Outside of posting for inflammatory purposes (IE trolling) I/we very rarely moderate for factuality. I certainly couldn’t be trusted or knowledgeable enough to declare what is or isn’t truth on many of the subjects discussed here.
If we feel that the post was being in presented in bad faith though (again, variant of trolling) then we may step in. Although again, because we suspect it’s ongoing trolling rather than because it’s factually wrong.
Though I certainly appreciate when someone flags a suspicious post where they think this is going on, rather than start putting in accusations outside the Pit!
That’s not the case for me. I don’t like communicating with people; there’s a finite amount of social activity I can tolerate and basically shut down after that.
So my use of this board is mostly reading. I post from time to time when I think I have something worth sharing, but my threshold to do so is high.
So maybe veering off-topic: No, people are just lazy. Half the emails I get are ‘replies’ to some long-since-completed discussion that the sender added a new unrelated question to; rather than use their address book/contact list to start a new thread.
On the gripping hand - when the moon is in the right phase, I love the fascinating connections made by rampant digressions; other days I’m furious when folks won’t stick to the point.
I totally agree. You need to make executive decisions to start a new thread. Is this topic interesting enough to stand on its own? Where should i put it? Do i need to give any background to make the new thread understandable… So most people mostly don’t.
People don’t stay on topic because someone says something that’s more interesting to them than the “topic” (if they even know the topic, it’s not always obvious the way Discourse presents posts to me). So they reply to that interesting thing. And sometimes, the actual topic has been played out. Sometimes, the diversion is just more interesting to several people. I know i get caught up in those sometimes.
Yeah, unless you think the person is trolling, please don’t report posts for being false. If you don’t want to do the work to correct it, you can say something like, “i don’t think that’s true, do you have a cite?”. If the falsehood is itself off-topic, go ahead and report that. Even in MPSIMS, I’ll moderate something that’s off topic and has hijacked the thread. (If it’s an interesting something, I’ll moderate by moving posts to a new thread. If it’s just something that posters feel the need to argue about, I’ll ask posters to drop the subject.)
In IMHO and MPSIMS, I really don’t care about hijacks and I rarely moderate them unless they’re causing some sort of problem.
In P&E and GD, I am ever mindful of the OP and what they wanted to discuss in their thread. I don’t mind organic hijacks that start out of a genuine interest to add context to an offhand, interesting comment. I understand where those come from and will usually allow a certain amount of off-topic discussion before making a mod note to bring the conversation back to the OP. I may even split them off into their own thread.
What gripes my soul are the inane, useless comments that have nothing to do with the original topic and add nothing to the discussion. They almost always derail a thread into Pit territory.
And trust me, we’ve heard the Schroedinger’s, ketchup-on-the-wall, Trump-poop-smell, something-something-all-the-way-down memes enough to last till the death of this Board. Feel free to go nuts with that stuff in the Pit, please. But I don’t know why some posters can’t resist the urge to add these tiresome comments in fora where as hijacks, they are specifically not welcomed. A lack of intellectual rigor, I guess.
One answer to the OP thread headline is that some people post things that they think are funny (they usually aren’t), and are only tangential to the thread. This sort of post can be easy to ignore, but it can also lead to a hijack.
Love it.
(oops – I’m validating a poster’s post, like human beings do, even though my post doesn’t really add new information to the topic. Well, too bad.)
Ah, ok. I apologize – I can be humor-challenged if such a comment is not accompanied by a smiley or an ‘/s’ or some other expression of lightheartedness. I thought you were genuinely irritated by my comments. And yes, all good!
Besides what others have said, one issue is that everything is a mass of interconnected facts and issues; reality isn’t divided neatly into “topics”. That’s just a human convention. So it’s very easy for a thread to wander off topic in just a few posts without the posters meaning to, the conversation sliding down the branching connections of the official topic to other related topics.
It’s one reason why threads so often drift into arguments over things like word definitions and other language issues; language by its nature is always connected to any conversation, and therefore always at least indirectly a subject of interest.
Except that I often wind up really wishing I’d had a chance to say something on the earlier topic; but the conversation’s moved on and it’s become too awkward to do so.
One of the things I really like about this board is that I can take time to think about what I want to say and the topic will still be at least mostly there for me to come back and say it.
I post a lot more replies than I start threads. Is that because I’m lazy?
Answer
HELL YES.
I will often even say, “This is probably worth another topic but I’m too lazy to start one.” And then not go further because I don’t want to start or perpetuate a hijack.
But with a data point of 1, at least, you are correct.
One thing, IMO, is that a lot of people around here are simply unable to resist responding to a pun with another pun. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen a thread I was reading get derailed into a solid 50 consecutive posts of fish puns.
