+1. True, someone new to the board won’t know immediately what Beck’s threads are like, but we expect newbies to take a while to familiarize themselves with board culture; recognizing what type of content a Beck thread in MPSIMS is likely to have is part of that.
There used to be a poster here, who has moved on for reasons I don’t recall, whose thread titles were extremely irritating to me. I hesitate to give a real example because their identity might be recognized and I don’t want to piss on the departed. (I believe the poster was beloved by most; I thought they were a lame attention-seeker, but I’m judgmental that way.) In any case, the thread titles by that poster were absolutely and deliberately the worst sort of click-bait. Made-up example: My daughter was just struck by a car. Then, you’d open the thread and it would turn out the daughter had just seen her first Karmann Ghia and had totally fallen in love with it. Bah! Beck’s title are fine; when I rule the internet it’s the true click-bait I’m going to forbid.
For some, it creates a curiosity. Like calling a short story “The incident”. You might complain, hey that’s a little vague. But I’m sure some people see her titles and think “what’s old Beck up to now?”
As others have tried to explain, it’s not about being “mean” or not, or favoring one poster over another. In general, the rule about informative titles is a good one and helps us decide if we want to read a thread or not, and helps when searching. It’s a good rule and should generally be followed, and those who don’t do so for serious questions or informational threads are not following good practices and should be corrected.
But the majority of Beck’s threads are not like that. The thread about being stopped by the same state trooper a second time is entitled “More bad bad bad Perils of Pauline er, beckdawreck!”. Do you think it should have been titled “Stopped by the same state trooper a second time”? Maybe, but I don’t agree. What is to be gained by the first title? It makes it funnier, that’s what, and by this time most of us knew what to expect from Beck and the “bad bad bad” series had already been established.
Look, one of my favorite humorists is Dave Barry. One of his many books is titled I’ll Mature When I’m Dead. Another is called Boogers Are My Beat. Chelsea Handler had a bestseller called Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea. Do you think all of these books should have been titled A Collection of Funny Stories to properly describe what they are?
If the context is humor, we need to have some whimsy in our lives and not demand that all material necessarily carry literally descriptive titles. You’re taking this much too seriously, although, again, I agree that in the general case the rule about descriptive titles does have a purpose and we should enforce it, or else the site would be chaos. But not unconditionally and in every single case where there’s a reasonable rationale for an exception. My vote is that Beck should continue her delightful practice of bad bad bad threads.
Incidentally, someone upthread mentioned a thread in PE called just “Michelle”. This is an example of a poorly descriptive title, and worse than that, some people got halfway through the thread and still didn’t know who the OP was talking about. I’d agree that an ambiguous title like this is bad practice.
First, you do realize what MPSIMS stands for right?
Second, are you fucking blind?
Whenever I see a thread by Master Wang-Ka, I know that the title doesn’t necessarily tell me what the thread is about, that it won’t be a two-sentence OP, & that I will be at least chuckling if not outright laughing as I read it. Case in point.
My own recent thread intentionally has a clickbaitish headline, & while it does describe what the thread is about it also doesn’t.
In the Boy Scout thread, you’ve gone on, ad naseum
Yet you’re starting a thread calling just out one poster. Where’s your dignity & respect towards Beck?
Why is this so difficult? You lose maybe, maybe ten seconds clicking a post, reading a few sentences, then either continuing or clicking the back button. It takes even less time than that to hover over the title with the mouse pointer, and still less by skipping her posts entirely.
Pretty much how I feel it should be. I prefer, but personally wouldn’t insist on, descriptive titles in other fora. But I think MPSIMS by its very nature should be partially exempt from that rule.
Bear in mind that MSPIMS is the designated forum for breaking news stories. And that many people interact with SDMB principally by using the “New Posts” button to see what threads are active - if you do that, fora are mixed together, so informative thread titles make it much easier to scan what’s of interest.
I don’t like her storytelling or her titles at all but I still think it’s fine for some big leeway in the MPSIMS forum to have goofy non-descriptive titles. It’s the personal and goofing around forum. Take a chill pill, dude.
Seems to me that any poster who hasn’t yet discovered that floating the mouse pointer over the thread title brings up a short preview of the OP contents has no business demanding that everyone else conform to their own level of tech competency. Use the float preview to get an idea of the thread contents because THAT’S WHY IT EXISTS.
Also, it can take several sentences before she gets to the actual subject of the post, making mouseover useless. Most of her titles are virtually interchangeable. Can’t tell which thread is which without opening each one up. It’s not so hard for the OP to add a little more context to the title.
But the subject of the story is clear enough in broad terms for MPSIMS. You know it’s going to be some “quirky” interaction she had in her day to day. Yes, she might get different clicks if she made it clear it was quirky encounter at the DMV rather than Pier 1 but who cares?
I don’t use Tapatalk because if you click into any thread it marks the entire board as read, which fucks over using “new posts” on a computer. And yet, I simply adapt and move on, tailoring my use to my own preference rather than making a big fuss because other people don’t do everything exactly the way I do. Funny how that can actually be useful as a general life strategy.