Don’t check, you anal retentive millions. I don’t actually do this annually. I’ve maybe done 3 times. I will begin with a disclaimer: These are my personal pet peeves. I am not telling anyone to stop doing anything nor do I expect anyone to change any habits that they have. I just feel like venting and I want attention-- I’m a whore that way.
People bitching about how this place has gone downhill. “It never used to be like this!” Bullshit. There is nothing new under The Straight Dope banner. Posters were always mean and nasty in The Pit. Always. We have lived through many, many Moderator and Administrator dust ups. Some much worse than the recent unpleasantness. We’ve had mass leavings. We’ve had larger influxes of new people and we’ve had quiet times. And always-- ALWAYS there are posters who say, “It never used to be like this!” Well, the only real difference is now we have to pay to post-- and that change is now over a year old.
2.The Mobius strip of who can give their opinion. Poster A makes a thread decrying some activity-- board related or not. Posters B, C and D disagrees about the activity being bad. Poster E comes along and says that “the board” is a terrible place where you will get dog piled if you do not tow some mysterious SDMB standard and everyone should shut up and let Poster A post his opinion. Poster B tells Poster E that she should shut up because her opinion is stupid and quite obviously not the right one since so many other posters agree with her. Poster F says that newbies/gays/tap dancers/Republicans/Libertarians/Democrats can never post their opinions without getting gagged. . .
This can go on for 6 pages without anybody noticing the irony.
3.All those goddamned NYC threads in IMHO.
4.Going into somebody’s “I LOVE this band/TV show/book/ pantyliner” thread in Cafe Society just to say how much that thing sucks. Yeah, I know I just said that everyone is entitled to their opinion a couple of numbers up-- but there is no need to shit in somebody else’s thread just to show how cool and/or unconventional you are.
Spelling Nazis. Because I can’t spell and they make me look and feel bad. Poo on you.
6.How nobody pays attention to me. I’m such a lonely whore.
This mainly happens in Great Debates, but I’ve run across it in the pit too.
8)dismissing a cite simply because it comes from a “liberal” or “conservative” web site. It’s fucking lazy and idiotic. If somebody posts something, I don’t give a shit if it comes from Bushpunchers.org or werapeliberals.edu. Read the fucking cite and point out the flaws if there are any.
I hate refering to people as letters instead of names. Especially if there are more than two characters to keep track of. My head hurts from trying to parse the Mobius point.
once, years ago, some one demanded a cite for a specific piece of data (IIRC, state by state policy wrt felons voting). I posted the cite that presented the data in the easiest format . Unfortunately it was from something ilke “socialist republic.org” and got lambasted for it. the data was accurate. but folks probably didn’t even click on it, just hovered and joked.
I didn’t read the entire thread, so this might have already been said, but here’s my 2 cents anyway, since everyone is so desperate for my opinion that I simply must share it immediately regardless of whether it has already been discussed for three pages and the thread has long since moved on, but…
…I can’t believe that no one has already mentioned people bitching about how this place has gone downhill. “It never used to be like this!” Bullshit. There is nothing new under The Straight Dope banner. Posters were always mean and nasty in The Pit. Always. We have lived through many, many Moderator and Administrator dust ups. Some much worse than the recent unpleasantness. We’ve had mass leavings. We’ve had larger influxes of new people and we’ve had quiet times. And always-- ALWAYS there are posters who say, “It never used to be like this!” Well, the only real difference is now we have to pay to post-- and that change is now over a year old.
GAH!!! I hate that. It’s not even that they didn’t read and decided to respond. Those people just look a little clueless. But that they actually *tell * you that they they didn’t feel like reading “Hi! I’m a lazy asshole and I’m here to tell you. . .”
Spelling Nazis. Because I can’t spell and they make me look and feel bad. Poo on you.
[joking]You invoke Godwin’s Law in a pet peeve thread? Are you aware that the Nazi’s killed millions of jews and were responsible for the deaths of millions of others?
Who do you think you are? A Senator from Illinois?[/joking]
In an IMHO thread where the OP askes for “your favorite ____” or “Most important ___________” or “Most interesting ____________” and people post a list of 20 things. Putting down everything you can think of that vaguely fits the catagory defeats both your purpose and the purpose of the thread! Things that don’t really apply or that are in no way superlative dilute the impact of things that are, and if the point is to have the longest, most attention getting entry, I’ve found that in threads like that I pay the least attention to the long threads because there is likely to be a lot of filler and no more real insight.
