Re: Eerie, for sure, but not sf or supernatural horror
Posted by:
Sawfish (IP Logged)
Date: 21 August, 2020 03:25PM
An observation about the notion of "thread focus".
In general I am in favor of sticking closely to a stated topic in a single thread--and especially so if the discussion represents itself as a more formal and systematic exploration--but such are the dynamics of this group that any attempt to steer discussions back to the stated topic is more likely to be the kiss of death for the thread. And I believe that this is because this forum is a de facto *informal* social exchange. A lot like an exclusive 19th C British gentlemen's club, with cigars, port, reminiscences, dry humor, and a lot of "HARRUMPH!"-ing, etc.
What happens is that when asked to clone an emergent topic off to a new thread, it effectively discourages any further new and interesting explorations that may have organically arisen from the discussion as it developed. This may be because the ownership of the new thread is ambiguous and essentially it drops thru the cracks. This is usually caused by the inconvenience of starting a new thread, and taking the time to explain the context of how the new topic emerged. As silly as it sounds, this is often enough to discourage the creation of the cloned thread, and at the same time killing any further off-topic explorations on the original thread.
So I guess I'm proposing that we consider whether allowing that an organic divergence from the stated topic of a thread is proper for the evolved nature of this forum, which I take to be informal, conversational, and to a lesser degree collegial.
Me, I could go either way on this, but I would note that traffic here at ED is pretty sparse and a part of why this is, is a reluctance to diverge from a topic or to make the effort to clone a new thread.
--Sawfish
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"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them...well, I have others."
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