Why does Martialtalk have more than one thread?
You seem to be taking me to task for expecting some degree of on-topic content, yet that is MartialTalk's rule, not mine.
No, I'm not. What I'm questioning is your premise that `me too' threads are somehow intrinsically connected to thread drift. The post from you I queried take that as a starting point; I don't think you've made any kind of case for it, though.
Of course not every "me too" derails a thread--it's more a cascade of them that has that effect, as people forget the subject and
react to language (vice content) in the last few light posts--yet there's a reason you recognize "me too" as indicative of a type of post that often waters down a thread even if at other times it's encouraging.
Any response—positive, negative, contentless, contentful—can go off-topic. My experience on MT is that a post with a lot of content is just as likely as a `light' post to derail a thread, because the more `meat' there is to the post, the more issues get put on the table that are very likely to spark a reader's off-topic response. Cite some MA authority on a certain point about kata, and you may very well get a `Yeah, but he also said that blah, blah, blah, which Motobu thought was idiotic' and then you get into this guy's problems with Choki Motobu and now you've reached escape velocity. There's nothing you've said which on the face of it shows that `me too' posts are any more likely to lead to thread drift than any other kind of post, so I just don't follow your argument here.
But if such natural thread drift is not a concern, why are off-topic warnings posted by the staff? The comparison to real-life conversations is exactly wrong. This is a different medium. Here's another wrong comparison: If you bought a book on motorcycle engine repair and on the second page the author drifted off on a tangent to helmet laws and never returned to the stated subject, would you be OK with that?
Wait a second: a manual is on the written page (roughly) what a lecture on a topic is in a verbal channel. You don't expect either a manual or a formal lecture to drift off-topic, because they are both monologue expositions of a certain limited content which the presenter knows, the reader or hearer doesn't and needs to learn about. That's why they've bought the manual or gone to the lecture. MT is a
discussion forum. It has many of the same characteristics as a verbal discussion, because discussions, regardless of their medium, involve a number of interacting voices and perspectives, different interests and emphases, and so on. Two different media, but that difference is irrelevant so far as their common basis in a certain kind of human activity called conversation. You've not given any reason why a hearty `well done' or `me too' or `thanks!' are fine on the verbal channel but unacceptable on the written/electronic channel.
Speaking for myself, it's quite to the contrary. I thought people have made several good points that I hadn't considered. For example, I addressed a few of them
here. I just seem to have a different understanding of what a
discussion forum is than some others.
I'm not sure how this bears on the questions I have about what you're saying. Ella quoted from several posts where people were saying `I agree', in so many words, and then dismissed these posts as `wastes of space'. You followed up with the still stronger claim that such posts were not only `AOLer' products but were off topic, and now you still simply seem to be just
equating them with thread-drift bait. Unless you can show that such post
really do lead to off-topic posts that seriously derail a thread, in a way that any other type of post doesn't, I just don't see the basis for your and Ella's extremely negative judgments about people's agreement posts.
