Please stop thanking me for cooling your writeup

So I use one of my obscenely numerous daily ching!s on it; the writeup gets a fat C! next to it and gets shewn on the frontpage. Usually it starts racking up votes unless my judgement has been amiss (not entirely unusual when I use everything2 sleep-depraved.)

Then I regret it. Why? In my chatterbox, the writer of the writeup will have penned a little thank-you note:

"Dear P_I: Thank you for cooling me!"

Blecch!

Listen up: first off, I did not cool you; I cooled your writeup. (That may be a bit of a hard concept to grasp, so read it a few times if you need to: we are more than the sum of our submissions to the database, scary as that may seem.) The cooling may have occurred because I felt the subject matter was under-represented, perhaps because I felt the writeup was well-writ, or it may even be because I meant to vote you down but my hand slipped on the mouse among dozens of possible other reasons. In most cases, however, my cooling the writeup will have to do with the content of the writeup - I was cooling the writeup, not you.

With that out of the way, let's get to the meat of the matter here: unless I'm applying anti-P_nch_m_dr_ "C!hing of Death" tactics to your words (don't do that), my chinging of your writeup was my way of thanking you for introducing some subjectively worthwhile material into the database. You do the work of writing it up, I thank you by cooling it. If more interaction between us must be had, it would be by far more appropriate for you to tell me "you're welcome" rather than "thank you!" Thanking me for thanking you leaves us drowning in a morass of obsequiety.

If you absolutely must reward me for having benefitted you, direct me to more writeups similar to the one of yours I appeared to have enjoyed.

Please also note: The title of this node is "Please stop thanking me for cooling your writeup", not "Please stop thanking others for cooling your writeup".

I'm not here to validate you, but i will if you want :)

unless you're a bigot or irresponsible with the things you say, then I will cut your face with a kitchen knife.

I consider this a worthwhile strategy not because I get more chings (in fact, I think I've gotten less recently than I usually do), but because it leads me to find some really interesting nodegel deserving of recognition.

Recently I've noticed that I'm not chinging my friends as often as I used to. Oh, I still do, but this has led me to diversify...

Unless, of course, you paid for the ching, then I guess it's perfectly all right to thank the person who gave it to you.

As a side note, I'm exactly the sort of loser who thanks people for sex, so I constantly send messages of appreciation to Those Who Ching Me. Well, except for P_I, because the only response I get out of him is a snide message saying "Please stop thanking me for cooling your writeup."

That's what I first thought whenever I read P_I's writeup. How could someone be so disillusioned with Everything? Where is the love?

So I mulled it over a bit. Everything is a community, not an encyclopedia. The fact that people can message each other through the chatterbox only adds to the growing personality of Everything. Positive feedback, such as thanking for C!s, encourages a good vibe amongst noders and more writeups result. But then...

I realized that Everything is a society more than Everything is a community. Speaking solely on Functionalist Sociology terms, E2 needs people like Pseudo_Intellectual to bitch. If Everything were all nice and cheery and rosy (as suggested above), Everything would only be monofaceted. No matter how much you hate nodes about sex or nodes about drugs, they exist. It's part of the society that is E2.

Each one of Everything's users has a different personality, outlook, noding style, you name it. Every part, in some way, shape, or form makes E2 what it is.

Only you can make Everything what it is.