I love when miscommunication creates an entirely new game; gridiron football (e.g. Canadian and American Football) was created from Rugby due to scrums being unfair in North America, so a system of downs was introduced.
Basically, Walter Camp thought scrums hid the ball.
> English players form solid masses of men in a scrummage and engage in a desperate kicking and pushing match until the ball pops out unexpectedly somewhere, leaving the struggling mass ignorant of its whereabouts, still kicking blindly where they think the ball may be.
TL;DR: In the mid 19th century Scrums did kind of suck (the possessor did not release the ball, sending the ball backwards was controversial, and it was twenty-a-side, so it was a mass of bodies just trying to move the ball towards opposite sides). Britain Rugby eventually responded to this, but in a different way compared to Canada and the US.
The US difference was largely impacted by a single college's preference for playing eleven-a-side, which opened the game up even more than the fifteen-a-side that was adopted in Britain.
Thank you - though, that would require me to build "checking my favourites" into a regular routine to remember to look for replies (and, more than that, I'd need metadata or brainpower-expenditure to distinguish "this is a comment I favourited because I want to check for replies" from "this is a comment I favourited to refer back to later"), whereas this approach "just works" with my (all-too-regular :( ) habit of checking replies-to-my-comments.
Though if this is considered a particularly irritatingly selfish behaviour, I'd consider stopping! I don't _think_ it particularly negatively affects anyone, but I'm willing to hear otherwise.
I think it is frowned upon a little bit because notes about wanting to check back later do not contribute to the conversation. But I think occasionally making those kinds of comments is ok, as long as the vast majority of comments that a user makes is contributing.
Fair, thanks! Implicit in my "I don't _think_ it particularly negatively affects anyone" was "I don't believe that seeing occasional non-contributive comments are a strong negative effect", but you're right to call it out explicitly.
I find those sorts of comments irritating. Why not just keep the comment open in a tab, and check back on it when you have a chance? Is it necessary to spam the discussion?
