Guh. The whole situation saddens me. Lots of people whose posts I valued reading and whose personalities I thought contributed going is just not... good. I honestly cannot say I've been glad to read a single one of the "I'm going to be taking a step back" or "I'm going away completely" posts.
I understand where the grievances are coming from. Even if the spamminess is confined to a single thread or group of threads (which it isn't always), the point of those threads (for me, at least) is to build up a more complete idea of who the people on this forum are. People who choose not to participate are inevitably going to get shortchanged on that, because I don't understand them as well and don't have as much a reason to care about them. I know that isn't right, and as much as I try to overcome it, I still find that it's hard to care as much when I can't conceptualize a poster beyond their immediate post and their username and avatar. And it isn't right, either, to insist that they participate in those threads if spam is allowed to clutter them up, because that's totally unrelated to learning about a poster and makes it hard to keep up with what is important. I know all of that is just from my perspective and might not apply to every poster, but I think it might be a real root of the problem that people who dislike those threads see.
So basically, that bias (which is a problem) seems like a necessary result of something I like about this forum compared to others I visit. Which is that I see a lot of posters here as real people, even friends, to a much greater degree than is possible without the sort of avenue the "Things that make you X" threads provide. And I don't see a solution. Which is sad.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9718000 times)