racial representation (it’s really influential).
Very few non-elites realize that in a purely fair hiring and promotion meritocracy, blacks would tend to be underrepresented by about an order of magnitude at the highest end. I’ve often joked that the Harvard Presidents’ Book of Secrets would turn out to be a padlocked yet heavily dog-eared copy of The Bell Curve.
***
from your review on sinners in the same place:
"Sure, a lot of gory stuff happens during the horror part of the movie, but none of it is in the least bit terrifying.
Why not?
For one thing, vampires are intensely European and aristocratic, so they don’t work well in a rural African-American movie."
*
"So there are horrifying (if also comic) aspects to West African superstition.
But Coogler, a racial loyalist, isn’t going to go there. Hence, there’s nothing terrifying in Sinners"
***
some examples i could find. vdare crashes my phone so i can't really link to it.
The current top post by other authors on takimag is "Black Knives Matter" which starts off with "If black people were consumer products, you'd have to ban them." and goes on from there with an uk based anti-immigration screed.
thats the company you keep and editors that pay you approve that. When someone talks to the faithful their speech often differs. they don't push back as much.
A classic example from a Steve Hater: My comment on the excellent Paul J. Watford being considered by Ruth Bader Ginsburg the only black good enough to clerk for her, and then suggesting both meritocracy and affirmative action have their merits in extreme right end of the bell curve jobs like Supreme Court clerk would seem like a model of why the world needs more of my commentary, but the Steve Hater assumes it's obvious proof to Good People like himself or herself that I need to be shut down.
I'm planning to quit posting here, so I'll say it: I certainly don't share all their political views, but I think they're probably right about the three-letter acronym. There are too many disparities that pop up across different nations and places and despite all attempts to fix them. It just explains too much about the world and better than the standard liberal argument that it's all socially constructed and the result of history.
I totally get why leftists want to bury it, and I don't blame you guys at all given the unpleasant implications and our own nation's history, but things keep happening the way they say. The left that figures out a way to deal with that and the reality of sexual differences, even if implicitly as a kluge, will carry the day.
No, it's stupid.
They always go on about african americans but native americans pretty much have similar issues or worse, and no one is fool enough to imply THEIR iq differences explains it. Or other aboriginal peoples; the vdare crowd is very specific in their subjects.
Plus rationalists are dumb sometimes in a specific way: they heavily reduce people to semi-machines acted on by singular or specific impersonal forces that can be isolated and explain their behavior. The idea that people are not like that even in aggregate: that it is significantly more tangled and a basket of things is hated because there is uncertainty and no elegant way to address or solve problems.
Problem is racists can tap into that, as well as other hucksters. and it doesnt help how isolated people are these days or how powerful narratives are.
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"
You know, that was supposed to be my last post here, but I have to say: that's pretty funny.
Can we ethically ask Scott to raise his children to the point where *they* can post stuff we'll find interesting, as quickly as possible?
Hmm, if "Kai" and "Lyra" are really named "Peter" and "Valentine", and Scott is secretly using the Polgar Method to raise them as precocious supergenius bloggers, how long do we have to wait for the Codex Utopia?
> 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
In hindsight, it seems like quite a miracle that we actually could have debates with this group for a while. I mean, their modus operandi is: "either you ban everyone I don't like, or I will leave in protest and try to burn down this place". If they leave, you don't have a debate; but to make them stay, you have to ban everyone who disagrees with them, and then you don't have a debate either.
I guess the only way to keep them is to balance on the edge of "maybe they can win and then purge their opponents, maybe they can't", so they keep trying... but that sounds like something that is easy to say but very hard to actually do, especially for a longer time.
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.
> an almost complete lack of interest in opposing or even questioning the trans movement
Perhaps useful context: I believe Scott was dating a trans person for a while during the SSC period. So highly negative stuff about trans people probably would have been looked askance more, and maybe policed more (by both Scott and other commentariat members).
I have you at 194th most prolific, with 803 comments. If you trust my comment quality algorithm (I would be a bit sceptical!) your mathematically best comment is this one:
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-352?r=6476at&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=73599131
Thank you!
(That's a lot higher than I expected, I guess the comments really add up. Also, I would call that one of my more ranty comments, that I don't know how much of which I even still endorse. October every four years is like looking at two very different possible futures the Western world might branch into...)
More generally, I think your review was very good and was one of the few I voted for in the preliminaries, but I think you've collected a lot of data that could be of great further value to everyone here (and that people who don't read the review posts might not even know about). Maybe you should get in touch with Scott about making its existence and/or availability widely known?
> 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?
Well, it is not a coincidence that these norms have appeared in the community of people who share the idiosyncratic views. Even if those views are in a minority among the commenters, a significant minority can still change the tone of the debate, especially when the moderator is on their side.
Scott can ban people who are rude, but if most commenters adopted the internet norm of "evidence doesn't matter, the most important thing is to out-comment the other side", the discussion would quickly go to hell. And it's an interesting empirical question how long the norms could protect themselves in absence of people who defend them for specific reasons.
I agree with you in general, but I think there's a great big conflation of the general norms about being unbiased, valuing evidence, being willing to provide reasons, being willing to change your mind, and so on...and the much more specific set of object-level beliefs I was talking about. A major motte-and-bailey about the term "Rationalism".
For example, I can't even *imagine* how a committment to productive discourse would be actively advanced (as opposed to just being unaffected) by widespread support for polyamory, or by belief in a near-term singularity, or by a love for evopsych explanations of behaviour, or by adherance to the MWI of quantum mechanics. Maybe there's a way, but I can't see it...
I think the causal relation is in the opposite direction.
As an analogy, you can have free speech without atheism. Technically, there is no reason why thousand deeply religious people couldn't start their own server and commit to norms of free speech.
But one day, the idea of atheism might appear on the forum randomly (for example, one member had a crisis of faith and deconverted), and now that the idea is out there in the open, by committing to norms of free speech you have lost the most efficient way to get rid of it.
So it's not like you need atheism for free speech, but more like free speech allows the meme of atheism to flourish in a religious society. It doesn't necessarily mean that all members, or even a majority of them will become atheists. It just means that the annoying meme of atheism will stay there, irritating some people, forever.
Maybe it is the same with the rational norms of discourse and polyamory / Singularity / MWI. You could start with a group of 100% monogamous people who believe in collapse and that nothing new ever happens. And it would work okay for a while. But when the heretical idea of polyamory / Singularity / MWI appears... it may turn out that the rest of the group doesn't have a devastating rational response to it. In the sense that most of them will remain unconvinced, but the annoying ideas will remain there.
So you would start with a rational forum without polyamory and Singularity, but would soon end up with a rational forum with (minority, but visible) polyamory and Singularity, and everyone else would complain about why did you have to start a forum with all this memetic baggage.
For the record, "not having a devastating rational response to an idea" does not necessarily mean that the idea is true. It might be the case that the idea is wrong, but wrong in a way that is non-trivial to demonstrate, and that people are used to dismiss it using extra-rational methods so much that without those methods they are lost in the debate. (Analogically, there were religious defendants of free speech who believed that atheism was wrong, but that religious people should keep exercising their "debating against atheists" muscles, rather then get lazy and forget how to defend their religion properly.)
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.
Yes, or at least he used to, unannounced. There was some grumbling about his editing old SSC posts, and a lot of people (including me) think the old versions were at least sometimes better.
Famously, "Meditations on Moloch" used to begin with a reference to Nick Land, and end (before the final Ginsberg quote) with "Moloch is the demon god of Carthage. And there is only one thing we say to Carthage: 'Carthago delenda est.'"
I agree!
Thanks for the answer, Evan.
"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?
see here: https://slatestarcodex.com/archives/
still some posting.
Yes, and also look at the Substack archive. There were only 3 posts across both sites between blog deletion and "Still Alive", yet the chart shows 6 dots.
You are right to flag this as an error - the data are coded correctly in the analysis but the colour box I drew over the different eras in the visualisation wasn't positioned quite correctly. Sorry!
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!
Any chance of getting the data to do ssmantic clustering? I'd calc comment embedding, plot umap and how it evolve over time.
Also, I wonder how the probability of reply changes with time. Are trere timestamps on comments?
Regarding "In February 2016, Scott requested that all Culture Wars topics be quarantined to a single Culture Wars thread on the r/slatestarcodex subreddit (link). This seems like the most common-sense explanation for the observation that the comment section changes dramatically around this time"
That applied only to discussing Culture War topics *on the subreddit*; it didn't apply to SSC proper. There was for a long time a norm or rule that CW stuff (originally "race or gender") should be discussed only on e.g. alternating Open Threads, and that rule got tweaked a few times but I don't recall anything substantial in early 2016. Certainly there was plenty of CW discussion in SSC proper in 2016, 2017, 2018...
I think it was somewhat reflective of a broader shift where Scott pulled away from a lot of the CW-ish stuff he'd been doing. Using the "things I will regret writing" tag as an easy proxy, I see 6 posts in 2014, 4 in 2015. 2 in 2016, 6 in 2017, 3 in 2018 and 2 in 2019. The obvious counter is 2017, but most of that is gender differences discourse, which has an extremely strong "someone is wrong on the internet" flavor, and which he closed comments on a lot of.
TL;DR
But: I hate the comment section of substack - at least on the phone, where I read things 99.9% of the time. It's slow loading, bloated, threads are cut off on the right side, when I want to drive into a thread and come back to the main thread it loses track and I'm back at the beginning. Tried to get around Witz all the issues the first couple of articles u til I gave up. Now I'm back on Reddit and some classic forums using modern forum software.
PS: login was a pain in the b* as well right now - took me 3 minutes and I was nearly giving up - but just wanted to send the message...
I only found Scott 2 years ago so I'm not a long term reader or follower.
But: older articles on SSC had the curiosity of a young intelligent human trying to make sense of our world. That was mostly very interesting. I read only some of the fictional pieces - and liked some.
But since Scotts outing and the move to ACT I got the feeling all got less and less interesting, mostly harmless like Douglas Adams would say. Like the author has already fully built it's internal world prediction model and now fully has switched to predicting the world based on his inner model instead of just being curious and watching our funny, interesting, worth living live unfold. I rarely find an interesting post these days, its mostly Open Thread, Reviews, Grants and Bets on some things I do t care or Doomsday things I try to ignore (when will AI overlords kill humanity - 1 2 or 5 years?)
I think this is why I enjoyed the SSC articles as well. I was drawn to SSC because it showed me that there was a way to oppose social justice, which I had become incredibly frustrated and disillusioned with, without being conservative, and I think the articles elaborately reasoned through that in the way they did because Scott was trying to work through the same inner conflict himself. For the record, my favorite relatively recent post was The Psychopolitics of Trauma; that's one of the better all-time ones in my opinion.
Hard to evaluate / check hypothesis: the recent drop in Flesch-Kincaid level of comments is due to people using LLMs to help compose posts, and or influencing their writing style indirectly. Specifically, I notice that they improve writing in ways that lower the level. (For example, shorter sentences with similar complexity via splitting compound/complex sentences.)
I guess one way to get marginal evidence about my intuition is to ask LLMs to rewrite a set of previous comments with low/high Flesch-Kincaid reading levels. My hypothesis is that they tend towards middle-school level, raising the lowest ones but reducing the higher-scoring ones. (Only the latter half is critical for evaluation of the claim here.)
this is overwhelmingly charming
Personally, I think the quality of Scott's writing has declined. It seems less thoughtful than it used to be, and he appears more arrogant. I think success has gone to his head. The writing used to be a hobby and a passion, and now it is a job.
I believe Scott is also a new father, and I am sure that is very challenging and stressful.
From memory, incidents of arrogance:
- his lack of owning his endorsement of an untested medical intervention (the mouth bacteria thing)
- his America centric discussion of housing, drugs and crime. He seemed incredibly triggered by anyone pointing out that America could potentially take inspiration from other countries. He just waved his hands dismissed those who disagreed, insulted them, and refused to provide any argument or rational (not even, e.g., linking a previous articulation of why such a discussion might be unproductive).
- various strange slightly reader antagonist posts
- the whole being to lazy to actually articulate a reasoned support of Harris over Trump. In short his endorsement was: I am deeply concerned by the Democrats, but [handwave] so there. His approach speaks to two forms of arrogance a. Alienating a reasonably large section of readers and b. Not bothering to properly articulate his own thoughts.
Overall the vibe I get, is he just puts in less effort, and holds himself to lower standards of both writing and intellectual honesty. I asked around at one of the meets up, and many people seemed to share this overall impression, and nobody disagreed.
To be fair, it could be Scot reacting to a worse comment section. E.g., if there is more disagreement and if on average the disagreement is of lower quality, Scott may feel less inclined to engage well with the comment community.
I think it was quite revealing the AI bet apology where Scott didn't really respect or consider the commenter he had the bet with, instead considering other public intellectuals.
I think perhaps Scott just not longer really respects or engaged with his everyday readers and commentators, like he used to, and sees his blog more as a conversation with other public intellectuals
I'm a relative newbie to the rationalist space. I wasn't around for the glory days of SSC, but I've peeked at the its threads, and I'd say the ACX commentariat is more *focused* on making convincing arguments than the SSC commentariat was, but that's my subjective impression. I wasn't there commenting day in and day out like I am here.
And I'm not sure if Scott is less engaged with the ACX commentariat than he was with his SSC commentariat, but I agree that he seems to focus on conversing with public intellectuals (and pseudo-intellectuals) rather than with his followers, and I don't see a high engagement with his followers at least on the public open threads.
The best comments section on the internet is at TV Tropes. But I suppose ACX has a solid claim on second place.
I haven't commented much here, and it's 2:04 pm, July 27th, here in the Eastern US as I'm reading the review.
Anyways, I just wanted to say that when I got to the line, "If this initial trend continues, the ACX Commentariat will surpass the peak of SSC Commentariat around lunchtime on the 27th July this year", it cracked me up a little.
Dear Finalist, Dear Scott,
I am sorry, but I think this is such a perfect example of everything I think that is wrong with with the Rationalist community:
- You think you have to solve a question yourself alone, like how Einstein or Maxwell did, i.e. to do classical science, which is possible in physics, but in the humanities not
- So you go good Bayesian and bring evidence, numerical evidence
- You cannot be sure you are actually measuring things correctly, you cannot be sure your measurements are anything like a measurement like "three kilograms"
- So you bring up a lot of numbers, graphs, measurements, based on... whatever. You are not measuring any kind of solid units, like "kilograms", your measurement criteria, your units of measure are made up.
- So you have fake science or scientism, which is bad, because it makes your opinion look more reliable than it actually is, because good science is good, but bad science is worse than opinions, because it looks more reliable than opinions, and it is not. False sense of security / reliability.
- It is better to look less reliable than to look more reliable, this should be really some sort of a corollary to the Bayes Theorem, when in doubt, round the probablity down, not up, it is the best to look very very modest "just my opinion" and not to look the super confident "look at my science!"
- As you are not doing this, scientism, fake science, unreliable numbers makes it a dark art, obviously
- Seriously, I don't think even world hunger / nutrition is measurable, even though that is based on biology. And you seriously propose to be able to measure *comment quality* ? I call this hubris.
The alternative is:
- You do not have to solve every question yourself, you can simply contribute a well-reasoned opinion to a community, and after many such well-reasoned opinions a hivemind, a sensus communis, a common sense appears
- For example, we cannot measure world hunger, nutrition, so we offer a cash prize to families in Bangladesh to take a pic of their dinners, and then the whole community engages with it, and after much back and forth, a sensus communis, a common-sense hivemind opinion emerges
My opinion: the old and new commentariat are good in different ways:
- Oldies like nywdracu were crazy geniuses, brilliant, creative, original, but not of this Earth, not practical
- Newbies feel normie, having a marriage, kids, even gasp a religion, less creative, less original, but more practical and down-to-Earth
(This also true of Scott :))) )
Early adopters are more sophisticated. It's the same for every education intervention, psychotherapy school, internet platform, underground band, etc. You don't really need to go searching for other explanations with this prior.
262th comment, so I surely repeat "Very fine review; yes: sometimes sounding like Scott, but no: not Scott" Just one thing: The last "datapoint does more than the entire preceding essay at expressing how much I value the ACX Commentariat" - sure, but I do not get the "0.07" value: their is hardly one comment there that is not outspokenly all "positive emotion"! Even more than the comments to "In the long run, we are all dad" - which should be a visible outlier, nonetheless.
So, what would a value of "1" look like?!? Love, love , love - all the way down? And 0.07 as opposed to 0.04 does not adequately reflect the comments, which were as close to "Love, love, love" as possible in full sentences: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/09/11/update-on-my-situation/
In 2014 Scott wrote "I Can Tolerate Everything Except the Outgroup" and appended to it the admonition to "Try to keep this off Reddit and other similar sorts of things." But I thought the essay deserved to be shared, and posted it, if not to Reddit, then to places similar to Reddit as I was specifically warned not to do. After that, a lower quality of commentariat flooded into the Rationalist sphere following those links and everything just went down hill from there.
I'm sorry, Scott. I was your accidental Ephialtes. Mea Culpa.
Have a tentative theory-- some of what happened is the power of entropy. Scott has a wide range of interests and ideas, but we've also come to know what the usual is. Social Justice excesses was a rich vein, but it's mined out.
Unless I've missed something, there isn't a lot new in rationalism. The early hope that thinking about thinking could make people a lot smarter turned out to be wrong, though I still believe that cleaning up bad mental habits can make people somewhat more efficient.
ACX is still a pleasure, but the early excitement isn't there any more.
Yeah, both LW and ACX think that AI is by far the most important and interesting thing these days. And while the "important" part isn't necessarily wrong, current stuff just doesn't seem that interesting to me.
To be clear upfront: I enjoyed this review and I think it's deeply charming.
That said, I have a lot of beef with the methodology and interpretation in this review (e.g. viewing the peaks in the engagement as something other than necessarily temporary peaks precipitated by some salient topic), but the most striking one are the language-based metrics (especially the one on word complexity). Not everyone is a native speaker, and there's no particular way I can think of that a trend "the blog has started attracting more interest from outside the anglosphere" (random claim, not an actual thing that's happening, necessarily; in fact, absent data, I don't think it is) would reflect any sort of decline in the comment section.
To give an example of what other beef I have with the methodology: I don't think comments that aren't engaged with are necessarily low-effort. They could just be saying something that everyone is nodding along with. (Note that I don't think that necessarily explains the data, it's certainly at least mildly suspicious that that has any sort of curve, but it makes me highly sceptical that the metric is capturing anything of importance.)
But I need to draw attention to one thing in particular, which is that Scott has a phenomenal sense of humour (which we knew, but bears repeating):
> If this initial trend continues, the ACX Commentariat will surpass the peak of SSC Commentariat around lunchtime on the 27th July this year, so mark that in your calendars.
Bravo for posting this up so it would be commented on in that window!
(I do see one other commenter pointed this out (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-the-astral-codex-ten/comment/139499892), and I might have missed another, but it's just too good not to mention.)
I'm a pretty recent reader of the blog, finding out about Scott through the famous "Meditations on Moloch" post through a google search in late 2023. From there, I read about him further and found ACX, and I've been reading it pretty consistently ever since. I've also hardly ever read/engaged with any comments at all outside the open threads, and when I have, I don't feel like it shapes my views on the posts in any considerable way.
As I've read the blog, I'm always surprised when past SSC posts are linked to, because to me they do always seem more interesting to read. They don't seem like they are better quality in terms of writing; it seems more like either the topic is something that's more interesting to me in general, or maybe that Scott was more interested in what he was writing about. Even going back to look at some of the last posts on SSC, they give me the same feeling overall as ACX.
There have been ACX posts that do interest me as much as SSC posts that I have read, and those are mainly his AI-focused ones. Otherwise, I keep reading mostly out of habit, waiting to read contest reviews, or see if he's made another in-depth post on AI. The latest post I've really enjoyed from the blog is "On Priesthoods" from this January https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/on-priesthoods
Something I've noticed in writing, at least in music, is that the best writing tends to be when the writer is very passionate about a topic to the point where the words come from a place where they can't be contained. As a result, for many bands that I like, the first ten years seem to be the best of their music. The first albums usually being pretty good, then the ones after being even better once the artist has a better handle on how they like doing things. After that, though, even though quality doesn't necessarily go down, something seems to be lacking. It usually feels like, either the artist grew personally and solved their issues that they used to write music about (I like this even though I don't like the music afterwards), or else they didn't grow personally and they're stuck writing the same music (cringe and a little sad). Whether they are at peace now or have little personal development, they now write new songs because it's what they do, and have lost the spark of inspiration. Or, like Billy Joel, they realize they're losing their spark and just quit writing new music and then they go on tour with just the good stuff.
I wonder if the same kind of thing has happened for Scott, and maybe he's at a point in his life where whatever original emotional reasons that caused him to want to write a blog are gone, and he does it for other reasons now (because what he writes is still good, it just doesn't seem as inspired).
Other reasons I could think of for the perceived change of quality of Scott's posts in someone who doesn't engage with reading/writing comments hardly at all (me) are:
-His writing hasn't changed; he just used to write about things that are personally interesting to me more often, and now he doesn't.
-Basically, the only SSC posts I've read are because someone posted a link recommending them. Naturally, those posts would all be of a superior enough quality for someone to link to them after so many years, and there's probably a lot of other SSC posts that are as semi-interesting to me as most ACX posts.
Whatever the case, I'm not so sure that the commentariat has as much of an impact on what people think of Scott's posts over time as this review suggests, as I don't read very many comments at all on regular posts and have personally thought there was a shift in his writing, not realizing it was a common thought among his readers.
EDIT: It looks like Scott more or less addressed everything I just commented about in the "Why Do I Suck?" post linked at the beginning of this review. Whoops.
You used chatgpt to write your comment analysis code but didn't ask chatgpt to rate the "intellectual depth" or various other qualities of posts? Someone get this man some LLM API credits or something! Asking llms to summarize and rate text on various dimensions soundly beats finetuned bert and any other legacy analytics.
I have found the blog and commentary less useful over time, but the reason isn't exotic and has nothing to do with either becoming worse. I'm not a newb who just started out on my intellectual journey anymore so it's just much harder to blow my mind than it used to be.
I started my ideas journey later than most intellectually curious people because I spent most of my time until age 25 or so using all my energy on fantasy/sci-fic fandom. A more typical trajectory for people who hang out here seems to be they were intellectually ravenous in a non-fiction direction starting in their late teens. Most such teens get galaxy brained by something - Ayn Rand, the communist Manifesto, the Selfish Gene, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, etc. They then (hopefully) get exposure to more things, and their galaxy brain fades some as they realize how complicated the world really is. My galaxy brain is an old galaxy at this point. There's not a lot of stars winking into life anymore. Now, I experience intellectual growth more as refinement than revolution. It's *very* rare for somebody to pop some idea on me that's truly, categorically new and like nothing I ever considered before.
>Majority of the readers only commented once.
I am one of those readers, my limited experience with the quality of comments here was exceedingly negative. I found the commenters here absolutely insufferable, with that distinct mix of smugness, superiority and holier-than-you attitute that is hard to describe but impossible to miss. If Reddit is your average worst of humanity to 11, then acx is same but cranked up to 31.
As for the posts, I started reading Scott way back after a few short stories from SSC went viral. For me Scott was always Unsong writer/psychiatry blogger. ACX posts for the most part been unrelatable, I have zero interest in EA, prediction markets and guest posts, etc. In the last few years there been maybe a few posts like old SSC, namely original bay area party story and Lumia post.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think all the measures for "depth of engagement" are somewhat degenerate with the outcome variable of comments per post. In other words, more comments per thread will generally lead to more comments overall, so using the former as an explanatory variable for the latter seems problematic.
I also think it would have been important to separate open threads from proper posts, and carry out all the analysis in parallel for both. Not only would this somewhat get around the big problem where density of open threads doubled at exactly the point where comments per post went down, but the dynamics of commenting on open threads compared to proper posts could be very different.
If the writer is reading this, though, despite my few quibbles, I appreciate the hard work that has gone into this post, and overall I think it's great!
Skipping ahead, I feel like a possible explanation for post-2016 decline is similar to the idea that Scott's writing has gotten worse, but I think there's a chance that he "used up" most of the really interesting topics, and now is stuck writing well written posts about stuff that people don't care as much about, or have as much else to say. That would explain all the early hits, as well as the fact that he's still a good writer. In fact, what if scott has gotten so good at writing that now he's preemptively making more of the points that used to get explored in the comments, so people don't feel as much need to comment?
I should note that I haven't read Scott's post "Why do I suck", and while I've read some of the early hits, I subscribed after the move to substack, and I'm usually just a drive by commenter
""A feature which many people appreciate about the SSC/ACX comments section is the freedom to discuss socially or professionally sensitive ideas (i.e. ideas which could get you sacked from a University if you expressed them publicly). ""
Maybe we need to get back to this.
Pre 2016, the "sensitive" issues some would like to discuss with more nuance like SJW, this was the place.
Now, in 2025. Where do you go for 'nuanced' discussion of such sensitive topics like "are we fascist?", or "do humans naturally tend towards fascism?", or "Does anybody even care that the United States is opening concentration camps?". What would a late 1930's person feel towards Hitler, he was popular, what can we infer? --- >
These are actually real questions, but since they are hot-button, inflammatory, it is hard to find someplace to have some real discussion about them. ACX should confront some of the SJW issues of 2025, which are now right-wing issues.
2016 issue was SJW. "Do Black Lives Matter".
2025 are now MAGA issues. "Should we just kill people to save money?".
Scott writes good
The comments are often insightful, as insightful as can be expected for a public website where any rando can comment.
I WILL NOT contemplate my own navel
After mulling over this review for a week, I'm recording my thoughts here for future reference. I loved the high ambition: let's scrape all the posts and comments into a giant dataset! I don't love the half-baked data analysis: let's notice some weird stuff, mention it, then hop along blithely; let's not do much serious data cleaning or look at the outliers, let's not check the results from the LLM code even if they look weird, let's just wing it in the writeup and create a sense that most of this could have been an LLM artifact, one we didn't care enough about to spot-check or revise. So much missed opportunity. Please give the dataset to Scott to look at, a future ACX intern could spend weeks slicing and dicing this data in different ways. Or maybe put in an ACX grant to spend more time with the data?
This was a pretty interesting an in-depth analysis. I'm surprised at the lack of mention of DSL though. It seems like the right wingers mostly exiling themselves to DSL could help explain changes in the 2021 era (though of course Substack UI and influx of new readers were much bigger confounder).
The ACX comment section continues to be unusable for me, in the strict sense of “the page hangs for seconds at a time and randomly turns into a blank screen while scrolling around, on both mobile and desktop, across several distinct browsers”.
Surprised "power users" weren't mentioned. A lot of Open Threads are unreadable because the usuals spam low quality contributions (guilty as charged).