If you don’t care enough about your topic to summarize your opinion, how to do expect others to care enough to respond?
How hard is it to click a link?
That was humour. Don’t worry, it often goes over a few people’s heads.
Obnoxious? Exaggerate much?
Again, my opinion is really only of relevance once someone else has seen the link to counter it.
Agreed.
I don’t see what the problem is, to be honest. I’ve seen threads with a link to some off-site news article and the only text present is a sarcastic quip and an eyeroll emoticon. This baaaaawing is unnecessary. It’s not like the site is swamped with threads linking to videos.
Take this thread. The OP didn’t explain anything at all. Given his post I wouldn’t know what the thread is about. Should I get butthurt because Facebook is blocked at my work or whatever? No. I close the thread, move onto the next one and if I’m really interested I’ll check it out when I get home.
I’m with ivan on this one.
Why should I care enough to click on your link if you don’t care enough to sell it? I am much less likely to participate in a thread that nothing more than a link and an ambiguous “What do you think?” It is just a lazy OP, a desperate plea for attention, akin to a post padding thread.
A plea for attention? Are you real, or what? And if I “post-padded”, my post count would be in the double thousand figure ballpark.
Because even a brief summary of this one, for example, would have told me enough about it to decide “Do I want to waste my time watching it, or not”. I never watched it, for the simple reason that I assumed it was just typical CT nuttyness that I didn’t want to bother with at the time. As it turns out, the people who went to see it confirmed my assumption. But what if I had been wrong and it would have been more interesting than what I spent my time on instead? A brief summary might have told me that. A “watch this and comment” certainly didn’t. It left me with no choice but to make my original assumption.
So, let me get this straight. If I link to a TED talk on human consciousness, and ask if the facts within it are verifiable, my own opinion on the subject matter is as relevant as the contents of the link?
I at least expect you to summarize the facts in question.
A) A summarization of the video is not “your opinion” of it. People have no reason to give a rat’s ass about what’s in your video if they have no idea what’s in the video. If you don’t give a rat’s ass about your own video to even give an outline of it, why should they feel that it’s worth their time either?
B) It’s a discussion. If you’re interested in discussing, then why wouldn’t you say anything about the topic? Generally, only because you don’t want to admit that you’ve bought into teh stupid. Learn to man up. Or, if you watch a video and realize that it’s almost certainly stupid and wrong, but that you aren’t technically knowledgeable enough to point out quite why, then just say as much. “Hey, I saw this video. It says X, Y, and Z. It sounds like stupid conspiracy shit but I don’t know enough to show exactly why it’s stupid.”
I flat out won’t watch a video or follow a link that doesn’t tell me what I am going to see. And not just “youtube video”, I’d like to know if it’s even worth my time.
But I agree there’s no need for moderation. I’ll just ignore the thread and move on. Quite honestly if it’s not worth your time to post at least a little summary, it ain’t worth my time.
In that link this is how you can say it without prejudging:
“In this video X, Y, and Z claims are made. I’ve looked around and while I see X & Y claims have plenty of substance, Z seems to be a bit dubious. The video is X minutes long and the most relevant part starts at ____. Does anyone want to counter the claims in this video?”
If you’ve watched it you can at least be arsed to tell us why you care!
So, if the subject matter is a technical discussion involving terms an OP or poster isn’t even familiar with, they are expected to transcribe the points involved into their own words, yes?
Mr Dribble, I think that when one is at work, one should be working, Sir.
If the OP doesn’t understand the discussion, why the fuck would he (sic) be linking to it? To ask for clarification? Then the OP can state “This is interesting, but I don’t understand X, can someone explain it?”
Oh, wait, that’s saying something about what the link is and what your own reaction to it is, which you’ve ruled out.
My bad.
This, at least, is true. Most of the 9/11 conspiracy nuts that show up here seem to display it as well.
I don’t believe this is true. I’m pretty sure repeated linking to NSFW material without a warning tag (or more prefferably breaking the link) will result in at least a warning.
We do sometimes shut down threads where there’s just a link and a “hey, look at this,” but it’s not common. This is more of an etiquette thing than a moderation issue. Cites are supposed to bolster your arguments, not make them for you, and asking people to watch a long video is kind of a pain compared to a text site they can read in a more leisurely way. It’s something people should keep in mind when trying to start a thread but I don’t think it needs to be a rule.
No big whoop until people respond and ask the OPs opinion and they won’t give it as Czarcasm pointed out. I agree if the OP of those types of threads can’t be bothered to weigh in or at least briefly summarize the thread should be heavily modded. Though not specifically the type of thread mentioned in this OP, the cattle muttes and the (lack of) discussion about UFO’s and the National Security State. vol1 spring to mind regarding this type of behaviour.
This is how I feel on the topic. If there is no summary I’ll just close the thread and move on. If notice a trend of this from a particular poster then I just stop opening any threads they start as it’s just a waste of my time.