to further refine it, any thread is pretty much universally guaranteed to go downhill at some point or another, especially given our lax moderation practices in terms of the quality of both posts and posters (e.g., bad posters are driven out mainly by social mechanisms, so by definition, thread-shittery needs to occur before a poster is driven out). it's just due to the specific circumstances here (long overdue album, most other substantial topics of discussion exhausted) that we see it happening in the specific manner i described above.
or more simply
people are gonna talk no matter what, and when there's nothing useful left to talk about people are gonna talk on some stupid shit. i know i certainly do this
