• Published:May 9th, 2008
• Comments:No Comment
• Category:Message Boards

Earlier this week, Amazon opted to limit the length of a discussion thread. Reading their post, it’s obvious that this wasn’t done on a whim: people were reporting errors when attempting to access threads that were much longer than the software was built to handle. Amazon responded by announcing that they were creating a system that allowed discussions that were growing unwieldy to continue in a new location, with a link back to the previous parts of the conversation. Guess what the first comment was.

Uh-oh.. I hate these stupid long discussions (Thread without a Reason, Holiday Recipes).. but to limit them? Isn’t that a little like supressing freedom of speech?

Yes, that’s right! A company taking a measure that ensures more people get to participate in a discussion with a one-click inconvenience is First Amendment Assault. Then there’s this person, who obviously read the original post several times and weighed their options carefully before jumping in:

Great, we will now lose all the past posts. This is not an acceptable solution.

You know, back in the 30s and 40s there was another wrongheaded person who was all about a solution he was happy with.

Thankfully, “Dieting Deb” (once she reaches her weight loss goal, will she become Maintaining A Weight I’m Happy With Deb?) has a great alternative:

There are much better boards to post on than this one. QVC for instance, and no, you don’t have to watch or purchase from QVC to get into some rather good discussions, especially in the Viewpoints section.

Oh, Deb. Thank you for this.

Thanks to Tipster ADB for this post’s content!