It’s hard to engage in any sort of meaningful and coherent conversation if one’s words might arbitrarily be moved to some other thread at any time because someone decided that the post fit better there. It gives users an impression they have no control over their own contributions and the discussion that they are responding to. It also makes decisions on their behalf about what they were trying to communicate; when this is markedly different than their own intention, users might understandably be rather unhappy about this.
If I had wanted my post to appear in a different thread I would have put it there in the first place. I did not, because I do not see it as relevant to that thread. I was interested in how users interact with the CV and the ID process more broadly, not about how the CV algorithm is trained. This is not at all the same thing.
While I recognize that sometimes it is important to stay strictly on topic, in general forum discussions are by nature rather fluid and develop organically. They are not meetings where a formal agenda has to be meticulously adhered to. The thread was not posted in feature requests; it was a question inspired by the challenge of how to increase IDing activity. My contribution was meant to as a reflection on this – I see the weaknesses of the user onboarding process as directly and inextricably related to some of the factors that discourage users from IDing. If the OP has not complained about the thread going too far from their original intent, why is it a problem that the discussion has evolved? Just because the initial thread title happens to have been “Should there be rewards for IDers?” rather than “How can we encourage more IDing?”, why should that automatically make any post that is not explicitly about “rewards” off-topic and irrelevant?
I’ve participated in a variety of forums with different discussion and moderation cultures, some rather free-for-all, some more strictly moderated. But even in the latter, I’ve never experienced anything like the insistence on keeping threads “tidy” that sometimes seems to surface here. The course that the discussion took did not break any forum rules that I am aware of, nor were there heated disagreements or tensions that would have merited intervention.
Nor was the thread devolving into mere rehashing of familiar complaints – on the contrary, the whole point of my posts was to try to imagine ways forward: figuring out other ways to encourage changes in user behavior as an alternative to a rewards system that virtually all participants in the thread had agreed was unlikely to produce the desired result. So I am therefore fairly miffed (to put it mildly) that an attempt to constructively brainstorm possible solutions is considered “off-topic” and not appropriate for the thread.
A too-narrow definition of “on-topicness” tends to stifle discussion, particularly when the criteria for what makes something off-topic are not transparent, because people end up worrying about whether their words will be policed rather than leaving space for unexpected insights that might emerge.
It is also less than ideal that the forum interface indicates when posts have been split out of a thread, but does not indicate in the target thread that they were originally posted somewhere else, meaning that moving posts can create incoherence rather than making a discussion easier to follow.