Honestly? I take the position that if a picture is worth a thousand words, a GIF is worth at least 13,486. I curate my GIFs very carefully, and try to avoid using the same one more than once within a short enough time span. I wait for and relish the moment that is made for a specific GIF. I realize that your issue is with the same specific GIF showing up over and over, but in terms of community and regular commenters? That’s just what @Mindysan33 does. I always have this sense that I know the people here. A typical conversation involves a GIF from @Mindysan33, a follow-up GIF from @funruly, @popobawa4u will hold forth in his usual dispassionate tone, while @jerwin will throw in a random but interesting tidbit, @falcor will growl at someone, @othermichael will turn it into a game topic, and I am a pretty reliable doofus who has the perfect GIF of a contestant on Jeopardy making a sassy-snap burning a hole in my pocket.
In other words, I don’t feel like this is turning into Reddit.
Hey, you can tuna piano, but you can’t mackerel a xylophone!
(This was an actual quote from me when I was half-asleep that my girlfriend transcribed for posterity. Apparently I say really goofy shit when I’m really drunk or sliding into unconsciousness.)
And I guess it’s been too long since I posted an overlong personal anecdote sourced from my trailer-park youth and only tangentially relevant to the thread at hand. How soon we are forgotten!
FWIW, I side with Mindy here, though I confess I’ve never quite gotten the meaning of the slurp itself, if there’s any more to it than just a dismissal of an ancient bad-faith argument. But anyway, I love her GIFs nearly as much as I love her lengthier (and always very well-thought-out and beautifully expressed) verbal posts. And that’s a lot!
So let us not hurl any shoes at our more valuable contributors!
But it isn’t a substitute for meaningful or interesting conversation. It’s a substitute for engaging with tedious, repetitive, and bad-faith argumentation, but significantly, while openly recognising it as such.
Posting an image meme (and worse, exactly the same one over and over) is engaging with it, and implicitly encouraging tedious, repetitive, and bad-faith argumentation.
OK, I should have added, ‘because someone should be able say something stupid, wrong-headed, and annoying without being banned or silenced for it.’ And possibly put ‘engaging wordily or at length’.
I don’t see why flagging posts is more effective or leads to a long-term healthier community. Some degree of trolling or honest-but-objectionable posting (or generally a combination of the two if you’re dealing with the New Wave of Misunderstood White Dudes) is inevitable if you want to maintain a decent breadth of opinions. The gif approach is a good indicator that a conversation is going in circles without closing the thread to new opinions of contributions.
It’s also a good response to right-wingers since laughter is like garlic to the majority of them.
So the basic premise is you and your team designed optional tools to nudge online discourse (heh) in a particular manner. But they aren’t always used to the degree you would like.
Hokay, carrot and stick them. If you don’t want people to engage in certain situations, the programmatically incent or discourage the actions you feel are harmful.
if (uploaded-gif IN gif-collection) { error; }
if (user-flags-post) { award-cookie(user); }
There are a million ways, many of which of course already exist. Or accept that some communities are different, and some things will irritate each of us.
Just look at this button. Just look at it.
