Thread Hopping

I do get annoyed when someone just drops a comment and leaves, expecting people to read the comment while refusing to read theirs, but there's nothing I can do about it. I do think that it's unreasonable to mandate reading every thread, and it's not enforceable.

People just need to have good sense of involved discussions when they come to these threads. As long as they understand the topic and can tell whether the response is in line with the ongoing conversation (and indicate it if it isn't), I think it's fine. It's a good tradition in these forums to indicate a threadhop, quoting the target of response or specifying where the response is directed. If a post clearly stating that it's a threadhop has points that has already been gone over, the others can politely re-quote the relevant responses or direct to them and continue on.

But if there are split conversations in a single thread and they persist, then the people should try to merge them with each other.

edited 26th Sep '11 10:54:52 AM by abstractematics

I thread hop based on length and the quality of conversation. I'll read some pretty long threads as long as I don't get too annoyed by the current direction of conversation, but I usually quit once I run into something I feel isn't terribly relevant/gets into an inane or otherwise uninteresting back-and-forth.

The other time I thread hop is when I know some fact or discovery that pertains to the subject, and leave that info as a "x has since been proven false" or something like that. Probably hop into that discussion properly once I read it.

And sometimes you just don't have clue what's talked about. Go to CERN thread and try to figure out what last 5 pages just said. So you rather just jump ahead, admit you have no clue what's talked and live happily.