conuly | I'll never understand what possesses people to go to

/r/whatsthatbook and title their post "I need to find this book!!!"

I mean, duh?

These posts get removed as soon as the moderator sees them, because there's only two rules in that sub and one of them is give your post a descriptive title. Descriptive means it describes the book, not you - many people seem to think that titles like "This book taught me to like reading!" or "I got this from a favorite aunt!" are descriptive. They are not, and nobody cares.

Honestly, it's enough to just post a genre. Many people seem to understand this but do not know what "genre" means. The following things are not a genre:

"Probably a kid's book or maybe a teen book"
"Written for fifth graders"
"Wattpad"
"Kindle"
"Kindle unlimited!!!"
"I read this a long time ago"
"I read this a SUPER long time ago, like, 2015 or something"
"Fiction"
"Non-fiction" (but then you check the post and the book turns out to be sci-fi)
"Had to read this for school"
"YA" (inevitably used for a young middle grade book)
"Early reader" (also inevitably used for a middle grade book)

I have no idea why people are like this. Why are they like this?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

shy_magpie

sounds frustrating, and a bit disrespectful of time of the people trying to help them

From:

conuly

They get downvoted to oblivion.

I've taken to actually telling them how to fix their titles, because I've found that if you don't tell them then they fail to read the comment the automod gives and repost exactly as was, but this time their title says "Sorry for the vague description, I need to find this book".

The problem here isn't the automod, btw. The comment they get from the automod is perfectly clear. The problem is them.

Edited Date: 2021-01-25 02:23 am (UTC)

From:

frandroid

THIS. I pick on a lot of that even coming from product managers, whose whole job is to induce people to take actions that are, hopefully beneficial to the user, at least beneficial to us. "You've got 5 words in that box, why is this text passive?? Your button is a mystery package! Why are you using an abstract icon to label your most important interaction in the app?" etc etc

From:

shy_magpie

Oh yeah, I hope I didn't imply there was anyone in the wrong other than the poster who couldn't be bothered to make a useful title! I can see making an emotional aside to let people know why its a big deal to you, I can't see wasting the time of people I was asking a favor from.

Edited (premature post) Date: 2021-01-26 03:22 am (UTC)

From:

shy_magpie

Not to shake my cane at the youth, or wish us back into the old days, but its a bit jarring that the idea of "lurk moar" or at least until you have some idea of community norms, seems to have disappeared.

From:

conuly

For real.

From:

readerjane

I hear you. That is my daily lament at work, in regards to email subject lines.

Just, why? Do people want an answer to their question or not? Do they understand how little time they have to engage attention? One glance, and that's it. Make it specific. Make it memorable. Sieze the moment.

From:

conuly

Argh.

From:

frandroid

From:

chez_jae

I didn't know there was such a resource. Good to know!

From:

conuly

The book you're looking for is probably written by Sleator, FYI.

From:

chez_jae

Damn, you're good!

:D

From:

conuly

You laugh, but... you know I'm right.

From:

dine

Why are they like this?
because they are stoopid?

From:

conuly

Yo.

From:

librarygeek

Working reference/reader's advisory at the library, my immediate reaction to those posts is hearing again:

It had a green cover!

I just submitted my final paper. Now to see if I graduate, but tomorrow!

From:

conuly

Oh, these folks never say anything as useful as "Green cover". It's five paragraphs of who they were when they read it and who was with them and what the library looked like and what grade they were in (but not the year, which might be helpful), and then "i think the main character was a girl or maybe a boy and she had a sister or maybe three brothers and a dog or a sheep or she lived in a city" followed by another paragraph about how crazy they are going trying to find this book, all interspersed with unnecessary and unwanted thank yous.

From:

steorra

Sometimes people don't follow directions because they don't know how to follow the directions. They know what the directions are and that they're not following them, but they don't know what they could say/do that would be following the directions, so they just do something even though they know it doesn't follow the directions. I suspect that's happening in some of these cases.

Like, say, if you had to list the genre of a book (I know that's not the actual rule), but you didn't know the names of many genres, you might either put the wrong genre, or if the book clearly didn't fit any of the genre names you knew, you might put something that wasn't a genre.

From:

melannen

I have been dealing with this same thing on the namethatbook board on LibraryThing for years, and it's SO ANNOYING.

...and then I tried to post on the whatisthisthing sub on reddit and found myself doing the same thing.

I think it's because the people who do that are usually coming into the subforum from outside, and the instinct is to say "What would make people want to open this thread and help?" and on ANY OTHER FORUM, "Help me find this book" or "My aunt gave me this book and I loved it" or "This has been bugging me for years!" would actually be the right subject line to get people to open it, and "This is an SF book from 1975" would not only not work, it would come off as rude.

(This is made more obvious on Librarything, where 90% of the people who should post to NameThatBook actually post on the general Book Talk forum instead. On the Book Talk forum, "What is the title of this book?" is a better subject line than "SF book from 1975", because the second one could be all kinds of book discussion, but the first one makes it immediately obvious that someone needs to tell them to post on the other forum and also to use a different subject line there.)

It just takes that extra leap to get to "oh right this is a specialist forum, the namethatbook part can be assumed" and most people don't make it.

(Now, the part where they say "I read this in sixth grade" and then refuse to say how long ago that was, even when somebody asks them to clarify! - that one I don't get at all.)

Edited Date: 2021-01-25 05:08 am (UTC)

From:

conuly

(Now, the part where they say "I read this in sixth grade" and then refuse to say how long ago that was, even when somebody asks them to clarify! - that one I don't get at all.)

Or they go "Well, I'm 35 now". One, not everybody knows when "the sixth grade is" and secondly - do your own math, buddy! We're trying to help you out, and now you're making us do subtraction!?

From:

melannen

Mind you every time I have wrestled a date out of someone like that, and then we've found the book, they've been at least two or three years too early, so maybe it's just as well.

From:

conuly

2 or 3 years isn't a problem. 20 years, which I bumped into a few months ago, is. I'm still not sure how the poster got it so wrong, but at least they found their book.

From:

reynardo

Fools. There's a couple of "Help me find a book" places around, and the number of entries with those titles is so frustrating.

That said, I hopped over to the Reddit, and was able to identify one immediately: A book begins with boys on teams playing/pretending war and one of the main objectives is finding out who stole some money from a chest or box that was supposed to be locked with a key.

That was such a lovely description, and I'd only been thinking of the book yesterday - the Otterbury Incident by C Day Lewis. I had a customer when I was in tech support whose surname was "Day Lewis" and he ended up the ID with "And yes, he's my uncle", meaning of course the actor Daniel Day Lewis. He was stunned when I gasped "The Poet Laureate was your uncle???", a) because someone actually knew who C Day Lewis was and b) that I loved his work. (I like Daniel's too, but this book was always a favourite).

From:

conuly

Sweet, hang around and help some more people!

From:

wendelah1

Why are they like this? I have no idea. I'm just happy they're reading.

From:

conuly

They're not reading, though. They aren't reading the book they want because they can't find it, and they can't find it because they didn't read the sidebar.

From:

silveradept

I think this is related more to a general idea of people not reading instructions if they think they understand what the purpose of a thing is. Which is really frustrating to deal with in the library setting when the person zooms past the thing they need to click on to get the thing they want to click on some other thing and then complain at you that they're getting an error and not what they want.

From:

frandroid

Me with my partner:
"Click right where your cursor is."
*Moves the mouse* "Where?"

Every. Single. Time.

From:

fred_mouse

This!

See also 'The last tab on the right'
* hovers over any tab but the one on either edge, so I can't even say 'the other right'*

From:

cloudsinvenice

This is something that I have finally realised is a huge gulf between my brain and most people's. I will frantically try to follow directions precisely, being a processes-from-details person, but most people are happy to skim until they think they've got the gist.

When I'm in situations where I have to write something which is intended to funnel people's behaviour regarding eliciting data or anything like that, I will wrack my brains trying to find a foolproof way to do it, and they'll still sidestep the directions in a way I never anticipated.

From:

silveradept

Humans are really good at getting out of things they don't want to do. Even more so if they recognize what's happening beforehand.

I prefer to read directions and do them when a thing is set as a list. I don't particularly like directions where I'm supposed to read through all of them completely so that I know to start the thing that's going to come due in six steps but isn't going to be mentioned until it's due. Or to know that step 15 contains an unless clause that's going to be relevant and might bork the whole thing if I don't know about it beforehand.

From:

cloudsinvenice

That's my pet hate with recipes, and it's probably behind people's frustration with the "recipes formatted as an anecdote" blogging trend. You just want to know which ingredients to marshall, and what degree of preparedness has to happen to them before they're usable...

From:

full_metal_ox

Check out this beef soup recipe recommended by Alexander Pope to Jonathan Swift—which is fun as a puzzle* and an in-joke between friends, but a pain in the kazoo if 21st-century you are trying to make a pot.

http://soupsong.com/spope.html

*Solley helpfully explains the topical references in a footnote; my own guess for “that bed/where children are bred” would’ve been cabbage.

From:

cloudsinvenice

Yes, it does come off more as an in joke for someone already familiar with the making of it!

From:

full_metal_ox

...but it turns out that Pope’s veal soup recipe reflects a whole contemporary fad for riddle menus!

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/riddle-menu-answers