- Joined
- Oct 13, 2014
I wrote this in August in jest
Everybody would stand to benefit from an enforced short-titles policy at this point. There's a sense of competition with other threads for attention, so everyone is attempting to make the titles more elaborate to hook the reader, but the fact that every thread is set up this way dilutes the effect to the point that there is no benefit to any thread compared to if they all had simple titles. The average KF veteran's brain will not light up when it sees the words "pedophile" or "dogfucker" in a title because the terms are bandied around liberally enough that they've become mundane and boring.
I could liken it kind of sort of to the end of tobacco advertising on TV in the 1970s. After the end of cigarette advertising, the cigarette companies really saw no losses since they were all more or less pouring thousands of dollars into ads to get even with one another and actually stood to gain because they no longer had to spend so many shekels just to be on level ground.
To exemplify this I can bring up the Tumblr subforum right now because the Tumblr subforum is both a part of the site I don't go to that much and a section where thread title cancer has progressed to stage 4.
That's a lot of new stuff for me to look at, right? When I'm presented with all this information at once I am not going to read all the titles individually so I can really absorb what all the blue letters are trying to tell me; I'm going to read multiple ones at once laterally in a grasping attempt to figure out what to click on, so what I can read the most quickly has the advantage. CatParty's threads stand out to me most of all because 1) they are short and simple and 2) they appear in a block, so they're the ones that catch my eye first.
"StraySheep II : The Return of the Tranny Spudking Sperglord Who Tried to Delete Her Thread" isn't something I'm going to read completely if I'm glancing at this huge wall with my glassy-eyed autistic stare and giving each individual thread less than a second of attention. I'll probably just read some of the words at the beginning and the middle and move on. "_____ Return of _____ Spudking ____________." In this case I would rather scroll down the list and look for something else than to try to puzzle out what it means or potentially invest 30 minutes in a thread that may be boring.
It seems to have been become increasingly less exaggerated as time goes on.
Everybody would stand to benefit from an enforced short-titles policy at this point. There's a sense of competition with other threads for attention, so everyone is attempting to make the titles more elaborate to hook the reader, but the fact that every thread is set up this way dilutes the effect to the point that there is no benefit to any thread compared to if they all had simple titles. The average KF veteran's brain will not light up when it sees the words "pedophile" or "dogfucker" in a title because the terms are bandied around liberally enough that they've become mundane and boring.
I could liken it kind of sort of to the end of tobacco advertising on TV in the 1970s. After the end of cigarette advertising, the cigarette companies really saw no losses since they were all more or less pouring thousands of dollars into ads to get even with one another and actually stood to gain because they no longer had to spend so many shekels just to be on level ground.
To exemplify this I can bring up the Tumblr subforum right now because the Tumblr subforum is both a part of the site I don't go to that much and a section where thread title cancer has progressed to stage 4.
That's a lot of new stuff for me to look at, right? When I'm presented with all this information at once I am not going to read all the titles individually so I can really absorb what all the blue letters are trying to tell me; I'm going to read multiple ones at once laterally in a grasping attempt to figure out what to click on, so what I can read the most quickly has the advantage. CatParty's threads stand out to me most of all because 1) they are short and simple and 2) they appear in a block, so they're the ones that catch my eye first.
"StraySheep II : The Return of the Tranny Spudking Sperglord Who Tried to Delete Her Thread" isn't something I'm going to read completely if I'm glancing at this huge wall with my glassy-eyed autistic stare and giving each individual thread less than a second of attention. I'll probably just read some of the words at the beginning and the middle and move on. "_____ Return of _____ Spudking ____________." In this case I would rather scroll down the list and look for something else than to try to puzzle out what it means or potentially invest 30 minutes in a thread that may be boring.
