Moderator Consultation: TL; DR threads in Real World

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Fig

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As of writing this post, the Healthcare Debate thread is clocking in toward it's 1150th post.

That's a lot of posts to read for a new poster who may be interested to participate in the debate. At the same time, I don't necessarily see any use in just creating a new thread, as people will go on quoting the old thread and refering to it all over the place.

As such, I'm curious to know whether anybody has any suggestion on way to make our debates more accessible to newcomers, without such scary post counts.
 
Every 50 posts a TL;DR is made for what happened so far.
 
Not sure. I wouldn't think that several smaller threads would be any better.
 
But that's why, I wanted it to be unified. XD

It's hard to search when you have multiple threads on the same subject. =/

Plus...yeah, it's one of my successful threads so I'm a bit biased. XP
 
There's not really much you can do. People will tl;dr after 2 or 3 pages. Then they'll just say what they want to say regardless of whether or not it has been said. Then it just goes around in circles.

This happens with every debate on the internet. There's nothing you can do about it, so it's just a condition you have to accept if you want to enter the questionable world of internet forum debate.
 
Evil Figment said:
As of writing this post, the Healthcare Debate thread is clocking in toward it's 1150th post.

That's a lot of posts to read for a new poster who may be interested to participate in the debate. At the same time, I don't necessarily see any use in just creating a new thread, as people will go on quoting the old thread and refering to it all over the place.
Click to expand...

That never stopped the HGSS Discussion and Wishlist thread.
 
The Kris/Soul debate is another good example. It pretty much went like this:

"I can't believe they scrapped Kris for Soul! Why did they do it?"
"I know it sucks!"
"I think it was because..."
"I think she's just Kris redesigned"
"How could you think that, they look completely different!"

Debate rages on until both side agree to disagree or both just stop posting out of fatigue, then someone who hasn't posted in the thread yet comes along, reads the first post and responds:

"I agree, down with Soul long live Kris!"
"Uhh, no. Soul is just a redesigned version of Kris."
Person/people from previous debate: "No she's not! ..."

Debate resumes. Cycle continues until thread gets locked.
 
The HGSS argument is a very poor argument to bring up wrt me, since I spent the past year campaigning for it to be split a little.
 
I don't see this as a problem; I see it as a sign of healthy debate.

I didn't come in early, I picked up at post 200 or so. And then quit because everyone was talking in circles a few hundred posts later.
 
evkl said:
I don't see this as a problem; I see it as a sign of healthy debate.

I didn't come in early, I picked up at post 200 or so. And then quit because everyone was talking in circles a few hundred posts later.
Click to expand...

Good point. that's why I dropped out of the Kris debate. I called for the debate to end A LOT.
 
Debates just don't end though. Even if someone knows that they're wrong, they'll still continue defending their position out of pride or something. At that point it is no longer a debate, but not quite a flame war.

There is no winning of an internet debate. The best you can hope for is that your opponent actually reads what you write and tries to understand it even if he continues to disagree afterward.
 
Are we starting a debate in a thread asking what we do about long debates?
 
This answers my question; looks like no one has better ideas than I've got, and I haven'T got any good one.

Thanks for the input everyone!
 
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