VANITY: Cluttering the Forum with Duplicate Threads

Me | 01/22/2010 | Charles

[CharlesWayneCT]

I'm writing to address a problem of increasing scope -- duplicate threads. Let me be clear: I'm not talking about the rare threads that are blessed by management, and are duplicated because of their critical importance. I'm talking about the everyday duplication of the same story over and over again.

There are several reasons I see for us getting duplicate threads:

1. people thinking they get special credit for being "first to post", so multiple people post a breaking story.
2. people who are too lazy to search
3. People who think they are too important to search.
4. bloggers who think that if they blog an article and post their blog it counts as a "different story"
5. People who want to comment, but feel their comments are lost in a 100+ comment thread, so they find the same story in a different paper and post it as if it is "new".

For these and other reasons, FreeRepublic is being inundated with multiple threads on the same story. While a live thread existed for the Scott Brown election, there were over a half-dozen posts to say he won; another over half-dozen posts saying dems would push health care anyway. There were 6 posts of youtube videos "Hitler reacts to Scott Brown's victory". 8 posts about Pelosi not having the votes to pass the senate plan. Too many posts to count on pelosi using reconciliation. Over a dozen posts on the Supreme court ruling on CFR.

This is BAD, for three reasons:

1. it takes up space and clutters the board. Each thread has a slot, and each page fits a limited number of items, and if the same story is up 6 times, it bumps other things off the front page. Is this why the servers crash? I don't know, but it can't help.
2. it makes duplicative effort. People don't know which thread to use to discuss, discussion happens in multiple threads, so we don't see all of our other freeper comments. Arguments get rehashed, good information gets lost because it's in one thread but another thread ends up taking over the discussion.
3. it makes it near impossible to find information later. You search for some story to find the comment on it you wanted to quote, and you get a dozen hits, and don't know which thread the comments are in.

What good are duplicate threads? i've heard it argued that it helps "get the story out". But that presumes that Freepers aren't smart enough to be able to find stories if they aren't on the front page. Plus, it is self-defeating, because to the degree stories NOT on the front page are lost, posting the same story multiple times bumps more different stories off the front page.

Anyway, we have breaking news sidebar for stories deemed important by the moderators. We don't need to duplicate threads in general to get real important news out.

Are there any good reasons for duplicate threads? Well, the freepathon is a good use of duplicate threads, because it does bring it back up top regularly to remind people. But that is a special case, and as I said, I'm not talking about the rare duplicates made and blessed by the site.

I've been thinking this for a while, but it came to a head in the past few weeks, and was made clearer to me first when I tried to find a couple of posts from 2008 and saw how much easier it was to find things then, when there were fewer duplicate threads, than when I tried to find a comment from a month ago.

So, what can we do about it? Well, I know that at some level, this is a moderator issue. THe moderators could, at any time, lock and even delete duplicate threads. I realise that since they are not doing so, it might mean they are happy with duplicates, and therefore I am at cross-purposes with the powers-that-be.

But I don't think so, I think instead the mods are too busy with more important things.

I think that freepers can police ourselves. If enough of us challenged duplicates, we could put a stop to it.

I had some suggestions of ways we can help:

1. Report all duplicates.
2. DOn't post into duplicates, except to point out it is a duplicate, and provide a link to the place where the major discussion is taking place.

Duplicates are useful to people who post them, because other freepers comment in the duplicates, giving them legitimacy. If we simply ignore the duplicates, especially the blog duplicates where the blog ads no value, we might discourage them.

A special point about blog duplicates. I specifically note blogs that essentially find a video, or an article, post the video or article to their blog, and then link the blog here, adding absolutely no value.

But this really also covers blogs that make cursory comments about single articles. Because in the end, that's what Freepers do when they post an article -- they put the article in the body, and their comments on the article in the 1st comment.

So FreeRepublic does NOT need a blogger to post a link to their blog in order to see the blogger comments. The blogger could simply paste their comments into the comments of the thread discussing the news story, so they would be part of the discussion.

The blogs that are valuable are those that find links to several articles and pull a story together from it, or which are movers and shakers whose opinions are themselves considered newsworthy.

But this isn't a vanity about bloggers, which is why I confined my list above to bloggers who provide no value-add to their posts, and are just trying to generate blog hits for their google ad revenue.

[A.A. Cunningham]

The search is driven by keywords first

Default for search is title not keyword. The searchee can determine whether it is by keyword or title.

[A.A. Cunningham]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1611173/posts?page=48#48

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/879568/posts

[CharlesWayneCT]

On your first link, in my opinion the situation on duplicates in 2006 was nothing like it is today. I don’t think the 4-hour rule works for the majority of freepers, even if it is tolerated by the moderators because they can’t really spend the time policing everything.

That’s why I posted this, to persuade the community to self-police, by giving reasons why reposting stories hurts the community.

Most freepers are trying to help other freepers, and if they just knew what they were doing made things harder, they would take more care.

On your 2nd link, that is why I posted in General/Chat. It’s where Vanities go.

And this is my 2nd Vanity since I joined. I believe that meets the criteria — at the time the Vanity rules were posted, some people were posting several vanities a week.

[Yo-Yo]

Default for search is title not keyword. The searchee can determine whether it is by keyword or title.

Wrong. If you use the search bar in the upper right corner of the main Forum (Latest Articles) page, the default search type is "Keyword."

One then needs to choose "Title" from the pulldown menu.

[fone]

Duplicate threads are on steroids lately...