Why don't you respect the mail threads?!

[Tomasz Rola]

On Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 03:36:08PM -0500, Evan Koblentz via cctalk wrote:
> It's gone meta: people threadjacking a thread about threadjacking.
> Now it's some posters trying to show others who is smartest about
> arcane details of obsolete email software.

Hey, I hope you do not mean that I am showing others who is smartest
or even attacking them. My language might happen to be (perceived by
others as) harsh, because I have barbaric worldview and eat raw meat,
but I am very far from attacking or showing that I am oh so
smart. Well, you will have to take my word on it, because I am not
going to let you open my head :-) .

Otherwise, yes, meta-thread-jacking is interesting - it shows that
people really like to jack everything and there is no escape from
it. This is why I have given up on regulating aspects of the net (say,
breaking threads), at least as long as it depends on other people's
behaviour (of course, they/some will misbehave, no escape) - but, as
soon as the mails come to my hard drive, I can regulate however I
please. So, provided I can program my way around my small bubble, the
problem of threads is a small one (but quite interesting from
algorithm side). Thus I usually do not make much fuss about the issue
(anymore), with exception of breaking threads - they break my own
reading experience _and_ they stay broken in the archive (AFAIK).

Searching the archive, public or personal, which seems to be partly
the motivation behind starting this very subthread - I think it needs
to be done by whole body lookup anyway, so even if some offtopic
discussion starts under "Pictures", the damage is (probably) minimal,
because Subject lines are, to me at least, merely a kind of fuzzy
tags, loosely connected to message bodies. And I think it is ok to
change the Subject of subthread if the message body is too far from
original thread, but keeping it as part of original thread has some
merits, because it shows logical flow of discussion. But, again, this
flow can be recreated with some (yet nonexistent but possible) tools,
so I do not feel the need to have very strong opinion about what other
people should do.

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **