Would a plane on a treadmill be able to take off?
DISCLAIMER: I am NOT planning to fly anywhere!
Sometimes people want to talk, and sometimes, people want to help. If someone indicates that they are in need of help, but it turns out that they didn’t really need the help, it was a waste of your time.
Tricking people into taking your problem seriously enough to spend time on giving you good advice doesn’t seem like a good reason to me.
People don’t always talk like robots, and often times do use aesthetic parts of language. It could be a segue or another form of conversation starter. It could be that the situation presented is semi-hypothetical, in that there are more details that are either personal or irrelevant, and so the info given is what the poster feels is necessary to answer the question.
I don’t think that any specific rules were broken, really, but I would not consider that tactic to be wise, overall. No warning, an admonishment not to do it again, and thread closed, sounds like an appropriate response to me.
If you only want to answer questions under certain circumstances you should make that known. I don’t think anyone would be that upset if you asked how important the question is, how detailed the answer needs to be, what they’re going to use the answer for etc. We do that all the time here. There’s plenty of time people ask a questions but before answering, some follow up questions are asked.
IMO a poster would be far better off asking that and deciding not to answer than to answer and lashing out at the OP because they felt their time was wasted. Also, it should be said again, no one forced anyone to answer that question, or any of them on this board. No one was getting paid, and now didn’t, no one lost any wages because of this. No time was wasted. A few posters just felt slighted.
If those “certain circumstances” are atypical, then I would agree with you. But if those are the typical circumstances under which people post OPs, then the burden is on the OP to clarify that they’re an exception.
Up until recently (apparently), GQ was the place people were supposed to post if they wanted a factual answer, unless they were seeking legal or medical advice for a specific situation. There has never been a promise that the questions were non-hypothetical, so it’s not reasonable to claim you were tricked if you chose to answer a question from a person who didn’t say it was about a real life situation. On this particular board requests for legal advice don’t belong in GQ anyway.
ISTM that tax advice is often a subset of legal advice.
No one would have been worked up about all this if Anise had stopped back in and said ‘thanks everyone this has been a lot of help’ instead of 'thanks, I’m using this information for…"
The only thing that changed, is you. No one was insulted until they knew that she was using this information for something other than what they assumed she was using it for.
Can anyone really say that this isn’t all because of incorrect assumptions?
And, I’d argue it’s atypical, on an anonymous internet message board, to only want to answer questions in cases where the person asking will only use your answer for things you want them too.
Hence, if you have restrictions for what you want your knowledge used for, lay that out beforehand, don’t get angry afterwords because you feel your time was wasted.
Like I said, just ask what the OP will be doing with the answer. If someone asks a tax or legal question and you only want your answer used for actual, real life, tax or legal issues, ask. It’s not fair to lash out at the OP when you find out they’re using the info for something you deem a waste of time (but maybe isn’t for them).
Yes, it was because of incorrect assumptions.
The incorrect assumption was that she wasn’t wasting their time, and when that incorrect assumption was corrected people got upset.
Of course it is, but that particular poster wasn’t seeking tax advice, because she didn’t actually inherit any land.
I haven’t gone back to the thread or checked in with Anise, what did she do with that information. All I got from it was that it was somehow involved in a plan to get out of a gym membership. I didn’t understand exactly how, but it thread was pretty lacking in details. Maybe you got more info than I did.
You guys are all acting like she tricked you into painting her house while she was at the party next door that you wanted to go to. A few people spent a few minutes giving her some information that she requested. They didn’t have to, they chose to. Later, they found out that the information was being used for something it’s not typically used for.
I guess I don’t understand why that’s such a big deal.
As I’ve mentioned, if you only want to answer questions you deem are important, not a waste of your time and/or you feel the OP will use your knowledge in a way worthy of your help, it’s on you to ask ahead of time so you don’t feel tricked afterwords.
Again, had she not revealed what this information was needed for and simply stopped back in to thank everyone the thread would have fizzled out and that would have been that. She’d have the information she wanted (or needed or used or got help from) and everyone else would have wasted the exact same amount of time.
In my opinion, Colibri, you took a wrong action. It’s irrelevant what the motivation behind the post was. It asked a hypothetical question about a factually answerable question.
Nor do you appear to have posted a valid reason to threaten a warning for her choice of forum. I mean, really, posting this in GQ in the future would justify a warning?? Be serious. And a bit less jack-booted, please.
So, as it turns out she was asking for help lying to the gym? Who would what to help someone with that problem if she had been honest about the lying part?
It’s my understanding that getting out of a gym membership, even legitimately, is extraordinarily difficult. I’ve seen plenty of threads around here about it and tons more across the rest of the internet as well as random news spots where attorney generals had to get involved because it got so bad. The gist of it seems to be that they auto renew the contact or they “cancel” your membership as requested but keep charging you anyways then lie about you ever having canceled. Stopping payment on the charges turns into years of dealing with collections, dings on your credit report or ending up in court.
With how common this appears to be with gyms, I’m surprised they’re so popular.
If Anise’s contract states that you can break it if you’re moving to a place with no gyms within X miles, I can see her wanting to use that as a way to get out of the contract. My guess is that Sweden has no gyms so she’s planning to tell them she’s moving there and wanted some details to back up her story.
Funny thing, when I checked up what happens when people try to break their contract with them, the first thing I found was someone saying that the place they were moving to was 75 miles from the nearest LA Fitness and that they still called that (a 4 hour round trip) close enough.
In fact, googling for how to cancel an LA Fitness membership or even trying to find their contract online yields little more than horror stories of people being charged for months and months after cancelling (and cancelling multiple times).
Just FTR, the “you guys” is incorrect in a post directed at me, as I did not even post in that thread and have no ax to grind here. I happen to agree with the poster(s)’ complaint, though. That’s all.
You guys keep saying the situation is hypothetical, but it doesn’t sound like one to me. The point of asking the question was about a real issue, which she wasted people’s time by not disclosing in the beginning. If they had, they could have given a much more useful answer.
If it were just a hypothetical, I would agree that it shouldn’t be closed. But, since it relates to an action the OP was planning in the real world, I argue it is not a hypothetical, and the OP should have revealed all the information to get the best answer possible.
And then, of course, the question should have been asked in IMHO, where real legal-related advice goes.
But bothers me more is that there was no moderator comment on the phrase “piss poor, utterly dickish behavior”, which is totally out of line with GQ.
Huh? Colibri directly addressed it:
Just because she had an undisclosed motive for asking the question doesn’t mean the question wasn’t hypothetical. She was curious about the answer to the tax question, and her reasons for seeking that information is beside the point. I don’t see why some of you are concerned that there were less complicated ways for her to get out of her gym membership. That’s her business and her problem. I’ve answered GQ questions, and it’s never occurred to me to ask the person upfront to justify their reason for asking so that I can choose whether or not to withhold the information from them.
I can only think of two times that I’ve ever felt slighted on this board (and one I wasn’t even involved in). I don’t recall the who the OPs were in either case.
Once when someone asked about if they should or should not report a gas station over being being handed the wrong about of change. They were off by a few cents, one way or the other, IIRC. There was much discussion, it was later revealed that the OP had already reported them to the state. I was annoyed because it felt like a case of “I already did this, but I need a bunch of people to tell me I’m right” or even worse, a setup for a gotcha if everyone said don’t do that, just to show us all when the state said there was a bunch of fraud going on and the OP picked up on it over a few cents.
The other one was that rabbit case. I don’t recall the details, but a poster asked for money for some sick rabbits, a bunch of people donated money only to reveal later that they not only didn’t need the money, but just didn’t want to dip into their savings. IIRC, this was after Dopers had already started donating money to the OP.
IMO, the thread in question is a bit similar to the first scenario in that people didn’t get quite what they bargained for, but people are reacting to it like the second one, as if they actually got scammed out of something.
I feel more slighted by the way no one is willing to clarify the actual rules of GQ than I would’ve been if I’d participated in the thread. But more to the point, I would also feel slighted if I’d participated in the thread and it had been presented as something that definitely happened only to later reveal that it didn’t, like the way a few people over the years made up stories about their lives for whatever reason only to later to be outed as liars.