Discussion on:

Five online behaviors that are overused and misapplied

I hear what you are saying about "me too" posts, especially if you initiated the thread and are hoping for an answer.

But "me too" is more often helpful than not, in the Linux forums I frequent, at least.

If someone posts details of a problem, they may actually be missing something, or perhaps they are way off base, mis-attributing a cause to a problem.

Say the person is having problems with wifi, and is blaming the broadcom driver, and I have the same problem, but my hardware is not broadcom. My posting I have the same problem, even if I offer no solution, is helpful. It draws all eyes off a red herring, in this case the problem would not be the broadcom driver.

It also helps in that sometimes one wonders if they are alone with a problem: "is anyone else seeing this?" A "me too" is very helpful in this instance.

Now, I have seen threads where eventually people are zeroing in on the solution, and then a newb chimes in with a hollow "me too." Annoying, at worst. It would make me go to the thread to see what the new post is, a waste of time, but I'd estimate these types of useless posts are less than 5% of the total.

Again, this is regarding some Linux forums I use. I don't do social media, or engage opinion-related discussions, so I have no reference point there. Perhaps useless posts are more prevalent in less technical arenas.

'me too' posts results in the issue rising in importance and eventually one of the senior techs associated with the forum will decide it's now important enough to devote more time to. In short, they help decide priorities based on frequency of user problem.

Would it not be better to have something akin to the "like" button on FB posts, or the + votes here on TR to state that you are experiencing the same issue...that way the issue could be raised in significance w/o the endless thread of "same here" and "me too" posts that make the comments section drag on and on.....

where you can "thank" a poster in a topic, or even rank a particular response in the thread. It just seems to vary depending on the forum software they're using.

if it 'bumps' the topic back to the top of a list or otherwise returns it to the public's attention.

Was trying to figure out why all of a sudden my face was muting my phone. Googled it, found many hits. Spent an hour reading "me too's" before I tripped over a possible answer. Checked one of the links in the answer, which didn't help, and then found many links for the problem, but couldn't find again the one with the possible answer. Argh city. But I do see the other points made below.

You bring up what seems to be an axiom of using the internet to find solutions, if you have a question, searching for it will find hundreds of other people with the same question, but good luck finding an answer.

You have to really sleuth it out, to come up with a way to re-frame your search to avoid all the posts with the 'easy' question, the ones with a lot of "me too" but short on answers.

Of all the misapplied behaviors, I have to agree that I have seen this one by the most. It is as if someone having a heated opinion is only there to cause trouble, or make things worse for the product being debated. I think there are people who have strong opinions, and who might even be called narrow minded that you can't show them a red circle and prove to them it is a red circle. However, that does not make these people trolls, and dismissing them outright as trolls, does not help any online community. I think there are far fewer people that go out to insight a flame war, than we accuse.

I have also seen writers or websites being accused of favoritism cause they are "making money off the ads." These people clearly don't know how little money these ads usually bring in. I am sure the whole 1 cent per click is really swaying the integrity of the article. I think people do this to justify their own beliefs, and feelings on a product. Often the people who have the strongest beliefs on a product have never used the alternative, or didn't like it but can't grip why everyone else doesn't have the same opinion.

Some people like oranges, others like bananas more, an article talking about how great bananas are doesn't diminish the oranges so get over it. (see how I refrained from using apples in that analogy ) We all have opinions, but if we can have more constructive arguments we enable ourselves and others to make better decisions. Dismissing a writer or a poster simply due to "not liking what they said" doesn't add anything to your argument. So put it into words, and support your ideas. You'll get better responses, and might even get some people backing up your point of view as well.

from having it up. I go to a tech site for tech information, not ads - and the ads are most often about garbage that is not what I want to buy or for sale in places several hundred miles to several thousand miles away.

Last time I turned off all my anti-ad protection to see where the ads were tar getting, since most sites target ads to your locale, I had to laugh. At the time my ISP was based in Perth in Western Australia while I'm in rural New South Wales (for those in the US think as if I'm in Atlanta Georgia dn the ISP is in L.A. California) so I got all these Perth ads based solely on my ISPs location. They've since been bought and the new owner has nodes in Sydney and Melbourne, a few times I've checked which nod I'm through and find it various between them, based on which had the lowest usage when I rebooted the ADSL modem and relogged in. That puts any ID location a good six to seven hours drive away from me - say about 700 miles. Other times the ads are for services in the UK and USA - even more ridiculous.

So please, everyone, spare us from ads for anything except what you yourself are selling, as I may be interested in them.

I use Chrome with the No Ads plugin and never see an ad,

where I trained it, so now I only see ads when I turn adblock plus off to see what is happening. But there are times I HAVE to use another computer than my own, and I get all angry about the ads again.

I doubt that TechRepublic would be able to find a good business model for providing all this free technical content. Would you rather pay a subscription fee?

I'd happily pay a small subscription fee to have back the fun community we used to have. But the powers that be higher up have made many changes which I feel are detrimental to the TR community as a whole, and the major increase in ads was but a minor one of the changes.

Y'know . . . I can't find anything worth disagreement in that statement. Hell, even the formatting in my older articles at TR is broken now.

Since CBS decided I didn't qualify to continue writing articles due to an arbitrary bureaucratic detail, all of my articles will be "older" articles soon enough, of course. By then, though, TR might change CSS formatting enough to have broken the formatting in those articles as well.

One that had a good run, a couple of championship years, and several division or regional titles. I picked up great seats before they hit it big, and kept up my season tickets over the years. Then the owners decided to reconstruction the stadium. The finished product resulted in reduced sight lines, long lines at the concessions, and some truly bad plumbing. Many fans understandably left, even though the team was as good as ever. Recent rebuilding has repaired a lot of those problems, but many have moved on to other entertainments.

How's that for beating an analogy to death? Want me to compare computers to cars and their operating systems to engines again? Oh, and I have no objections to the advertising.

except there were no championships, rather 4 lost superbowls in a row

nt

I thought the non-US audience wouldn't get the reference; or the Minnesota Vikings either. Dale Jr, maybe.

many of the stories I read from storiesonline.net (warning it's a marked adult site) are written by US authors and many evolve around sport or have large sport contingents, thus I get to learn a lot about the US sports just by enjoying stories such as Lost and Found by Douglas Fox, of the Defenceman by Cold Creek, or Path to Glory by Brendan Buckley - heaps of such stories; and most US writers always find an opportunity to include their favourite footballs or baseball clubs in them. They cover not only the major league teams but also many college teams like the Penn State Lions and the UTEP Miners etc - and that's for all the way over here in Australia.

I'm not so sure the team is as good as before, for that matter. It's difficult to say for sure, though. Some turdly writers have been sent packing or departed of their own volition, but so have some good writers, and both good and bad writers have been picked up. The very best writers at TR have always been a very small subset, which is normal for basically any venue, but I mostly read articles for those best writers, and as the known-best writers dwindle over time I don't find myself spending a whole lot of time trying to find out whether there are new writers as good as the best that have been lost.

of the highest sort - being that you so frequently show up and comment on my articles.

Of course, sometimes you just can't help but watch Jerry Springer, precisely because it is SO awful, so it might just be that...

I followed Sterling here -- probably *the* best writer on TR right now.

It drives my thoughts to Digg, a site I used to visit frequently. My feeling was that Digg wanted a *different* readership than it had, and that the redesign was intended to drive that migration. I'm not sure if it worked out the way Digg wanted it to or not, but in the end, I think that the Digg reader-base changed significantly.

Just observing from the bench, over here.

I think that, if not initially, digg at least *eventually* started trying to build for itself a docile readership/userbase that would meekly submit to corporate guidance toward the day its readership/userbase would be a valuable commodity, auctioned off to the highest bidders (mostly advertisers).

Wow. It was interesting to read this list, and to realize that not much has been changed since the days when college freshmen got their free accounts and discovered USEnet newsgroups.

The infamous, trademarked "Max Attack", is a good example.There have been others that have stooped so low, even some attacking Max. I generally get a kick out of those as a survivor of a vicious Max Attack-(Trademarked.) Use freely.

Trolls thrive on getting people all worked up. Seems the best way to deal with trolls in general is don't respond to them. Let their obnoxious comment float into oblivion. They'll find another bridge to where they can terrorize the billy goats.

Side note: those of you who do not live in Michigan won't realize it, but "troll" has a different meaning here. Anyone who lives in Michigan's Lower Pennisula can be refered to as a troll (and often is!). That's a reference to the Mackinac Bridge which connects the two separate land masses which define Michigan. ("Don't you cross my bridge, or I'll eat you...") lol.

Nope, I'm a troll. And proud of it! lol

while my father was stationed there in the late '60s. That's when I vowed I would never again live where the highway department owned plows, or where the weather forecasts included the words 'lake effect'. Still, I do support the movement to "Make 'Superior' the 51st State!"

I love the Moderators of forums and chat rooms out there that sit on their gilded ivory pestals and rant and rave about their "freedom of speech". That they can say whatever they want, whenever they want, no matter if they are right or wrong, or who they hurt, or the amount of myopic opinion that they include in their "facts" (no I am NOT referring to anything on this website). And they always seem to toss in the fact "because this is America".
YET, these "paper thin" people are the first to kick you out and ban you if you disagree or try to engage them in honest and intellectual debate and how they just MIGHT be wrong. AGAIN, NOT REFERRING TO THIS WEBSITE.
To these people I have two things to say: "Freedom of Speech" is a two way street; to wave a banner of free speech while silencing opposing views, isn't. And this isn't America, this is the Internet; you shame the view that other people have of "Freedom or Speech" with every person you ban.

The volunteer mods here on TR tend to be a pretty tolerant group. Unless a post is out-and-out spam, contains profanity, or is excessively abusive, we'll usually let it stand, even if we are the target of the disagreement.

Of course, there's a first time for everything.

Okay, this one's been up for 8 hours already.

Deleting in 3...2...1...

I did say that I was in NO WAY referring to this website. I mentioned it twice even. I give high kudoos to almost all Mods for weeding out the mental landfill that the Internet has become. However there are some very self-righteous bad eggs out there.

The emoticons / smileys in Nick's post?

Those things have gotten so overused and divested of real meaning anywhere that I've grown effectively blind to them, so I wouldn't be surprised if the same applies to LordLQQK.

sorry about that

The following post is sarcastic in nature.

to start bracketing my sarcasm with sarcasm.

The previous post was sarcastic in nature.

Haven't they gotten to the point of abused too? In some places it is getting to the point that you have to install plugins to see all these asinine things. Some people actually respond to posts solely using these things, like it is a viable statement. It is getting to the point that I am having to Google some of the more obscure ones just to see what the hell these people are referring to.

When I am searching for information on a topic it pains me to see postings that look more ornate than Rockefeller Center during Christmas. Do we really need goofy little animated turds to indictate the BS that is left behind by junior?

nt

In their place (and sparingly used), emoticons are a useful feature of forum software or a web page. Unfortunately, they are grossly overused, and usually by people who are trying to be "cute" or "avant-garde".