HOW TO USE SAGE PROPERLY

Oh boy, sage autism. What fun.
Sage originated on textboards with either no deletion cycle or a really long one. Additionally, 2ch-style BBS-es have a thread list at the tp of the page, which lists all the threads on the first few pages, right there, together, with no need for a thread to be on the first page to be seen. Posting with sage on a site like that does no harm to the thread, as it's not going to die if it's not bumped. On imageboards, especially fast ones like 4chan, if a thread is not bumped evey few minutes, it runs the risk of dying (on the faster boards, that is. A thread on this board may last a day or two with no bumps, depending on whether the board experiences a flood of new threads). Due to this, users tend to view sage as a harmful thing--which, if it's done enough, it can be. However, it is mostly just used to express the desire of a poster to let the thread die faster, since one sage post isn't going to kill a thread.

Which meaning of sage is ``correct''? Depends on the setting. On a slow board, sage doesn't really have any meaning at all. Slow boards require you to go back a few pages to see all of the active threads. On a faster board, a simple F5 will likely give you mostly different threads than were on the board last time you looked. On these faster boards, the high rate of new thread creation means that, if sage is done enough, it can kill a thread, and if it's just one person doing it, it expresses, as I said before, a desire to see the thread die faster.

In both cases, sage does not, in reality, do anything. Neither interpretation of sage is more valid. Just use it in whatever manner the other users of the board tend to interpret it.