Waste of what, exactly?

Waste of time for the reader that must find his way thru more chaff.

Only if you are already wasting your time by reading through every note listed in Newest Nodes. If you are reading the thread in it's entirety, then there is no noticable amount of time wasted.

You must be waiting a week before you start reading each thread if the thank-you notes are already in place for you. q-:

For me, the point is that I hate it when the solution is left undeclared. Write a note saying what worked or didn't work, I don't really care whether one says "thank you" or not.

So, yes, a node that says nothing but "thank you" just reduces the signal-to-noise ratio for me. But if one combines the information with the courtesy than we can all be happy.

And I've become even less fond of the thank-you note that shows up before the person has even attempted to use the suggested solution. It often makes it look like the solution worked, often in cases when the solution made no sense at all.

So, please, be liberal with the information you provide and not overly liberal with the nodes of courtesy (next we'll be seeing you're-welcome notes).

No, I don't downvote thank-you nodes (I may have only a few times long ago but they were unusually obnoxious examples). But I'm sort-of glad that there a small number of crackpots around that do occasionally take this action, just so the site documentation can say that there are some crackpots that downvote information-free thank-you notes and this whole courtesy thing won't get completely out of hand and every SoPW thread first start out with a "please" node and a "yes, please go ahead and ask" reply (and then we'll have "excuse me" exchanges before that...).

Please pass the salt.

And on a more seriously presented note, I do greatly appreciate a lack of discourtesy. I find that much more important.

- tye        

That could be avoided by changing the node title to “Thanks (was: some kind of request)”.

But I agree with tye here, still.

Makeshifts last the longest.