Jesus H. fucking Christ on a pogo stick! If you’re bothering to talk about something in a thread, could you please tell me what the fuck you’re talking about??
Yeah yeah, it’s really clever of you to have figured out that what with this world wide thingamabobber here you can just refer to things by a pronoun, and have the pronoun be a link that leads you to a page that tells you what the pronoun refers to. I’m shocked and amazed at your technological savvy.
But it’s annoying as fuck.
Here is just one example:
That’s from this thread, in case you’re wondering. And it’s not even the most egregious example out there. It just happens to be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.
Why didn’t the poster in question just tell us that he didn’t like No Contest or Gothika? What was to be gained by making us open up two additional windows? If he wanted to make it easy for us to access the IMDB pages of the two crapfests in question, he certainly could have linked to them. But there was no reason he couldn’t have told us the titles in the body of the post.
Unless, he thought he was being cute.
But let’s give the poster in question the benefit of the doubt. He may not have known that he was being annoying. He may not have thought about the fact that some of us have balky old computers that don’t really like to have too many windows open at once. This rant isn’t directed at him in particular. It’s directed at everybody who engages in this practice.
So, dear fellow posters, please refrain from making posts that are incomprehensible unless the reader clicks on a link. We do want to see what you have to say. Putting a vague link where a proper noun should be is just make-work–for you, for us, and for the hamsters. Let’s lighten all of our loads.
Right on, Green Bean!
I agree with you 100%. When I post a link, I always try to quote at least some of the relevant portion. I am sick to death of jokers who think what passes for an argument is “Well look at this link”, and expect me to wade through an entire magazine article. Fuck that noise. If someone can’t be bothered to include even the slightest clue as to why they posted a link, I simply skip over their post, because I have found that 90% of the time, it’s some inane shit anyway. I’m just not interested in waiting 5 minutes for your pdf to load just to find out that it’s some irrelevant crap. So you know how to google; well congratu-fucking-lations. Now learn how to write.
If you don’t feel like clicking, it’s the Timecube website. What does it prove? Don’t ask me, I’m just educated stupid. Here’s some goofy commentary on Timecube, and here’s some goofy commentary on a very strange RPG parody of Timecube.
I never click on the links embedded within posts. I figure if the person is too damn lazy to actually write an explanation of what the link contains, then it is probably long winded and really isn’t worth repeating in the first place.
My guess is that the posters in question don’t want to run afoul of copyright laws by C&Ping too much. I agree about the brief summary thing, though, just write it in your own words.
I agree with the OP, and I don’t have any speed/old computer issues. It’s simply because it is annoying. If the quote in question had actually specifically mentioned the movie titles in question, then it becomes a good thing, not an annoyance. I’ve already read about “Gothika”, so I would feel no need to follow that link, but I don’t know anything about “No Contest”, so I may well follow that link to find out more about that movie. But when the text merely says follow this or that, it’s very annoying and not at all helpful.
Well, but that notion is a bit far afield from the point of the OP. I’ve seen plenty of posts that say something like, paraphrased, “If you think that was dumb, take a look at this” or “You should check out this site” or whatever. What’s wrong with saying “the movie Gothika” instead of “this”? Why be coy about what “this” is? You don’t have to explain or summarize all the nuances of the linked article, just tell me what the Hell it’s about.
Should have done your research. Isn’t that what this message board is FOR? Sheesh. :rolleyes:
As a BTW, I wholly agree with the lovely Green Bean. There’s no reason a person can’t say, “If you’re looking for a REALLY horrid movie, check out Ghost In the Machine or Bitches.” Making the hyperlinks “this” or “these” or “this pile of crap” comes off as someone TRYING to be coy, but smacking dead center of “fucking irritating” instead.
To me this issue ties right into another which has been pitted in the past: Uninformative thread titles. The linkswhicharealmostwhollyunhelpful issue is as bad as thread titles like, “I can’t believe this” or “Guess what?”
I agree whole heartedly, their are very few web sites realy worth the visit. So using a teaser link is almost always a dissapointment. Linking to this list of films much worse than 28 days would make sense, since it avoids typing a possibly copywrited list into Straight Dope, and also reveals an aspect of the IMDB site that some may not have seen before.
And regarding the above discussion about summarizing what’s contained in a link–If you can do that, great. But even if you can’t, you can at least tell us what the link goes to. To use the above example: “This article compares the raphopythe and the bathyrimple.” That’s not as helpful as the summary offered by Hammy, but it would be better than a link saying “Look here.”
The worst are the OPs that are just one word, which is a link to something else, and then commentary along the lines of “OMG! Can you believe some people!”
Luckily we have that nice little scroll-over thing that shows the OP now. So if an OP looks like what I described above, I go on to something else.
