Particularly in political topics, although I've seen it elsewhere as well, some people are in the habit of simply embedding a video or posting a link to some other site on the Internet that supposedly supports whatever it is that they've chosen to believe, and I can't understand it, unless the point of it is to save them from having to actually participate in a discussion.
No, there's nothing wrong with embedding a video or posting a link, although there are far too many links posted, as far as I am concerned, if the point is to support your position on something, but what I'm seeing a lot of are those who aren't even making an argument or stating a point; instead, they are simply trying take people away from the forum to read or watch something somewhere else.
Why? If whatever it is that you're embedding or linking is worth watching or reading, then why don't you show us that you have learned something from it by stating your positions in your own words? This is a discussion forum. We should be talking about stuff here, person to person. If you think we should all be watching PBS instead of discussing things on an Internet forum, or if you think that some other biased online source (whichever direction the bias goes) is way more interesting than anything anyone could say here, why aren't you there instead of here?
I used PBS as an example, but I've seen it on the other side of the political spectrum as well. Copying and pasting stuff from some other source is not a discussion. When you do that, you're making someone else's point, and if that person wanted to be part of this forum, they could join if they're fifty or older.
I don't care what your politics are; I want to talk with you, not with whoever else you think might be smarter or more authoritative than yourself. I'd rather talk to you, and the whole point of an Internet forum is for people to talk to one another, using their own words to state their own thoughts and opinions, not someone else's. Would you want to carry on a discussion with someone if, rather than responding to you directly, they brought out their phone and quoted an answer from AI or from the Internet? If I want to research something through AI or the Internet, I'd research something that I'm interested in.
Again, there's nothing wrong with posting a link for supplementary information, although these are usually unnecessary, and most people never click on them, anyhow. There's also nothing wrong with embedding a video that you think someone might be interested in, as embedded videos are, I think, more likely to be watched, seeing as they don't take us away from the forum. Sometimes a video can be used to introduce a topic. I do that sometimes, but I get the feeling that some people who embed videos haven't watched the video themselves because they have nothing of their own to say about it.
While there is a place for links, they should not take the place of your own words and thoughts, and you should be aware that most people won't click on them anyhow. While they may have their place, I'm not so sure that the forum wouldn't be better if we didn't allow them at all. We would lose the occasional information source that some people might actually go to, but on the upside, we'd all have to spend more time making our own points rather than simply pasting a link into the forum.
As with so many things, the problem isn't with the embedded videos, the links, or even copied-and-pasted stuff, but in the overuse of this stuff. This is a discussion forum, and most of us would rather hear from you than be taken on a tour of the Internet.
I don't mean this as a reprimand, but it has long been a concern of mine, and one that I truly don't understand. This forum isn't about recruiting people to vote Republican or Democrat, and it's not about persuading people to live the way we'd like them to live. Let's be real; we're not going to change enough minds here for it to make a difference. At its core, this is a discussion forum; a place for people fifty and older to talk to one another about stuff. This doesn't mean that your political, religious, or health views are unimportant or irrelevant, or that you can't try to convert people to your way of thinking, but that realistically, it's not likely to happen often enough to be worth annoying people. The discussion should be more important than the outcome, and we should be able to enjoy one another even if we disagree. This is more likely when we're talking person-to-person rather than through a battle of sources and third-party references.
