posted
You'll have to excuse me; I'm new to this posting stuff. A very special lady asked me to join. I can't go to battle school because I don't have enough time. (He says doubting his ability to be consistent) Although I would love to my postings would be sporadic at best. I feel weird posting because there are no faces to watch react. I don't know what topic to begin because I have too many in my head to pick just one and I get bored too quickly reading through the myriad of other topics. My attention span wavers and unless I find something really worthwhile I will fade away lurking once or twice feeling guilty because here is another thing I was not consistent with.
So I'll start with a question. Why post?Posts: 15 | Registered: Jan 2007
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
Tell me why you should not post and we'll start from there.
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Hmmm? It could be a waste of time. I'm not used to having someone to talk with so open ended so what would a person talk about?
Posts: 15 | Registered: Jan 2007
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posted
You don't have any reason to post. If that doesn't motivate you, then you don't have to post ^_^.
Posts: 3060 | Registered: Nov 2003
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posted
The simplest answer to your question isn't an answer to your question at all, but rather a piece of advice: read the forum for awhile, read a variety of existing posts and discussions, and then you'll see for yourself if a) the kinds of things you're interested in are discussed here, and b) the tone of the discussions is one you feel you'd enjoy.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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Phanto - you may have not understood my question so I will reword it. Why do you all post? What do you get out of it?
Rakeesh - Thank you for the advice. I'll give it a shot over the next day or so.
Icarus - Exactly! Why talk? What's the point? Sure I like people but rarely do I find anyone with similar interests.
Posts: 15 | Registered: Jan 2007
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Heh... Goram Steelfist's my Dad... I got tired of talking about Hatrack to him all the time and told him to join in on the fun - even if it's just to read.
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Why post? Hmm... I don't know. People here are nice. There's a sense of community and friendship. People care about other people. It's quite odd, and I've found very few places like this one in my life, let alone on the Internet.
And people here tend to be very smart. I kind of like that.
Posts: 12266 | Registered: Jul 2005
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You might have gotten a less than extra-warm-n-fuzzy initial reception because you came in at the same time as, well, several new posters (or multiple nicknames of the same poster) who seem to be more interested in other things than actually communicating.
I assumed you were "trollish," as it were. Glad to know otherwise.
I post here because there is a rather large and fluid group of people with interesting and varied backgrounds who seem to nonetheless get along fairly well. Good grammar and punctuation -- as well as clarity of thought -- are valued, and that's important to me. And the folk are generally quite friendly.
I've made some of my closest friends here. I've been reading the site in its various incarnations since around 1995, and I've been posting since around [2000, apparently]. It's the best place I've found online to get current news, joke around with people who have a fairly sophisticated appreciation of puns, and get my most basic assumptions challenged on a regular basis.
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Is it the same "very special lady" who's apparently asked, like, twenty gazillion OTHER people to join in the last two days? Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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Claudia Therese, Trollish! I love it. When you wrote "... several new posters...' I thought you wrote posers. Anyways I'm pretty 'smaat' too. Sadly though and cmc can confirm this I also think I am funny.
Posts: 15 | Registered: Jan 2007
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You're brave, cmc. My dad has posted just the one time, in a thread I linked him to directly. I'm not sure I want my parents around seeing exactly what I'm up to . . .
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'Cause it's fun. As I suspect you're finding out.
Welcome to Hatrack, Goram. My parents are both members, too, although they don't post much, as well as my siblings, who do. Having family here is neat.
Posts: 7954 | Registered: Mar 2004
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It's not so bad, cmc. My parents, my siblings, my husband, my son, and my dog are all members.
Of course the hubby posts on behalf of the son and the dog, since one of them doesn't have separable fingers and the other so far only knows how to whack the spacebar.
Posts: 9866 | Registered: Apr 2002
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posted
Okay, I'll give a more thoughtful answer. I don't think there is a single answer for me, because for me, that is not a single question. So let me tell you about my Hatrack experience.
I first looked into Hatrack because I was (am) a huge fan of Orson Scott Card. I regularly came to his website to read his reviews and his online writing lessons. Then I saw in one of his Alvin Maker books that he had incorporated elements of the Hatrack River 1830s story/rpg/forum here into the book, and I was intrigued. I decided to get into that, both because of the chance to interact with OSC and the chance to contribute in some way to a future book. That resolution lasted about an hour and a half. As I read through the archives, I could see it wasn't for me. I was not enthusiastic about it; I had no interest in it. I didn't realize there was more than that; I didn't see that there were also general discussion forums. So I went back to reading the front page and the calendar and the writing lessons.
Then in 2001 or 2002 I saw on the calendar that Card was going to be having a signing in my town, so I left work early to go. While there, I met Bob_Scopatz and Chris Bridges, and as I stood next to them in line, they both talked up the forum to me, and OSC seemed to value the forum and the community when it was mentioned to him, so I decided to give it another look. I started reading the forum, but I didn't post. Then one day I saw a thread on something I did know about: teaching. An exchange between Baldar and Belle made me angry enough to sign up and write a long reply--which promptly got eaten when I attempted to hit Submit. I couldn't bring myself to retype it, but now I had an account. I started occasionally posting in threads. I made one of the classic newbie blunders: starting a thread demanding to know why I was still classified as a new member despite being a member for nearly a month. The response was gentle and friendly, actually. Sometimes people found my opinion worthwhile, and that was flattering.
One boring evening, I clicked on the Parachat room we used to have here, and was welcomed by Ralphie and aretee. They both vaguely recognized my screen-name, but said I was a lurker and asked why I didn't post more. I said I only posted when I had something to say. They told me not to let a silly thing like having nothing to say stop me.
Why did I post? Because the site was welcoming, different from anything else I had encountered, and because it was flattering on those rare occasions when someone said I had perfectly expressed their thoughts.
Eventually, I noticed Bob_Scopatz again, and pointed out to him that we lived within about five miles of each other, and that we should get together. We did, and we did again, and we did again, etc etc etc. I think of Bob as one of my best friends now, and I met him through Hatrack. Being friends with the person who was, at the time, arguably the most prolific poster sure drew me into the community. I started to post all the time, not just when I felt I possessed particular knowledge. I posted to ask questions. I posted to complain. I posted to brag. I posted to express sympathy. I posted to play games. I posted to pun. I posted to be funny. And while I was doing this, I came to genuinely like an awful lot of the regulars. Hatrackers were (are) an incredibly diverse bunch: from all over the political spectrum, of every religious persuasion, of all ages from much younger than I to slightly older, of all income levels, etc. And yet, Hatrackers have some common features: they tend to be intelligent, value education, value reading, value science fiction, and (try to) value polite discourse. So as I became more prolific I found I could learn so much here, and I could be so accepted here. Hatrackers were like me in all the ways I was different, and different in all the ways that the people around me were all the same. (Does that make sense?) I started to value the fact that I could gain perspectives here that I was less likely to encounter, let alone explore, elsewhere.
Why did I post? Because I learned so much here.
As time passed, I started to meet other Hatrackers in person. [EDIT: This next paragraph reads like a roll call of people you don't know. If you get bored, feel free to skip it.] zgator also lives near me, and we got together to watch jai-alai. Then Ela, JaneX, Narrativium, and Shlomo traveled by, and we spent an afternoon together. Then Rakeesh came up to join Bob, Zan, and me for a game of arena football. Then jeniwren came down on vacation. Then Tom Davidson and Christy came down. Eventually Kwea and JenniK moved to the area, and I consider them extremely close friends as well. I also traveled and met Hatrackers on the road. I met Leto II, Strider, Frisco, and Leonide on one trip. On another, I met saxon75, Juliet, Papa Moose, and Lady Dove. Then I traveled to Bob's wedding and met about three dozen more. And there were others I never met that I felt just as close to, through our interactions online, on AIM, playing Scrabble, etc.
And,time after time, what I discovered was that I liked my Hatrack friends more than my local friends. I missed them desperately as soon as they left or as soon as I left. I missed the things we understood about each other, and the ways in which we differed. I can't begin to tell you how desperately I wish that some of them lived here.
As I continued to post, I started to feel comfortable sharing anything here. I shared my insecurities as the parent of a special needs child. My insecurities as an educator. I told Hatrackers things I'd told almost nobody else, and they listened and understood.
Why did I post? Because Hatrackers were my friends, and posting was how I talked to them. So my original answer was fairly straightforward.
Eventually I found myself feeling an odd sense of ownership over Hatrack. I found myself moved to defend it, when I felt someone threatened the chemistry I loved so much. I was not always the nicest person. I contributed much less, and I got a free pass on less than stellar behavior simply on the basis of my history of posting here. And I couldn't win. Many of the people I was closest to here were moving on, and posting in other forums. We found places where the group was smaller, and mostly all already friends. It's easy and comfortable. There aren't trolls over there, and having that haven makes it easier for me to ignore the trolls over here. I no longer feel any kind of ownership here, nor do I feel it's my place to defend Hatrack or smack anybody back into line. Most of the people posting these days are unfamiliar to me. I'm not any kind of pillar of the community--I'm just some guy who happens to have 12,000 or so posts, but most of them quite some time ago. Nobody thinks of me first when they have a question about adoption, math, Disney, teaching, education, Catholicism, latino culture, Spanish, grammar, abuse recovery, . . . anything.
But this is still a pretty friendly place to post. I have a lot of friends who no longer post in or read Hatrack. You get to feeling, after 10,000 posts or so, that you've earned something, some sort of respect or consideration. But to a new poster who's been around for a thousand posts or so and made friends of their own and found their own community, and to them people with a lot of posts who aren't around every day aren't really part of the community, and they certainly aren't special. And that's okay. All the things that attracted me to Hatrack are still there; it's just a different bunch of people having the bulk of the conversations. I follow along when I feel like it, and contribute when I have something to say. I guess I've come full circle. I won't be one of the ones who leaves, because Hatrack has meant so much to me, and, who knows, someday it might again.
Why do I post? Gratitude. Over the last five years, I have met the finest people I know here. I have made my best friends here. I have cried when people I knew died. I have shared my tears when things didn't work out like I planned. I have shared my adventures, as I explored new parts of myself. I have hugged people and been hugged. I have celebrated others' success and had people celebrate my own. And I have laughed a hell of a lot. I'm more peripheral now, but not that much has changed: I like it here.
Will you have the same experience I have had? I can't say. I don't know to what extent you're looking for what I found. I also don't know to what extent Hatrack is still offering it. I wouldn't try to force it. Specifically, I wouldn't stress about being consistent or feeling guilty or anything like that. It's not an obligation, man. It's something to do if you find it rewarding. My experience was that it grew more rewarding the more I participated, but that might not be your experience, and that's okay.
posted
Icarus, except for some of the specific details that sums up my Hatrack experience almost perfectly. I was planning to post something very much like this, but there really isn't much need, now--you said it better than I would have, I think.
For the record, you're the first person I think of when someone asks a Disney related question, or mentions Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, or raising special needs kids, or a good dozen other things. Don't know if newer members would or not, since a lot of that comes from your earlier history here or our shared participation at other fora, but still.
And by the way, it's at least faintly criminal that we haven't met yet.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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quote:Nobody thinks of me first when they have a question about adoption, math, Disney, teaching, education, Catholicism, latino culture, Spanish, grammar, abuse recovery, . . . anything.
Nope, you're wrong. You are exactly the first person I think of for many of those things.
And other than specific details, what Icky described is pretty much why I'm here as well, except that I've met no one in person. From Hatrack. Except for my husband, who also occasionally posts here, but he's here because of me...
Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
<Also thinks of Icarus first on many of those things.>
<Does consider Icarus to be a pillar of the community, but may define it differently than he.>
<Really appreciates Icarus listing "to pun" and "to be funny" separately.>
<Echoes many of the sentiments of Icarus's post. The long post, not that quid's an oldbie. Though she is.>
Posts: 6213 | Registered: May 2001
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posted
Icky, you're like an entire year and then some older than me. Then take a look at the post count. I'm a veritable newbie and lurker in comparison!
Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
Well, you've got one thing right, quid. You ARE a lurker compared to some.
Why post? Because it's a wonderful way to waste time when you want to, a wonderful place to discuss things you really care about when you want to, a wonderful community of people who love you when you need it (as long as you don't display trollish attributes), a wonderful place to find people with common interests and obsess over your many obsessions together, a great place to find new obsessions (don't get me started on how many things someone on Hatrack has started at our house) and a wonderful place to "hang out" with people you might one day have the privilege of meeting in real life, or might just form a closer online relationship with, or might just think of when you do certain things or go certain places.
In short, the reason normal people go to bars, clubs, community centers, concerts, conventions, or church socials is the reason I come to Hatrack. Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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quote:Originally posted by quidscribis: Even if I decided to... I dunno... Kill all the ketchup?
That should have been John Kerry's campaign threat. He could have strongarmed the nation's ketchup lovers into voting for him.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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I couldn't bring myself to retype it, but now I had an account. I started occasionally posting in threads. I made one of the classic newbie blunders: starting a thread demanding to know why I was still classified as a new member despite being a member for nearly a month. ![[Embarrassed]](redface.gif)
The response was gentle and friendly, actually. Sometimes people found my opinion worthwhile, and that was flattering.![[Wave]](graemlins/wave.gif)
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