My read was that the opposite was the case with r/SSC—that >50% of the activity of the whole sub-reddit is in the weekly ‘culture war’ thread and also that the total political content increased once it became more concentrated. I’d be interested if anyone could gather data on this.
Quickly looking it seems like there are ~3,000 comments/week on the SSC thread. I just eyeballed (rounding everything to nearest 10) the total number of comments on posts in the last week (i.e. between the last ‘culture war’ thread and the next) and got 1130 comments, which indicates a 3:1 ratio of political content to non-political content.
This isn’t a perfect metric though, as posts are more important than comments. The total number of posts in that time period was 47, and if each is worth 10 comments, then that only brings us to a 2:1 ratio, but maybe they should be worth 100 comments, making it a 1:2 ratio (against politics).
I tried to compare the ratio to the SSC reddit era before the ‘culture war’ thread, but reddit wouldn’t let me go back that far (after hitting a page with the 1000th article, sorted by ‘new’, it said ‘there doesn’t seem to be anything here’). So I don’t know if we can draw a clear line from then to now. Also that line would be quite imperfect anyway because there are other forces that cause people to write political things, than just having a space+affordance for doing it.
Looking over exciting posts from that era being discussed on the subreddit, my weak impression is that the sub has grown quite a lot in the period from when the ‘culture war’ threads began weekly. Exciting posts back then seemed to have 10-50 comments on them, whereas today they can have 100s and 1000s. So I don’t think the ‘quarantined area’ has had a marginalising effect on the content.
I take this overall as weak-to-medium evidence in favour of the OP’s hypothesis. As I said, any clearer data on this forum or other forums would be appreciated.
I’m still unconvinced. Both your data and David_Kingsley’s data seem to confuse correlation with causation. The rationality community has grown. It has more people interested in politics than it had in the past. This led to more politics being discussed, which, in turn led moderators to create politics-only sections on forums, discords, etc. to prevent politics talk from overwhelming the main channel and turning off those who were not interested in discussing politics. This seems to explain the increase in political posts and the quarantining of politics without requiring a causal link between the two.
My read was that the opposite was the case with r/SSC—that >50% of the activity of the whole sub-reddit is in the weekly ‘culture war’ thread and also that the total political content increased once it became more concentrated. I’d be interested if anyone could gather data on this.
Quickly looking it seems like there are ~3,000 comments/week on the SSC thread. I just eyeballed (rounding everything to nearest 10) the total number of comments on posts in the last week (i.e. between the last ‘culture war’ thread and the next) and got 1130 comments, which indicates a 3:1 ratio of political content to non-political content.
This isn’t a perfect metric though, as posts are more important than comments. The total number of posts in that time period was 47, and if each is worth 10 comments, then that only brings us to a 2:1 ratio, but maybe they should be worth 100 comments, making it a 1:2 ratio (against politics).
I tried to compare the ratio to the SSC reddit era before the ‘culture war’ thread, but reddit wouldn’t let me go back that far (after hitting a page with the 1000th article, sorted by ‘new’, it said ‘there doesn’t seem to be anything here’). So I don’t know if we can draw a clear line from then to now. Also that line would be quite imperfect anyway because there are other forces that cause people to write political things, than just having a space+affordance for doing it.
Looking over exciting posts from that era being discussed on the subreddit, my weak impression is that the sub has grown quite a lot in the period from when the ‘culture war’ threads began weekly. Exciting posts back then seemed to have 10-50 comments on them, whereas today they can have 100s and 1000s. So I don’t think the ‘quarantined area’ has had a marginalising effect on the content.
I take this overall as weak-to-medium evidence in favour of the OP’s hypothesis. As I said, any clearer data on this forum or other forums would be appreciated.
I’m still unconvinced. Both your data and David_Kingsley’s data seem to confuse correlation with causation. The rationality community has grown. It has more people interested in politics than it had in the past. This led to more politics being discussed, which, in turn led moderators to create politics-only sections on forums, discords, etc. to prevent politics talk from overwhelming the main channel and turning off those who were not interested in discussing politics. This seems to explain the increase in political posts and the quarantining of politics without requiring a causal link between the two.