You can subscribe to a thread without posting, you know. (Up there, under Thread Tools.)
Yes, I do know. I still think it answers the OP though.
Sometimes it is about a particular sort of smug: If the question is “How should I handle all this credit card debt?”, the answer “Don’t get it in the first place. I didn’t, because I am not a self-indulgent, weak-willed child” is not useful.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but if I did it would be a Boston Terrier.
Sure, but what constitutes overmoderation? Everyone’s going to draw that line in a different spot. Personally I don’t see a mod stepping in and requesting people stay on the subject as overmoderation.
If the thread-wreckers are trolling, that’s not possible. They just move back in and rue wreck the thread when it gets back on track. I’ve seen that quite often too.
Very true! And I think those tend to be the most annoying off topic posts.
I see this a lot.
If you go over to Reddit’s Ask Me Anything (AMA) forum, where celebrities make themselves available alongside other folks offering themselves up for questions. You can scroll for a page or two before the AMA OP person posts - the filler posts from other folks can range all over the place and often (usually??) have nothing to do with the OP except in the most tangential way. It’s just the way it goes online.
When you have this much bandwidth, and limited filters, a whole new approach to conversation has emerged - there are main strings of topic, with countless diversions, tangents, etc. Because folks know that this is how online talking works, they are more likely just to post their $.02 on a whim.
Agreed. But, one difference between online vs. in person interactions is that, in a public forum, if someone asks a “How do I get out of this mess?” kind of question, it may be useful for people to give advice on how not to get into that kind of mess in the first place, for the benefit of others reading the thread.
In this case, it was the point out that not everyone drinks beer, and to joke a bit about that assumption.
Which, of course, completely ruined the discussion for everyone involved. Shame on you. Your only permitted answers were “zu Befehl!” and “Gosh, I don’t know.”
And a duck, because one of both of its feet are the same.
Somewhat related in this thread is a person who obviously knows nothing about the subject but continues to post as if he does.
First post: question about probability
Second post: question is correctly answered with work shown
Third post and far too many after it: person giving wildly incorrect answers acting as though he knows something about the subject
I’m not sure if it was clever trolling or just a clueless buffoon. Either way I’m baffled by the behavior.
There are times that endless babble posted as “answers” gets under my skin as well, but I guess it depends on whether you regard the MB as an encyclopedia, an answers service or an intellectual watering hole.
You really can skip over irrelevant answers unless you have no ability to focus and are distracted by puppies and shiny objects. I’ll concede that a string of irrelevancies tend to doom a thread to permanent irrelevance, but not always and only if the “serious” participants allow themselves to be derailed.
No problem, it just made me think about the situation.
I really do understand that on internet boards there are a variety of posters and there are quite a few that interject humor into the threads. Sometimes absurd, sometimes hilarious. I’m not offended, bothered or upset by people putting in their two cents even when it has absolutely no relevance to the OP. My question was more out of curiosity seeking the motives behind why people would do it. If it’s a case of no impulse control, OK. If someone is just trying to increase their post numbers, that is a rationale that works for them. I know some people who can’t resist interjecting themselves into conversations IRL even when their contribution has absolutely nothing to do with the discussion.
I’ve wondered this before, as well. There was a thread asking for advice on purchasing an item and someone had to chime in with “people actually use those?” Well no, stores stock these items by the thousands on their shelves and no one ever buys them. I just don’t see the point of that kind of post.
Or when someone posts in a thread about a show that they’ve never watched it, again, what’s the point?
Not entirely true. A thread can be wrecked even if the serious posters stay on topic if enough trolls or joksters keep posting in it; if they are prolific, they can overwhelm the on-topic posts to the point where most readers aren’t willing to wade through all the crap to discover the pearls. (And with some of those off-topic posters, I think that’s their point. For whatever reason, they WANT to kill that particular conversation.) When that’s happening, I think it’s appropriate for a mod to step in. OTOH, a couple of off-topic posts in an otherwise on-topic thread are best ignored.
If they are ignored, or mostly ignored, they do not “ruin” the thread. If someone makes a big a fuss about their irrelevance, which develops into a derail, then they ruin it.
I do not think I have ever seen that happen, not on this board anyway. Isolated jokes or even trolls cannot derail a thread. If joke or trollish posts start to outnumber on-topic ones, that almost certainly means that the thread was about to die anyway and the jokesters are actually keeping it alive past its natural span. It is feeding trolls that derails threads.
fart