Personally,
I'm really sick of people telling me what I can't node. Yes, yes
GTKY nodes such as "My favorite color" or "I walked across the street" are totally pointless, but there's lots of GTKY nodes that are funny, insightful, or overall just
good. For instance:
damnit, I am so sick of reading about other noders enjoying human companionship
I have asked my library to ban a book
My female offspring shall remain chaste until menopause
yom kippur and this gentile
I often wonder if I am closer to reality simply for being poorer
When you tell a friend you love her and she says, lets just be friends
movies that make you want to cry alone in a dark room for hours
The Dumbest Things I Heard In High School
Sean Connery encounter
odd characters: The Boy Who Cried Censorship
Tell me why you're an idiot
There Was a Customer Today
When the aliens attack my workplace, I'm going to be so damn READY
Those are all great nodes, but some border that GTKY line. Some
gods I've noticed simply say "GTKY" and
nuke it, when the only thing that really makes it GTKY is that it's written in first person. Another
taboo on E2 that started out well-intentioned but has turned into feverish and blind disgust is
copy+paste write-ups. I'm lazy and don't really feel right paraphrasing other's facts. For instance, several of the the
CIA World Factbook nodes were downvoted on and I had several /msgs about them being copy+paste writeups.
Why?
I didn't just simply copy+paste them and stumbit; I worked hard getting the HTML right and adding useful hardlinks. What use would it be if I put it into paragraph form rather than the list it's in? It'd simply be harder to read and more work for me, besides-
facts are facts, I'm not taking credit for that. The final catchphrase that's being spread around is "
an empty nodeshell is better than a bland writeup".
BS. After writing a guide on how to make a DivX rip I checked some of my hardlinks, one of them,
MPEG4, had nothing in it. I'm not an expert at all with it, but I felt that
anything is better than nothing. I even added this message after it was downvoted- that if someone else had more information they should post a writeup and I'll nuke mine. Instead people just downvoted it into the ground until it was nuked (now's a good time to note that in all of the 30 or so writeups I've had nuked, not once did I get a /msg and only TWICE have I got /msged for being downvoted). Either way, if someone knows nothing about MPEG4 and looks it up, I alteast gave them some basic introductory information on what it is. A nodeshell doesn't do this. Then there's some nodes that you can't write much more than one line on, like
whotf- a term that was really popular in some
online games (as in "whotf was supposed to guard the flag!?!!"). What else is there to say other than it stands for "Who the fuck"?
It'd just be nice to remind some people why exactly these
"rules" came into practice and they're not to be blindly followed. Who cares if it's copy+pasted, GTKY, or just a short sentence- as long as it is just plain good or is just better than nothing.