
Stop Sharing Quotes. You're Not Better Than Anyone. - sfard
http://throwww.com/a/6n1
======
lutusp
But sharing a quote you didn't write doesn't make you "better than anyone", it
makes you a reader, not necessarily a thinker, and certainly not someone
posturing as the sage who invented the quote in the first place.

Sharing quotes is like telling jokes (most of which weren't invented by the
speaker). I don't think people will accept an argument against telling jokes.

On the topic of quotes, here's one of my favorites: "While programming, you
can write fast programs, and you can write programs fast, but you can't write
fast programs fast." Guess who said it?

~~~
vincentperes
The dalai lama?

------
lawn
Stop writing comments, stop writing blog posts and stop doing anything at all
because you know: you're not better than anyone.

Sigh. This kind of post annoys me. The purpose isn't to be "better than
anyone", it's to share something you personally find interesting.

Most of the time like writing blog posts. But this time it's something I've
seen before and here I really get the feeling that the writer wants to be
"better than anyone". Well, at least show that "anyone" is worse.

~~~
coldtea
> _Stop writing comments, stop writing blog posts and stop doing anything at
> all because you know: you're not better than anyone._

Oh, you say it ironically, but oh boy, how fortunate we would be if more
people took this advice. Including the author, me, and you.

I'm pretty sure we are all familiar with the StN ratio in information theory.

------
d23
How do you know I didn't read the Bhagavad-Gita? I did actually.

Regardless, I'm not one of those "quote" people on facebook or in general. To
me this post says more about the author than it does the people he is judging.
Why does he care so much about the quotes they post? Whether you like the
quote, hate it, or are indifferent -- is it so hard to just move on?

~~~
coldtea
> _How do you know I didn't read the Bhagavad-Gita? I did actually._

He doesn't have to know what YOU did, he just has to have a good idea of what
the 99% of the morons who shared such quotes have done. And they haven't read
it.

~~~
Dylan16807
Yep, sharing ideas makes you a moron.

~~~
coldtea
Conflating sharing a dime-a-dozen, easily digested, populist quote (that would
be the majority of them) with "sharing ideas", does.

~~~
Dylan16807
Wow, I've never been personally insulted for calling simplistic ideas "ideas"
before. It's an interesting feeling.

~~~
coldtea
Well, sorry, if I offended you, but really, do you feel "personally insulted"?
Because I made a pretty generic argument in both cases.

Is there a better definition for a moron than that of someone who shares
"simplistic ideas"?

Come to think of it, isn't "simpleton" a synonym for moron?

So, yes, "sharing ideas" makes you a moron, if the ideas are moronic (as it
often happens with quoted "wisdom"), or they consist of soundbites that have
been shared to death (as it also happens more often than not).

How else would you call the guy in the office that emails everybody the same
BS hoaxes, "funny powerpoints" and "inspirational quotes"?

~~~
Dylan16807
Oh I'm not offended, but let me explain how I read the comment string. At
first you were insulting the people that vapidly shared quotes. Then I
questioned if that actually made them morons. Then you said that the very act
of conflating 'vapid quote sharing' with 'sharing ideas' marked a person as a
moron. _I_ was the person conflating those two, not the people you were
originally insulting. Doesn't that make it a personal insult? If I misread
something please do correct me.

Anyway I would say that a moron is someone that is stuck at the level of
simple ideas, not just someone that indulges in simple ideas from time to
time.

------
petercooper
I noticed this phenomenon on Twitter a couple of years ago and last year
created a Twitter account solely to share or retweet programming related
quotes: <https://twitter.com/codewisdom> .. Doing almost no promotion, it got
up to 15,000 followers very quickly with some quotes getting almost 1000
retweets!

I also run Twitter accounts with things like programming news and programming
related links and it's far more common for those to be "favorited" than
retweeted. So there's certainly something about quotes that makes people want
to share.

~~~
sfard
Interesting. That doesn't surprise me at all. The most ironic ones I find are
the ones about happiness and humility. Something about sharing them on
facebook strikes me as so counter to the point.

~~~
pyre

      | Something about sharing them on facebook strikes
      | me as so counter to the point
    

The point of the quotes is to be sequestered and/or hoarded?

------
teebs
Although I think that sharing quotes is not bad, and few people share quotes
to show that they're better than someone else, I think there is one basic
message worth remembering from this article. If I may quote it:

"This epidemic, if you allow me to be hyperbolic, is getting so bad that we
don't even seem to care if quotes are real anymore."

Or, quotes are sometimes fake. This is because of two issues. First, people
don't fact check. Mostly, this is because the cost isn't worth the reward. If
you find out the truth and you tell people, your reward is often looking like
a know-it-all. There is a gap here for someone to make a better fact checking
platform that reduces this cost through the magic of natural language
processing.

Second, people pay too much attention to arguments by appeal to authority.
Just because someone was respected does not mean that everything they said was
correct. In fact, for many particularly talkative people, you can probably
find arguments they've made on both sides of many issues.

~~~
Dylan16807
I would have thought that not checking the source of a quote means you care
LESS about who said it, anti-appeal-to-authority.

------
gnosis
_There is indeed a strange prejudice against Quotation._ \-- James Boswell

 _I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have,
beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than
oneself._ \-- Marlene Dietrich

 _I have heard that nothing gives an Author so great Pleasure, as to find his
Works respectfully quoted by other learned Authors._ \-- Benjamin Franklin

 _Like your body your mind also gets tired so refresh it by wise sayings._ \--
Hazrat Ali

~~~
power
“The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.” \- William
Somerset Maugham ;-)

------
smonff
Don't agree with this anymore. Quoting is wonderful. Free Software is like
quotations. You don't need to understand and know everything about a library
to use it. You will be better if you do but it's not absolutely necessary.

I think we have to quote, we have to copy, share, redistribute, what we can
and what we should.

I will quote only one place for more details:
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Quotations>

------
gm
Reading this title is the first time I see someone accused of sharing quotes
as trying to be better than someone else.

For me a shared quote is a little piece of wisdom (or funny) packed into a few
words. The fact that someone read it, liked it, and shared it is an act of
generosity and also a bit of self expression (ie, "I value this thought").

But do I think I'm being better than anyone when I share a quote? Hardly.

What I do think is that the fact the author accuses quote sharers of trying to
be better than other people reflects far more about the author's psychology
than of the people who share quotes with him.

EDIT: Also - Writing a blog post demanding people change their behavior is one
of the most futile things out there. Best thing to do is to unfriend people
who share quotes or use whatever controls there are to not see stuff annoying
people post.

~~~
drivebyacct2
Yeah, I don't even necessarily do it to invoke authority (though I don't often
quote people I guess) but as a way of conveying a concept in a well put way.

------
zokier
"You shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet" _-Abraham Lincoln_

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blackjack160
There is something therapeutic about this process, for the individual and the
communities they influence. Sharing emotions and wisdom emphatically clearly
resonates with the general populace.

Speaking from experience because we've launched an iPhone app called Quipio
that lets people create and share such quotes in seconds (possibly this
author's worst nightmare).

We've seen it grow pretty dramatically in the first three weeks: 42K quotes
have been created, 115K+ shares. 70K+ downloads on the app store. There is no
question that people reveal their emotional states through them. Makes for an
interesting graph.

------
Swizec
Think about quotes as an interesting multivariate optimisation problem.

How to maximize the amount of meaning while minimizing the amount of content?
Quotes, much like good jokes, are at the bleeding edge of natural language
elegance. They're the Haskell of English if you will.

No wonder some people spent _hours_ practicing their off the cuff remarks and
preparing impromptu responses. ;)

------
sosuke
I don't every remember sharing a quote that didn't mean something to me at
that time. The last one I tweeted me, and a friend of mine on twitter, were
deciding whether or not something was worth fighting for. Edmund Burke one
about evil winning. It doesn't make me better, or worse, it was just fun and
relavent.

This seems like a lot of misplaced frustration.

------
p3nt3ll3r
Actually sharing quotes is a good place to pick ideas for new books to read.

------
jonsterling
This is great. I almost tweeted it, but I learned my lesson just in time...

------
specialist
Language is a virus.

