As a heads up, for approx. the last week of this month I'll be minimal in presence if not generally-absent on some days. Work related.

I perceive different classifications of threads that people umbrella under as a "general". Since we've been talking about generals on /a/ lately, I might as well get some thoughts in on that here.

By my loose-ish definition, a true general thread is an uninterrupted/chaining thread that exists essentially 24/7, most obvious with backlinks/"new thread/"next thread"/"previous thread" etc somewhere in the mix. Quite often a new one will be made around the time that the old one is falling off a catalog and people will even try to compete for which one gets picked for the routine, expected migration to the new edition. Quite often these harbor an enclave that seems to never leave the thread.

However though there are also what I call scheduled threads - miuna monday, waifu wednesday, etc. People know/expect these are coming, and use them for a few days every week. They are objectively not the same as the actual 24/7 generals as they don't literally chain the threads. To me this method at the very least communicates some awareness or attempt of quality control, hence is better than an actual 24/7 gen, because those users at least know to not force a subject to be up 24/7 and are aware of what a break/pause is. They are still something worth discussing though because they are by nature deeply repetitive and like a casual/lite general in function.

Lastly on /a/ there are functionally two types of 24/7 gens - ones for very popular recent series that retain lots of momentum powering extra discussion, and what I call the "evergreen" generals for series that constantly have new content year-round i.e they are not season-based. Evergreens are things like One Piece, Precure, SnK etc. The vast majority of the gens that remain on /a/ (as well as the most frequent targets of complaints) are evergreen subjects. Recent popular series with momentum tend to die out on their in ~1-2 years (ex: Re:Zero is less frequent now and not 24/7), while some /a/ evergreens are 4-5+ years old.