sig appends

[sartorias]

Okay, here's a Net question.

I just did a LiveJournal read a little while ago, while drinking my tea. As it happens, some of my reading list overlaps with someone I don't know--I'm not on their list or they on mine. But they'd obviously been doing a run just before me because I encountered three comments in a row, basically like this:

ONE:

I

Comments

[zeborahnz]

The content of their post is more important. If they sound like an interesting person - and this generally takes a lot more than one post - then I might want to know more and can follow the sig. OTOH on LJ I could also go to their profile and follow links from there so I don't know if there's any advantage.

[sartorias]

Yeah, me too . . . I'm wondering if the idea situation is to append the sig after a substantive comment or post, rather than every single one. But maybe spread spectrum works better. That's why I threw the question out there.

[dichroic]

I'd be OK with a .sig after every post, even, if it's a one-liner. Something like:

Ima Writer (my writing blog link)

If the comment is interesting enough, I don't *need* to know about the awards, etc to want to click over.

[jimhines]

Yep. It would have to be a much more substantial and interesting comment than any of those for me to pay the slightest attention.

When your sig file is six times as long as your comment, that's a bad sign. When you're so blatantly posting empty comments in order to get your sig file out there, that feels like spam to me.

[shana]

I have followed up people who make excellent comments, and friended some of them because I liked what they wrote.

If they were writers, I would look at the reviews of their books and request them from the library if they looked like something I would like. Or buy them for my library if they looked like something our patrons would like even if it wasn't my cup of tea.

But as far as I'm concerned, sigs belong on Usenet, not livejournal.

[klgaffney]

this.

admittedly, i tend to even find that people that sign every comment with their name mildly annoying.
+1000 for annoying if that sig is the same as their user.

sigs that are that obtrusive, i consider an extremely tacky form of spam. ew.

[sartorias]

With Google as easy as it is, my thought is, username plus an identifiable name if one wants advertizing--CATPRINCESS (Ima Writer)--would be enough, but I see enough sigs that I wondered if they really work, and I was totally missing a substrata of communication.

[klgaffney]

*ponders* hm. i can't imagine them being terribly effective--at least not as far as book advertising goes. they may get a few bites, but then i'd wonder how many more potential sales they may have driven off by the constant heavy barrage; especially when there's an actual thread involved, and there's sig in each and every single comment. arrrrgh.

[dancinghorse]

No. But you could turn those sigs into a story that would rival the one that was all footnotes.

[sartorias]

Heh!

(As I was making it up, I thought, I would actually read a short story called "When Cats are Floons.")

[dancinghorse]

"Never mind the slithy toves, let me tell you about the time all the cats in the neighborhood splooped into floons...."

[sartorias]

TEA SPLAT!

[movingfinger]

Wow, that's spam.

I'd delete those, if they landed on my LJ. There's no contribution to the discussion there, just self-advertisement.

[sartorias]

How about if the same sig appears after a comment that has some content to it?

[movingfinger]

The content should be relevant, novel, and longer than the .sig file. If it's nothing more than rephrasing previous parts of the thread or contains a quote with "+1" or some inane agreement, I'd still be inclined to delete it. If it contained a quote and a one-line, pithy, and appropriate aperçu, demonstrating engagement and cognition rather than an echo, it would be content.

One-liners of the sort you posted are exactly the sort of thing that the new spam farms are producing. Pure noise.

The .sig problem has been with us for a long time, it started on newsgroups and mailing lists. An oversized .sig like that is rude.

[sartorias]

Yeah, I first noticed sigs back in the GEnie days. I had a tiny monitor, and it annoyed me to have to scroll past all this verbiage, so I trained myself not to see them.

But today, when I encountered the same super-long one three times, I noticed it.

[a_d_medievalist]

I generally erase them as spam.

[sartorias]

Would you if the sig appeared after a comment that was an actual discussion of the post?

[a_d_medievalist]

yep. Do all the time. I don't provide strangers the space for self-promotion. If it's a friend, I'll plug for them myself. But this? is rude.

[sartorias]

Yeah, though it might be really clueless.