Using judgement and value of commentating on media (pictures, videos, articles)

solarz said:

Well here's a counterpoint: I've been here since 2009, and I rarely frequent the military threads because I find them too technical and inaccessible to those without sufficient knowledge. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way.

Is it a bad thing to post captions that make the pictures more accessible to the common reader? In the example you posted above, I wouldn't know why that guy was shining a flashlight under the plane. I also wouldn't immediately know why that plane has a parachute behind it. To you, those captions might be useless, but to me they're meaningful.

For example:

J-10 Thread IV

America sets fires all over the world and suffers blowback and unintended consequences all the time. That’s not a role model you want to emulate! China has never backed down from any of its red lines, but it’s wise enough to know you can’t fight everyone all the time over everything, nor would...

www.sinodefenceforum.com

I really have no idea what Siege and Deino are talking about in the above post, or why Siege posted that plane picture. What am I supposed to see in that picture? I have no clue.

In contrast, I can follow @xyqq 's post, I know that those are pictures of the J-10A, and they're doing some night training. That is meaningful to me.

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by78 said:

I would suggest to ask questions if you're curious about something. There's nothing wrong with asking questions; in fact, it's highly encouraged in the military forums, provided the questions aren't unhelpful one-liners. We even have a "ask anything" thread for each sub-forum for more general technical questions. I've always made a point in answering them when I can.

Again, the specific point here is knowing when and when not to add a caption, especially when a concise overall summary would do just fine. That specific post you mentioned, xyqq actually didn't explain why the ground crew member was shining a flashlight. Moreover, I think most certainly you can tell when a plane is taking off or landing, especially at night when the engine exhaust is far more visible, or when it's simply taxiing on a runway or making its way to the hangar. So something along the lines of "so and so participate in a night exercise. Note the construction number in the first image" would be more than sufficient, assuming these uninteresting and low-quality images deserved to be shared in the first place.

To me, his posting style just gets old after a while. It's like sitting through a boring relative's slideshows on her boring, umpteenth trip to the local flea market, with each mundane slide described in mind-numbing detail. Yes, I can tell that's a moldy old sweater being sold for $1.99, I can see the price tag; the same for the dusty desk lamp, because I know what a desk lamp is; and yes, I've noticed the said lamp is the third item from the left, after a garden gnome and a bicycle. Yes, I know what a gnome and a bicycle are, and so on and on.

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solarz said:

Not everyone has the sufficient technical knowledge to distinguish between, say, a J-10 and a J-20, even though the difference might be quite obvious to you. Saying "just ask questions" is not helpful when someone does not even know what question they should be asking.

Again, I would suggest that if you find @xyqq 's content to be unbearably uninformative, just put him on your ignore list. If someone has a pattern of posting commonly disseminated pictures and writing layman-level captions, they're not suddenly going to post some top-secret material with expert level insight. In fact, you can see that most of his photos have common Chinese military forum watermarks on them, so he's just posting stuff that he comes across on the Chinese internet.

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This is clogging up those threads with pure pictures.

Do not get us wrong, we like good pictures, but we have a plce for pictures alone.

News, articles, pictures with comments ,or articles with pics go:

To the Respective Equipment Page on SD in the various forums.

Photos alone, videos alone go:

To the Respective Military Picture Thread for the respective service.

We have separate picture threads in the Military Picture forum for:

PLAN
PLAAF
PLA

PLEASE, post individual or groups of pictures with no comments to those threads.

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nlalyst said:

@Bltizo @Deino

The forum rules mandate that all the photo posts (without corresponding articles) shall be posted in the Military Pictures forum. I don't think that oneliner comments should cut it. Why do we allow our specific threads to be cluttered with photos, when the idea is to have them devoted to technical discussions instead?

From the forum rules:

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