Should We Prohibit "Edit: Ninja'ed by ______"?

RadiantPhoenix

RadiantPhoenix

Trudging up the Hill
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I was thinking about the practice of praising posts for being the fastest to respond, and it occurred to me that this might be a bad thing.

I am interested in hearing other people's thoughts on this matter.
 
I see no compelling reason to make work for the moderators by banning the practice described in your thread title.
 
It can contribute to lower quality posting and the gamification of debate in N&P. But in quest and fic threads it should be alright.
 
Clown Bean said:
I'm actually curious if somebody can explain why this is bad? Like I have no real opinion on it, but I'm looking at it and not really seeing the issue?
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The overall argument is:
  1. Ideally, people should think their posts through, and consider them carefully before posting.
  2. Careful consideration takes time.
  3. The more time you take considering your post, the less likely you are to be the first to respond to whatever you are responding to.
  4. Therefore, if people are trying to be the first poster to respond to something, then they will not consider their posts as carefully before posting.
  5. Therefore, trying to be the first poster to respond to something is bad.
  6. When people make the "ninja'ed" comments, they are communicating that the person who posted before them is cool/good because they responded first/fastest.
  7. This encourages people to try to be the first poster to respond to something.
  8. Therefore, the "ninja'ed" comments are encouraging posters to do something bad.
  9. Therefore, people should not make the "ninja'ed" comments.
 
In my opinion, trying to police this sort of stuff is the in the same vein as banning "chan behavior" or thread necromancy. It's not actually a problem considering SV's board culture. These sorts of rules are basically the equivalent of school uniform regulations, frankly.

The practical effect of implementing such a rule is that it would probably generate quite a bunch of additional work for moderation as people report anything that looks like it's toeing the line, when this kind of behaviour is only actually a problem if people are engaging in to an excessive degree. And if that happens it should be enough to hit the specific problem users with a warning and hope that they shape up.

EDIT:

Sufficient Velocity said:
In discussion and debate, we expect a certain threshold level of behavior: we expect honesty, clarity, conciseness and a good-faith willingness to engage with others. That means writing in a way that can be understood; it means not posting enormous, unnecessary walls of text; it means not misleading others about sources; and it means engaging with arguments with the intent of communicating your opinion or presenting facts. If you aren't doing that - whether intentionally or because your posting is of such poor quality - that's a problem.
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My understanding is that contentless posting is effectively covered under Rule 4 already, and that's the underlying problem this suggestion would be trying to discourage, if I understand your chain of logic correctly.
 
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Personally, I just use it as a shorthand for 'someone else made the point I was making in this post before me, but I don't want to delete it'. I really, really struggle to see how it's supposed to encourage bad behaviour- the chain of logic you lay out just feels super tenuous and speculative, and I'm thoroughly unconvinced by it. Hell, you could use exactly the same reasoning to ban people from posting 'X said what I wanted to say' when somebody's posted something they agree with.

It's good to be concerned about potential bad posting practices, but I don't think there's anything to be concerned about here.
 
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RadiantPhoenix said:
When people make the "ninja'ed" comments, they are communicating that the person who posted before them is cool/good because they responded first/fastest.
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That's not what it means though. It means "I'm not a parrot repeating what the previous poster said, it just happened that we answered pretty much at the same time".
 
I use "edit: ninja'd, whoops" and similar as a face-saving sort of edit. If I made the same point as someone else, I'm saying "oh, I didn't mean to repeat something that was already said - at the time that I composed the post, the post above mine didn't exist." I'm not praising the other poster for being fast, I'm just explaining how my seemingly repetitive post came to exist.
 
RadiantPhoenix said:
I was thinking about the practice of praising posts for being the fastest to respond, and it occurred to me that this might be a bad thing.

I am interested in hearing other people's thoughts on this matter.
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At first I thought you were talking about people gloating about their debate opponents being banned by "thanking the mods for responding so fast" in the thread and kinda understood where you were coming from.
RadiantPhoenix said:
The overall argument is:
  1. Ideally, people should think their posts through, and consider them carefully before posting.
  2. Careful consideration takes time.
  3. The more time you take considering your post, the less likely you are to be the first to respond to whatever you are responding to.
  4. Therefore, if people are trying to be the first poster to respond to something, then they will not consider their posts as carefully before posting.
  5. Therefore, trying to be the first poster to respond to something is bad.
  6. When people make the "ninja'ed" comments, they are communicating that the person who posted before them is cool/good because they responded first/fastest.
  7. This encourages people to try to be the first poster to respond to something.
  8. Therefore, the "ninja'ed" comments are encouraging posters to do something bad.
  9. Therefore, people should not make the "ninja'ed" comments.
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................ And then I read the rest of the thread and it turns out you're actually suggesting some crazy idea to ban people from doing the "ninja'd" thing because you think it's some sort of weird-ass performative praising of people for being the fastest to post an explanation or opinion or whatever.
 
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