Not infrequently, in my wanderings through this database I come upon a
succulent, lascivious or merely obscure writeup which appears to thus far have avoided being thrust to the prominent place in
the public eye it deserves.
So I use one of my obscenely numerous daily ching!s on it; the writeup gets a fat C! next to it and gets shewn on the frontpage. Usually it starts racking up votes unless my judgement has been amiss (not entirely unusual when I use everything2 sleep-depraved.)
Then I regret it. Why? In my chatterbox, the writer of the writeup will have penned a little thank-you note:
"Dear P_I: Thank you for cooling me!"
Blecch!
Listen up: first off, I did not cool you; I cooled your writeup. (That may be a bit of a hard concept to grasp, so read it a few times if you need to: we are more than the sum of our submissions to the database, scary as that may seem.) The cooling may have occurred because I felt the subject matter was under-represented, perhaps because I felt the writeup was well-writ, or it may even be because I meant to vote you down but my hand slipped on the mouse among dozens of possible other reasons. In most cases, however, my cooling the writeup will have to do with the content of the writeup - I was cooling the writeup, not you.
With that out of the way, let's get to the meat of the matter here: unless I'm applying anti-P_nch_m_dr_ "C!hing of Death" tactics to your words (don't do that), my chinging of your writeup was my way of thanking you for introducing some subjectively worthwhile material into the database. You do the work of writing it up, I thank you by cooling it. If more interaction between us must be had, it would be by far more appropriate for you to tell me "you're welcome" rather than "thank you!" Thanking me for thanking you leaves us drowning in a morass of obsequiety.
If you absolutely must reward me for having benefitted you, direct me to more writeups similar to the one of yours I appeared to have enjoyed.
Please also note: The title of this node is "Please stop thanking me for cooling your writeup", not "Please stop thanking others for cooling your writeup".