Interesting seeing recipes broken out when there’s a potential troll afoot.
Reminds of that goofy scene (which, btw, there was only one of them) in Zardoz, where fey wierdo is mortally cast out of the group as a “renegade”.
So when, why, and how did the recipe thing come about? And curious if other messageboards had* similar expulsion shenanigans, like at the Pork, where I was “fire-drilled” out of.**
At the Giraffe boards, where I’ve submitted a whopping five or so posts under the sobriquet Formerly Robert McNamara - are there any scuttling procedures there, for instance?
*notice past tense, considering SDMB is basically the final messageboard left on the planet?
**all cools…different strokes, as they say.
Somewhere in the not-too-distant past, there was a thread on this very idea. I don’t remember who the idea was credited to, but hopefully someone will be along who does. The practice here does not date back very long. It may be a revival of something that was done years ago (pre-AOL? maybe not even SDMB).
I believe that this is only to be used in the Pit, and it seems to only work when a plurality of participants agree that the discussion is fruitless, either because it was started by a troll, or because a troll has come to dominate it. There have been threads where recipes were attempted but discussion continued.
There has been some discussion about whether this practice stifles discussion. As I mentioned above, those who wish to continue discussing seem to do so, so it is my opinion that it does not.
Since the condition required for the recipe thing to happen is that a majority of the thread participants agree that it’s warranted it can’t happen in just any pit thread.
If it were just a few posters trying to prove a point by doing it in threads where it wasn’t warranted they would just be mocked or ignored and have no real effect on the general flow of the thread.
It’s a relatively common technique on boards that are lightly or unmoderated. Not the posting of recipes, specifically but commandeering the conversation away from the troll’s control.
I don’t consider it threadshitting at all. It’s not about making fun of the participants or the topic. It’s just about not letting a troll control the conversation.
The only way to completely avoid feeding a troll is to not engage with them. But doing so by simply not responding just leaves other people to respond, feeding the troll. Creating a topic that other people would be interesting in discussing gives you a way to pointedly ignore the troll and make them aware you are doing so.
And, so far, at least, it’s seemed to work. This easily trolled board is finally getting people who just get tired of trolling.
I think the “recipe thing” is being misapplied. And some of those threads seem rather silly.
To me, the correct way to use it is if “Trolly McTroll Face” STARTS a thread just to rile people up, or ruins a perfectly good thread others were enjoying.
But if “Joe Doper”, starts a thread ranting about what a sorry sack Trolly McTroll Face is, and then subsequently Troll Face comes in to defend himself (or more likely, dig himself a hole), it doesn’t make sense to me that Joe Doper, or whoever else is piling on to start with the recipe crap.
It’s like: “Dude, you started this stupid thread. Now you want to turn it into a recipe thread? WTF?”
Bill Door was the one who mentioned it as a tactic used back in the early days of the internet. I remember it was used here a while back in a rather ugly pit thread and it worked pretty well for a while, so I gave it a shot in a different troll thread and it worked very nicely.
When we tire of recipes, may I suggest song lyrics or poetry? Idea inspired by a recent thread that has inadvertently wandered into poetry. The poetry is completely unrelated to the thread topic. The recipes are good (I’ve learned some things). Poetry is just for variety.
I remember other similar but mildly different techniques from earlier days on this board. For instance, someone would post “My cat’s breath smells like cat food” and that would get a reply akin to “I keep losing my appetite after I eat”, which would get another reply, turning the thread into the ultimate Mundane Pointless Stuff I Gotta Share and ignoring the troll. I like the recipe thing though, it’s a truly useful redirection of a trolly thread!
I like the idea of song lyrics because then you can use numbers like “Hit the Road, Jack”, “Go Your Own Way”, “Hello/Good-bye”, “See You In September”, “Goodnight, Irene”, etc. (maybe being too obvious, perhaps)
Or keep asking the troll questions about its childhood. (or what kind of recipes it likes)
I’m already looking forward to the thread where a troll is in full rabid rottweiler mode, and when we start asking them about their childhood, they break down and admit “Oh, how did I not see it before? I’ve been attacking strangers on the internet because my dad never came to watch me win that curling trophy!”
That would be horrible…about as horrible as the possibility 0f the earworms presented in some of the Cafe Society threads being real worms that dug into your brain!
Song lyrics may not work, because of copyright concerns. We can only quote a small amount to remain within fair use guidelines. There may also be the same concerns wrt poetic works.
I’m going to start posting subtly wrong recipes. Or maybe not so subtle.
If you come across a cookie recipe and one of the ingredients is Polonium-210, you probably shouldn’t ask the clerks in your local grocery which aisle you can find it in.