So I was reading threads in The Lounge today Options

[*mipadi*]

In an unprecedented move, my university canceled classes today, so I came to chill at CreateBlog a bit. I started reading some of the threads in The Lounge, and I noticed that almost all of them open with a potentially interesting story, then culminate in some lame question related tangentially to the story. Following this initial post is a long list of stupid one-phrase answers to these questions.

So my question is, are you the kind of person who can just post something interesting and leave it at that, or do you feel a need to follow up every anecdote with a solicitation for the egocentric thoughts of the readers?

[*disco infiltrator*]

I feel like I'm cheating the public of Createblog without having some sort of direct question that they can respond to. I don't feel as if there will be discussion if there's nothing to answer.

[Smoogrish]

I feel like I'm cheating the public of Createblog without having some sort of direct question that they can respond to. I don't feel as if there will be discussion if there's nothing to answer.

People won't answer if you don't give them a specific question to answer to, you're right.

[*mipadi*]

People won't answer if you don't give them a specific question to answer to, you're right.

So you're not motivated to read or respond to a thread unless it gives you the opportunity to talk about yourself?

I wasn't entirely clear in my first post, but I'm not talking about an interesting post that ends with something like "So what do you think about this?" I'm talking about the endless topics that follow a format like this example:

Today I went to school. Some mean girl slapped me, so I slapped her back. Have you ever slapped anyone in school?

Which is then, of course, followed by about forty people saying some variation of "Yes, I have" or "No, I haven't" or maybe telling a quick but rather boring story.

That seems neither interesting nor engaging. It's just one-phrase responses under the guise of an actual "discussion", but there's never any discussion going on. No one ever actually responds to another post or uses a post to branch to another aspect of the discussion.

A chain of responses to a single narrow question is not a discussion. (Which brings up the point as to why we expect a discussion to follow a single, narrow course—which is quite boring and doesn't add anything new—but that's a different story altogether.)