Fundamentally there's a real reluctance to create new topics and I'm not entirely sure why. Someone could probably do a whole Ted talk on the psychology of it.
I'll put it succinctly and be entirely honest about how I feel here - I'd say it's as simple as: people don't want to have other members kick off at them for 'doing it wrong'.
I've seen - many times - someone set up a thread only to be given sarcastic comments in response along the lines of 'there's already a thread for this
', or 'why have you set up a new thread just to say this?
'
Personally, if you'd asked me (before TV Forum's very own version of 'lockdown') about my view on creating a new thread, I'd've told you that I wouldn't dare open up a new thread for this very reason.
I fear this change in advice about threads is very confusing for the members who weren't here to remember the 'good old days' of this forum's creation in the early noughties and have only ever known the large, general, programme-specific threads like the GMB, Loose Women, and This Morning ones.
Spot on. I agree wholeheartedly. It's the usual suspects who jump all over people who dare to create a new thread that are the problem. I may be wrong here, but isn't that what the administrator and moderators are for? Who promoted these thread monitors? If you think a thread is unnecessary, don't post in it to say so and therefore derail it immediately. Use the 'report this post' feature to highlight it to the moderators whose job it is to sort out these things. Or, alternatively, think to yourself 'there are bigger things in life to worry about' and just let it go. Is it really the end of the world if someone creates a bit of a useless thread? It'll disappear before you know it.
Fundamentally there's a real reluctance to create new topics and I'm not entirely sure why. Someone could probably do a whole Ted talk on the psychology of it.
I'll put it succinctly and be entirely honest about how I feel here - I'd say it's as simple as: people don't want to have other members kick off at them for 'doing it wrong'.
I've seen - many times - someone set up a thread only to be given sarcastic comments in response along the lines of 'there's already a thread for this
', or 'why have you set up a new thread just to say this?
'
Personally, if you'd asked me (before TV Forum's very own version of 'lockdown') about my view on creating a new thread, I'd've told you that I wouldn't dare open up a new thread for this very reason.
Forum Etiquette generally dictates that its better to post in an existing thread than to start a new one, but as I've bored everybody with previously in the thread there are reasons not to do this (plus on some forums the answer to the question can be found via the search button and on some forums its preferred to make a new thread, but the general rule unless advised otherwise is to where possible to post in an existing thread). Also it used to be generally accepted practice to lurk for a long while to figure out the culture of the board before you join, but these days, that rarely happens, and once they've seen the Requests forum, patience of lurking goes out the window.
People are too used to the way that Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp work when it comes to the way they lay messages out. Twitter just shows everything as a flat form response to an initial tweet and doesn't "thread" as such, and Whatsapp doesn't have any concept of threads, its just message after message with the occasional quote.
So Joe Public comes to a proper web forum like this, and they haven't a clue how to use it properly, or at least in the way forums are supposed to work. As the rota threads have shown they get treated like its a slow motion chat room.
Sad as it is, things have moved on. Forum etiquette, or even general netiquette, are so 1990s. That's not to say that we can't expect a certain level of respect, decency and coherence from contributors, but most people these days have such busy lives that they aren't likely to spend ages searching forums for answers. And, in many cases, posting a question/topic that might have been done to death before often leads to a brand new, interesting discussion ensuing. Take, for instance, the current September 11th thread. Nineteen years after the event and after countless threads on the same topic over the years, this year's one has been very interesting and is still going.
In terms of posting in an existing thread where possible, yes, do so but use common sense. If there are two threads about GMB having a new split screen, that's ridiculous and the mods should merge them. But it's fine to post another thread about another aspect of GMB to prompt a discussion about that. The mega threads don't help this because they have been seen as mandatory for all discussion about their subject, combined with self-appointed thread police jumping all over anybody who tries to create a new thread.
That's why I think we should probably keep some key mega-threads to mop up very minor discussion points, but work hard to try and create and allow some new threads about more important things a bit more often than we have over the years. With any luck, the mega-threads would then be less important, would sink down the page and in doing so discourage rota talk.