note to self: meme tags

[taimatsu]

I am tagging some entries, and have noticed that I have classified memes/quizzes/etc. in a particular way. I have 'questions', which goes on those long write-your-own-answers quiz things, which are often quite interesting and do tell you more about the writer. This also goes on the 'ask me five questions' idea. I have 'meme' which goes on other things which have a similar value in telling you more about the person answering - these must usually require thoughtful written input. I have 'sillymeme' which goes on the sort of thing which is fun and pleasant but not particularly illuminating (like the Christmas Stocking toy or the Mystic Pig) - and then I have 'stupidquiz' which is for 'What Kind Of Christmas Decoration Are You?!?' and suchlike fooleries.

How do you mentally classify such things?

Comments

[robert-jones.livejournal.com]

How can you say the Mystic Pig is not illuminating?

[simont]

It's odd how often "note to self" shows up in things I read that are written by other people. drswirly suggested once that it's sometimes a typo for "not to self" :-)

Personally I refrain almost 100% from filling my LJ with memes, so the question of how I tag them is meaningless (in fact doubly so because I've never got round to using any tags on my LJ either!), but when I'm reading them in other people's they classify into three basic categories:

• things which contain genuinely interesting information about the LJ owner
• things for which the LJ owner's answers, while not usually totally uninteresting, interest me less than trying to work out what my own answers would be
• things which tell me virtually nothing about the LJ owner and which inspire in me no motivation to do it myself.

Generally, I find the "what type of biscuit are you" sorts of quizzes with a shiny piece of HTML to paste into the target LJ fall into the last category, because (a) the questions are usually annoying multiple-choice with badly thought out categories and I want to tick "snowflake" in most of them, (b) IME when the quiz gives me an answer it's not generally an answer I feel that I identify with in any way that makes me satisfied to have found it out, and (c) for the same reason, seeing the answer that was given to somebody else tells me nothing about them.

The second category is usually where those long fill-in-your-own-answers quizzes go: reading other people's answers tends for the most part to tell me things I either knew already or didn't find particularly interesting, whereas thinking up my own answers often involves looking back on my life from angles I hadn't previously considered, and that's much more interesting to me. For precisely this reason I don't then go to the effort of typing up and publishing all my own answers, because I can't imagine people finding them nearly as interesting to read as I found them to think of.

The first category is the only one that actually tempts me to propagate the meme myself, and as far as I can remember only one meme has ever fallen so convincingly into that category as to actually inspire me to propagate it. That was the ten things you've done and none of your friends have meme, last February, which was actually really interesting because everybody's answers told you lots of things you didn't already know about them, and also because the lack of leading questions meant you also got some idea of what sorts of things were important to people.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I'd rather know what kind of biscuit people self-identify as than what kind of biscuit an online quiz thingy tells them they are.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I don't do memes terribly often.

Those that I do tend to fall into the following categories:

Pretty graphic at the top which I think is worth decorating my LJ with.

Interesting thinky questions meme

Most other memes are put into a 'not interested' category and I skim over them in other people's LJs. Except that alarmingly detailed 'which x man are you' quiz, which was fascinating because it contained SO much x men back story that I didn't know. I didn't care much whether anyone did have any kind of deep connection with Wolverine, but I was quite taken with finding out how old Wolverine was and what originally killed his memory.