Yet Another Thread Will Solve It

An AntiPattern in team communication.

Someone starts an EMail thread and a discussion starts. After a while (hours/days/weeks) someone starts a new thread (either because he/she is too lazy to go find the original thread or because he/she is unable to understand the discussion) and asks the same question again, slightly rephrased. ("What's the status about ...?") In total this multiplies the work because now the burden of having to look up the original thread is on everyone else, and everyone will basically post what they already said.

See also YetAnotherMeetingWillSolveIt

Also an antipattern in modern netiquette.

Once upon a time, noobs would show up on usenet or a forum posting several threads about the same topic, which made it hard to follow. The Old-timers would hound them to search first and post on an existing thread about their topic to keep the discussion in one place instead of starting a new thread. Unfortunately, disk space, bandwidth, and search technology weren't that great, so often people couldn't find the existing threads, which led to the birth of FAQs and proper etiquette being to at least read the FAQ first.

Fast-forward a few decades. Now we have plenty of storage, plenty of bandwidth, and much better search engines. We could easily keep a discussion running for centuries. But now anyone who posts on an existing thread (that hasn't been active in the last few days) is chided and derided for 'necroposting', and told to start a new thread rather than resurrecting an old one. This results in highly-fragmented discussions, lots of duplication, and long lists of search results to have to sort through, rather than a coherent discussion.

So now that we finally have space-age technology, society insists that we act as though we live in the stone age. What happened?

What probably happened is that people still like small, digestible chunks of information, and most people will not want to read through a centuries-old thread to find the information they need. This means that most people will link to a thread (and maybe post a summary, as in StackOverflow), and the people that really need to find the information "I have the M72, and had to toggle the power switch twice before it worked" are the only ones that will frantically read every single post in the old threads.