What I mean is, I see a lot of *posters * commenting of this; I’m not really asking why it is bad per se but, rather if a poster’s intent is to post-pad, what does it get them?
Believe me, I’ve posted my share of jokey, silly, inane or throwaways posts and I also understand why mods close threads that have devolved into nothing but those types of posts.
But why the general, negative type of response from other posters over another poster’s thowaway line or quip?
Pull up a chair, boy, and let Granny Bean tell you how it was in the olden days…
When I joined up, post count WAS considered sort of a big deal, at least by many people. I mean, getting to 1000 was a milestone because so few people had anywhere near that many posts. People started threads celebrating their post counts and everything.
Naturally, some people started focusing on the number above all else, and tried to artificially inflate their post count by “post count padding.” Which was (and is) really lame, and caused a lot of board clutter.
So, the answer to what padding “gets” someone is a weird kind of status.
I think there is a lot of leftover negativity toward the practice from the time when it was more prevalent and problematic. I don’t doubt that there are people out there that actually are still doing it to some extent, but I also don’t think that it’s much of a problem.
So, I’m going to guess that when people comment on it, it’s usually just a convenient insut.
Thanks, granny bean, can I go out and play on the lawn?
So, if this status thing was achievable and noteworthy only back in the day, why the general approbation now, if [del]you[/del] [del]old-timers[/del] venerable posters know it doesn’t mean anything either way, and scrappy spouts like me don’t know or care?
People got sick of being judged and making arguments based upon post count. People also got sick of post count parties filling up the boards. Also, there was a time when the servers were a lot slower than they are now, so people started to get impatient with the ratio of signal to noise.
I’m beginning to understand now especially Green Bean’s contribution and yours about parties (ahhhh, the parties I miss) and signal/noise issues.
Would people seriously offer arguments based on their higher post counts and/or rebuttals/refutations based on someone else’s lower count? I’ve seen insults sallied forth re high post counts being signs of no life or dwelling in mom’s basement, but not this.
Not directly. But sort of. There was definitely a clearer divide between “regs” and “newbies,” and people did sometimes have their arguments blown off because they were newbies. And a higher post count was “evidence” of non-newbie-ness.
Like I said above, I think people still say this because it’s a convenient way to denigrate someone else or some types of threads. If someone wants to say that they think that a lot of the chitter-chatter that goes on in MPSIMS is useless and doesn’t contribute to the board as a whole, then they can just make an accusation of post count padding. It doesn’t really make sense, but there you go.
