I don’t actually do this, unless I’ve been following the thread from the beginning. Mostly, with long threads, I doubt I’m going to have anything new to add so I don’t go into it.
Occasionally I will start with a new thread and drop it after 20 or 50 posts, because it seems to have been answered (or I lose interest because it doesn’t seem worth pursuing). Then, some days later I will notice it has grown to 1000 posts and I think to myself “what can they still be talking about?” and so I read the last 30 or so posts, which I think should catch me up pretty well. Usually, either the thread will have segued any number of times and is now about something fairly different, or else there is one or more stubborn poster who is having fruitless arguments with other posters and both sides won’t give up or back down and have to have the last word. These are often the usual suspects. If I do jump into a thread in this way, that is still interesting, I try to start with a clarifying question rather than a statement. In these cases, I don’t mind being pointed to earlier posts that I missed.
I’ll read about the first 10 or 15 posts and the most recent 10 or 15 posts more thoroughly than I’ll read the ones in the middle, if there’s a lot in the middle. I will, again, try to at least skim all the ones in the middle – though if they’re more than a couple of years old, and/or if they seem to be mostly a couple of people arguing with each other, they’ll be skimmed quite fast.
Skipping the middle entirely not only risks missing that the particular thing I was going to bring up was dealt with quite thoroughly in posts 57 through 62, 312 through 320, 502 through 530, and 712 through 745 of a 923 post thread; but also risks missing that there was a moderator note to shut up about it already at post 750.
Tip: Doing a quick search on any thread with the search term, “moderating,” should bring up almost any mod note in a thread. It’s one of the reasons we try to use the same term. It makes it easy to find the mod notes in any thread.
Whether or not there is gatekeeping, I will always ignore a long thread. If there are thousands of posts, fuck it. I do think that jumping in without reading is being an asshole, and I won’t do it. I’m also not going to read something for hours. So no, long threads I haven’t read yet are just not going to be anything I participate in.
Nor will I participate in threads that generate hundreds of posts in an hour. Partially it’s because it’s too much trouble to keep up, but also because 9 times out of 10 it’s because there are a couple people bickering with each other and trying to participate is like trying to get in the middle of a family squabble.
Yeah, I mean threads like “I Pit Zionism” that only serve one purpose; and that’s to keep that useless circular complainfest out of threads that might have a potential for some kind of real discussion.
I agree with this. But just how is it gatekeeping? Insisting that somebody cannot wear a band t-shirt unless they own all their albums and have every song memorized is definitely gatekeeping. If people are having a discussion on a movie, requing everynody who participates to have actually watched the entire movie at least once is NOT gatekeeping.
I try to be an LGBTQ+ ally. I have not posted in The Republicans War Ongoing War On Trans People thread even once. By the time I saw that thread, it was incredibly long. I post in any thread thread I see about LGBTQ+ rights. But that one was so very long. I did not want to post without reading the whole thing first. I did not want to read the whole thing.
I often avoid very long threads, it threads that have a hundred new posts since i last posted.
That was one thing i liked better about vbulletin. It was fairly easy to browse a page and flip to the next page. It’s much harder for me to go with with infinite scroll. So my threshold for “i can’t keep up” is much smaller than it used to be.
For me, it depends on the thread subject, and also on how old it is relative to the currency of the subject matter, not on the length of the thread. In principle, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with long threads. Read the first dozen or so posts to understand what it’s about, read the last dozen or so posts to understand what it’s become, if different, and if you have something to add to a rapidly moving thread like major breaking news, and it’s not in the last one or two dozen posts, at least check the timestamps and the recency of your news to see if it’s really new.
The same applies to a long but slow-moving thread like something that’s been resurrected about a new scientific advancement. What’s the date of the OP? What’s the content of the first dozen posts? What’s the content of the last dozen? Is your exciting new information recent enough and relevant enough to be worth adding?
There’s nothing inherently wrong with long threads, IMHO, and we have many of them, including threads that are in at least their third generation, having at least twice blown through the 10,000 post limit, and still they live! Furthermore, many of the posters in these long threads have been there since the beginning – they may not necessarily have read every single one of 30,000 posts, but they have a pretty good idea of what’s going on.
So I’d oppose the idea that in general, long threads should be discouraged. In some specific cases, sure. But in general, no.
If it’s something like, “What is your favorite ice cream flavor,” I would be fine with giving my opinion. Because it’s not like I need context to talk about ice cream.
That kind of thread I have less of a problem jumping into without reading the whole thing, because it constantly features new information. If I want to respond to a current event, I may read back a few days just to get the zeitgeist of the thread, but so long as I stick to specifics and don’t go off on philosophical tangents, there’s no need to read it all from the beginning.
“The zeitgeist” of the thread is a good way to put it. If I log in and see that a thread in which I was interested has gone 56 or 74 or 103 posts since I last logged in, I’m not going to plow through all the posts. I’ll look at a few from where I left off, then skip to the end, look a few above, and comment if I feel the need. Always sticking to the topic, of course, as far as I can.
Heh. I recently posted a thread looking for ideas about making sugar-free cheesecake. I know that there are helpful people around here, which is why I posted the thread; but there are also this sort, which is why I added what I hope was a gently snarky note:
While I fully agree w your point there is a counter-point.
Commonly called “The XY problem”, although that’s a crappy name IMO.
It goes like this:
Someone wants to accomplish X. They decide Y is the way to do that, or they come up with a method where Y is an essential step. But they don’t know how to do Y. So they post a question that amounts to “How do I do Y?” with no mention of X.
When in fact their idea to use Y is forced, convoluted, or generally stupid and there are much better ways to accomplish X that don’t involve Y at all.
Typically over the course of the back-and-forth about solving Y eventually they reveal that Y is only in the service of X and then we can begin to address the question they actually had: how to best accomplish X.
Your case wasn’t a true example of XY, but it’s hovering somewhere nearby.
I use it a lot when searching long threads to see what moderation has already occurred.