Ha! Okay, a re-post, sans sarcasm...
When it comes to online forums such as this, as well as social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, many people have a bad habit of becoming intellectually and communicatively lazy; they will read a little bit of a post, assume what the rest says, and reply. Or maybe the post will remind them of something they think we should hear, with varying degrees of relevance, and post about that. This, co-mingled with the posts directly related to the subject of the original post, makes for a very difficult thread to keep up with.
This is not really a complaint; it is simply what happens when a widely varied group of people with a widely varied set of experiences and practices all post on the same thread. Imagine attending a lecture in school, and partway through the lecture, various factions break off and begin to have their own conversations. Rude, huh? Well, it's kind of what happens online, however it's really not so rude here, but part of the fun, and can lead to different places. Now, not everyone in every thread has something useful to add to the conversation (not that it stops them), but they can usually be passed over easily enough if you're trying to follow a certain aspect of the thread.
Some people go out of their way to pick a fight, whether in person or online; in the latter case, there is far less risk, since we all have aliases and are out of arm's reach. I highly doubt there are any posts like that in this thread, as I highly doubt that more than 0.1% of TB members fit that description. I like to think that for some reason bassists as a general rule are less likely to be disrespectful than the average musician or person, and for that reason I find myself spending a lot more time here than I do FB these days.
