Not to be all “logical” or anything, but… well, it’s not like we’re at a dinner party of fixed length, where any ten-second sentence you say takes the place of a ten-second sentence I don’t get to say. Even the trolliest trollies at BB aren’t exactly preventing anyone else from squeezing in their $0.02.
A week or two ago, when we had the BB post about the sexist kids’ books (sexist books for kids, not books for sexist kids), I myself ended up getting in many more comments than I usually do for any given topic. I hope I wasn’t spammy, but sometimes it’s tough when one takes up a complicated, nuanced, and not-instantly-popular opinion. Sometimes such opinions cry out to be defended, and sometimes such defenses take more words than one would normally feel the need to employ. I just checked and there were 230 comments, 32 of which were mine. So I put in nearly 14% of the comments on that article. At a certain point, it triggered the warning for me.
In retrospect, should I have shut up sooner? Was I beating a dead horse? Was I dominating the conversation, or derailing it, or keeping other people from voicing their opinions? I’m curious if anyone here thinks that was the case. As is to be expected when somebody posts a nuanced opinion, somebody else will get all reductive and the temptation is high to reiterate everything said up until that point, but even when one resists that temptation and doesn’t respond to the more obviously logically-challenged yahoos, sometimes it takes a few tries to get one’s point across.
I don’t think an arbitrary automated numerical threshold will reliably denote someone overstaying their time at the podium.
But of course, as a wordy futhermucker when I get my dander up, I would say that.
