Political debate in the Intel thread
fingolfen writes:
"What I have to keep asking myself is... is this the appropriate forum for a partisan political debate. The answer I keep coming to is NO! Unless it relates to Intel the company or Intel's stock price, I don't see the usefulness of engaging in political debate here..."
I completely agree. Finding interesting messages within the "Intel" thread is difficult. I logged in Sunday night to find 115 new additions to the Intel thread, most of them either political or "is so! is not! is so! is not!" back-and-forth. I gave up on trying to wade through them.
With SI's very primitive "threading" capabilities, where basically all 135,000 Intel messages are in this gigantic "thread," and where subject lines are just whatever the first line of the message is (e.g., "Hey, Paul, like, Intel sucks!"), it's very hard to have coherent discussions of _anything_.
It's tough to wade through all of the Bush-bashing, Clinton-bashing, Gore-bashing, Reagan-bashing, energy policy-bashing, Monica-bashing, Democrat-bashing, California-bashing, Republican-bashing, gas guzzler-bashing, tree hugger-bashing, and bashing in general...to get to the true meat of this thread: AMD-bashing vs. Intel-bashing.
(I'm being facetious. Most of the Intel-bashing vs. AMD-bashing is pointless. Comparisons of mistakes and successes of each company are of course useful, but not just "mine good, yours bad" posturings. Personally, I hope Intel does well. Because I have most of my assets in Intel, for historical reasons. But I also acknowledge that AMD is a solid company in many ways, and their Athlon certainly is providing solid competition to Intel. Bashing them for the sake of bashing them seems utterly pointless. As some of you know, I use Macintoshes, so I have the best of all worlds: the Mac OS and Intel stock!)
A year or so ago when I returned to reading SI, I was surprised to see so little use made of the ability to start new threads by simply _creating_ them. Instead, the number of messages in the "Intel" thread was, then, a shockingly large 105,000. Now, it's around 135,000.
Of course, the reason is that the "Intel" thread, along with the "Moderated AMD" thread and the "RAMBUS, Penguin or Eagle?" threads, are effectively the "watering holes" of this group of people. (A few other common ones are the George Bush thread, and so on.)
If there _are_ other Intel threads, which there are, they are usually bereft of traffic and not known to people unless they look carefully. This is like the Schelling Point analysis from game theory: that certain popular spots, like watering holes, will gain in popularity at the expense of other spots. The lack of cross-posting into other threads is also a factor, as people don't even see the possibility of posting to those other threads. (I could, for example, post this message to some new thread such as "Intel, non-political," but none of you would see it and there would be no responses. So I add it to the 135,000 messages already here in this mega-thread.
In effect, certain threads become the equivalent of "news groups" on Usenet. Instead of the "comp.sys.rambus" of Usenet we get "RAMBUS, Penguin or Eagle?"
So be it. . But it's then a pity that there are no good tools to threadify discussions within these "mega-threads" like "Intel" or "Penguin or Eagle?"
Descriptive message titles would help. Caterwauling about Bush vs. Clinton or gas guzzlers or Colorado vs. California just confuses things vis-a-vis Intel.
My two dollars.
--Tim May |
