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- Exalted Legendary Member
Posted by: dazarobbo
Posted by: CTN 0452 9
I think it does add to a thread, just not as much as a new post.I'm going to take that out of context to make another argument.
Quoting another post adds to the thread, but that's literally what it does it does - it adds a duplicate post that I've likely already read, and therefore takes up unnecessary space on the page that could be filled with somebody else's response.
Now I want someone to explain why this is a good thing for discussion on these forums.
If you want to argue that it's a way of indicating you agree with a post, I wouldn't disagree, but I would say that it's not a good way of expressing your agreement because of the reason above. That being said, I think there are far better ways of still allowing others to "this" a post and do so in manner that it not anywhere near as disruptive as it currently is.
The word "discussion" is used so often on these forums...what are we actually wanting here? We want threads to be worthy of discussion and posts to be contributing to discussion. What does that mean, though?
Honestly, the first reply of this thread is less contributory to "discussion" than a quoted post, in my opinion. In a real-life discussion, you'll have plenty of people who, after an opinion is expressed, will say "Yep" or "I agree" to reinforce the idea that was just presented. Could they elaborate? Sure, but it would be pointless to elaborate unless they actually had something to add. But in a face-to-face conversation, I wouldn't rail on someone for "not contributing to the discussion" when they said "I agree with that" or "good point" or something similar.
I think the idea of contribution has somehow been twisted into the idea that every single post has to offer individual merit and talking points. But I wonder why. After all, that's not how real discussions work. There is no limit on the amount of replies a thread can have. If someone wants to quickly express that they think something is funny, they agree with something, or anything along those lines, they can do so quickly without being verbose and in my opinion it still adds value to the thread.
I agree that perhaps a "like" button or something similar would offer a better way for these responses to be included in the discussion more effectively, but we don't have that, so I think it's fine.