It's very disappointing to click on a thread hoping to read something meaningful and find it's just a page of two or three people exchanging desperatingly dull jokes. . . one line posts.
. . .same thing when entering a forum hoping to find new and interesting content and suddenly half the threads were made this guy.
Threads tend to get ruined too after a couple posts when they get hijacked, derailed and cluttered with insipid off-hand comments. . .
Maybe there's one or two interesing posts at the beginning but before people get to take their time to think and reply at the same level the thread moves on to a second or third page of, basically, pure spam. It could be argued that if people wanted to post meaningful content they'd do so in spite of the spam; they'd look for meaningful threads that drop to a second or third page. . . they'd reply to that one convoluted post forgotten back in the first or second page of a thread several pages long in hollow one line posts going back and forth between a few - but, in practice, that's not happening. It seems that once a thread turns into a spamfest people just move on. . . same thing a bit with entire forum sections. One reason for this is a timing issue; it takes a certain time to write a relatively decent post while it takes only a fraction of that time to write 5 random one-line posts; users trying to develop a meaningful discussion just fall behind as they would in some crowded mIRC channel.
Something that takes this beyond any statement somewhat aligned with "freedom of speech" or "content quality is debatable" - beyond any ambiguous ground where it could be deemed torelable - is that the dynamics of this behaviour themselves are downright pernicious:
As it's often a personal, colloquial back and forth between a few users (very few - a clique of sorts); unlike any meaningful discussion - unlike any thread according to what is normally expected from a forum and it's presumed purpose - the content is downright irrelevant for over 90% of the users running into it. A discussion about a topic you are not acquainted with can teach you something or at least has the potential to do so, 5 pages of dull jokes that are only meaningful within the clique throwing them back and forth do not.
Also, unlike any thread any user is entitled not to be interested in, this content - these dynamics - does not stay confined and identifiable under a specific title but appears randomly and degenerates threads other people would have liked to see develope into something more interesting.
This is already very damaging to forums where most people don't have AS and therefore can cope with these extreme (in that they are purely social - cut-throat social - cut-throat social to the exclusion of others and everything else) behaviours more effectively.
All this wouldn't matter if it weren't a public space that is at stake.
Littering, shouting. . . that kind of problems in a sense. . .
21 May 2008, 1:17 am
