Discobot’s not that bad. If you shave his head, there’s probably just a tattoo saying “Eat your vegetables. Say your prayers. Remember to vote.”
I know, right?
discobot, is that true?
@discobot fortune
Better not tell you now
Hmmmm, well that doesn’t instill confidence.
That’s just because he’s thinking of running for office. If he lets everyone know they should eat their vegetables, Trump will unleash the power and prestige of Big Burger.
In fact, politics explains both why he never answers a question and his predilection for 1d1s (black and white thinking).
*black and black
I got annoyed when it butted in and said I’d posted too many times too close together in a thread and then (IIRC) wouldn’t let me post until a few others had. I haven’t seen that recently though. I don’t know if it’s because I haven’t tripped its algorithms or if someone turned that little “feature” off.
I ran into that a day or so ago.
Well, bugger. Too bad.
I’ve seen that multiple times, but it’s never stopped the post. I just either ignore it and hit reply anyway, or if I want to see the preview window (which the scolding post covers) there’s an x in the corner of the scold which closes the scolding window.
So I’d put it in the “mildly annoying” category. If it actually prevented posting, that would be a serious problem; but it doesn’t – unless something entirely different is for some reason happening for other people.
It will also complain if you respond to the same person too many times. What’s annoying/disturbing is the nannyish philosophy that put it in place to begin with.
On the other hand, I’ve seen plenty of threads in the vBulletin days that amounted to a two-way back-and-forth conversation or argument. I usually stopped reading the thread once that happened. So the idea of something that points out you might be monopolizing things is not a bad one.
If the thread turns into two people (or for that matter multiple people) going back and forth over and over the same ground, that’s a problem. But if the thread’s mostly two people working out something interesting, why shouldn’t they?
And the thing is – in an IRL conversation, one person talking really does make it difficult for others to say anything. They have to either interrupt, or try to talk over the other person, or just stay quiet; because two people talking out loud at once is difficult for most people to follow, and five or six people talking out loud at once is impossible for pretty much anybody to follow.
But one person posting doesn’t prevent anybody else from posting. And even if multiple people post simultaneously, the posts don’t show up as a batch of type covered by and/or mixed with other batches of type – the posts still show up separately. So no matter how much one person posts in a thread, other people can still post, and still be read.
I think problems more often occur when multiple people all go off down the same sidetrack; and I don’t think discobot has been warning against that, or plausibly could do so.
Celebrating several weeks without a Discobot post. What are the chances?
@discobot roll 1000d1
I only have 20 dice. Shameful, I know!
1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1
Am I imagining things? It seems that discobot sometimes responds even when his name is mentioned without putting @ at the beginning of it. I didn’t know that was supposed to happen.
discobot whisperers know its secret.
Of course, as only one or two posts have mentioned, the problem with discobot is not in the occasional posts that appear in threads (which supposedly only happen when someone asks for them), but with the disco-nanny interventions about similar posts, non-grammatical sentences, too many consecutive posts, and the other intrusive stuff like that. It’s not about the silly quotes, magic 8-ball fortunes or random drunk walks.