…doesn’t sound that interesting when you first see the title and so you don’t bother to open it. Then some signficant time later you realise it’s still on the front page and has blown out to several pages but you think “meh, can’t imagine why anyone’s interested” so you don’t click on it. Then some even more significant time after that you realise it’s still on the front page and has even more pages but the title doesn’t sound any more interesting than it did at first so you don’t open it. This process is rinsed, lathered and repeated for some indeterminate period of time until eventually your curiosity overcomes your better judgment and you think “dammit I have to have a look” so you do.*
Any ideas?
*And you find (usually) that it is a dull thread in which a couple of posters are fighting over some arcane issue and have been for so long not even they can remember what exactly the point was, and so you close the page hurriedly and vow that you’ll trust your initial judgement in future and leave such threads alone. Which you do. Until you get tempted and open one again.
For me it would work to call it a “conference candies” thread because whenever I go to a conference there are those candies on the tables and I know that when I start on the candies I can’t stop and they aren’t that nice anyway and they end up leaving you with a bad taste. But then the candies just sit there in arms reach and stare at you and everybody else has them so I get tempted even though I know it never turns out to be a good idea. But I don’t know that my “conference candies” experience is very universal. There must be a more universal analogy.
Plus they’re lollies really but I have to call them “candies” so the 'Mericans know what I’m talking about.
Even though you don’t think your experience is ‘universal’ (to whit, the lollies etc), the analogy you have drawn is indeed one that I reckon most can identify with on one level or another.
So, let Conference Candy threads be the new benchmark by which others are measured!!
Yeah, but they were mostly in the Pit IIRC, whereas Princhester is talking about threads in other forums if I’m reading this correctly. Mind you, Pissing Threads has a certain twang to it that sounds rather apt.
Actually the ones that catch my eye most are in GQ: you see the title and you think “well, I know the answer to that, it’s been asked about sixteen times before, not much to see or to say there”.
Then you eventually notice that what you thought was a dull or simple question has pages and pages of answers and you wonder think “what the #$%% are people still talking about?”
I vote for the pigeon eggs.
just opened that today thinking hhmm surely there are’nt like ten pages of comments on regular pigeon eggs.
I still have resisted the live foaling cam
Ok, i checked out pigeon egg…it’s basically one person babbling on and on about a topic with little or no content from anybody else…basically a hobby blog posing as a thread.
