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04-04-2012, 12:01 PM
#10
Lowengard is offline Lowengard
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Excuses, excuses, Artashes

Actually, I suspect this thread is dead. Nevertheless. . .

Some of the problems that I see--here, and elsewhere--could be lumped together under "ownership" or "curation" issues.

I've noticed that online forum posts frequently fall into one of two styles. They are:
1. I need information.
You (this is a non-specific "you") post a question. Someone answers. Someone else may add to that answer. A third or 4th or 5th person may add more, or may say "Man, you're f*****d, here's the real answer." Frequently, because people read the question but not the existing responses posters# [2-n] may repeat a previous answer as if it is brand-new.

You're not having a conversation, you're playing 5-card draw or maybe Go Fish with miniscule packets of information.

2. Here's something I read or saw that I just gotta share.
Again, no conversation required. Sometimes it's a link to the poster's website, sometimes it's just the forum equivalent of those irritating group emails of cats making coffee, or donkeys with heads where their tails should be. I'd place rants in this category too.

TF seems to be good about discouraging such posts, or else I don't read the groups where they appear. But in many forums--on LinkedIn, for example--they're endemic. And irritating. And conversation stoppers--especially when the number overwhelms both questions and attempts at conversation.

Actually I'm not clueless about why there's so little conversation here. At least among the US participants, there is little school training in debate or argument as a viable conversation form. You're not taught how to nurture your ideas into a sustained exchange, something that takes both thought and time. You're not taught, as a rule, to present ideas in a way that encourages discussion and debate rather than cuts it off. And without a sense that you need to "own" the discussions you start--that if you continue to participate in conversations, add more ideas or comments, summarize the posts others submit or otherwise follow up--you sometimes can engage the lurkers.

Instead, you back off, as Derek did here in his 1 April post, when he said "I was really just trying to be annoying." Or someone announces "everybody's entitled to an opinion" or another anodyne statement that really means "I'm bored with this discussion, already [and you're a jerk if you continue it]." Or you start shouting, or calling your conversant names, as a way to have the last word because the last poster, as everyone knows, wins.

;^)

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