Please stop blog posting

[anigbrowl]

Something like 75% of the posts on the Economics forum consist of nothing more than a cut-and-pasted article from some blog, without any original commentary or writing by the poster.

I have a feed aggregator in my browser, and things like bookmarks; if I want to view blog postings, I can look at those blogs. What we have now instead of informed discussion is an echo chamber where a small number of posters just repost their favorite blog articles in full without adding anything, and there's a few short comments consisting of 'yeah, true, rock on' or suchlike.

Meanwhile, worthy discussions are falling off the front page because of this blog spam. I'm sure that's not intention of those posting blogs, but I ask you to be more restrained, post less often, and use excerpts instead of copying complete articles without regard for copyright.

If you don't have any opinions of your own and your input here consists mostly of just posting the last article you read, maybe this isn't the right forum for you, and you'd be better off commenting at those blogs rather than simply reposting them here.

[Tangerine LaBamba]

1. Thank you and ditto

I'm always dismayed to start reading something posted here and then realizing it's a cut and copy job from someone's site.

I'm much more interested in the thinking of the people who frequent DU. If I wanted people to do research for me - if they thought I'd be interested - I'd hire them.

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

2. I often come here looking for the research postings of a few long time well known...

... DUers, and while they aren't necessarily always pulling from blogs, they essentially just share their research -- I consider their contribution invaluable to this site.

[Night_Nurse]

3. I agree...

I don't have time to check out numerous sites/blogs, so I come here for information. Some blog posts are good, and I would have never have seen them if not for someone sharing them here on DU.

[bronxiteforever]

4. I agree with you. Being exposed to different blogs thru postings has expanded my viewpoint on issues

[NMDemDist2]

5. agreed. n/t

[anigbrowl]

6. I'm not opposed to ANY blog postings

But I think that a paragraph and a link and condensing several of them into one post beats copy-pasting an entire article. I dropped the front page of this forum into Excel today and found that ~70% of the posts are just reposts of blog articles, with 28% of the posts on the top page being from a single person.

That's just spamming the forum, and it's not really the way DU is meant to work (rules are supposed to be that you just post excerpts rather than complete articles and so on). It's not that I don't want to see links to those articles, but that I don't want to see blog articles pushing actual discussion off the page.

For example, today we had that bailout vote fail in the house, and American and Asian stock markets have had their biggest drop since 1987, while the money supply was increased by about 5% with the fed taking emergency action. This is big, meaty economic news about which there should be 5 or 6 serious discussions going on.

But they're not happening because a lot of the more thoughtful posters have just given up on this forum. Spam on the front page is part of the cause. Meantime, several attempts at serious discussion in the general forums (disclosure, 1 by me) have ended up as bitter and largely uninformed arguments about class warfare.

I don't want to dissuade anyone from posting what they think is interesting information, but instead we're awash in multiple postings from the same blogs and suchlike. And the informed, spirited discussions which this forum is for aren't taking place.