I'm starting to feel like I'm being shunned. Maybe it's just coincidence, but in numerous cases when I post to a thread here at Hatrack, my post is the last one in the thread, and it gradually disappears off the bottom of the list. There was, briefly, a bit of a renaissance here with a flurry of new threads and activity, but it seems to have petered out. I know I'd be more inclined to post regularly if my posts got responses.
Posted by PanaceaSanans (Member # 13395) on :
I'm quite sure it's not you. There's just not many people around, and it's Saturday.
[ February 11, 2017, 05:10 PM: Message edited by: PanaceaSanans ]
Posted by Glenn Arnold (Member # 3192) on :
It's not just today. I'm talking about threads that I've responded to for the past, maybe, several years. I respond, the thread dies.
I've never really left, it's just that the dynamic has changed so that if you leave a post, it lies dormant for awhile. Maybe days. And then someone responds. Then maybe there's a flurry of activity and the thread goes dormant again. All that is fine. But I see people exchanging posts, and throw my 2¢ in and that's it. It just ends.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Have you tried the Last Post thread?
Posted by Glenn Arnold (Member # 3192) on :
Aha! The ultimate test of my thread killing power!
Posted by Heisenberg (Member # 13004) on :
Maybe take it as a compliment?
Sometimes when I read a refutation of what I've wrote and it's bang on correct, I meekly cede the field to the superior argument.
Of course the polite thing to do is to acknowledge your defeat, but most especially when people are invested in arguments it's not a fun thing to be that explicit. I personally zero out the equation by acknowledging that I'm not a good person.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
this forum's very low nearing-extinction-level lull of activity makes for some very weird and selective activity pressures.
most of the activity will pertain directly to controversy, as a result. someone will come in and say something controversial and the filthy snarkhunters will come in and feed into it. not me of course because i am totally not like that. but hypothetically other people of course. like a ron lambert post where he says something so profoundly dumb that pretty much everyone here has to say SOMETHING about it like 'wow, uh, that's dumb' or make fun of him for it and he just continues on anyway.
compare that to just saying something thoughtful and not necessarily in any need of reply, a reasoned conversation can just more or less be over in like three or four posts
like really, look at the pattern. who's gonna be ending threads? bad posters? nooo. threads don't just end with ron or whatsisface infinity or late-model-steven. they end after that's all over.
Posted by Strider (Member # 1807) on :
Glenn is the thread-killer. Glenn is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face Glenn. I will permit Glenn's posts to pass over me and through me. And when Glenn's posts have gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see their path. Where Glenn's posts have gone, there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Posted by DustinDopps (Member # 12640) on :
Glenn - I never post because echo chambers are boring. And this has become one.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Originally posted by DustinDopps: Glenn - I never post because echo chambers are boring. And this has become one.
I agree, dustin. I definitely never come here anymore, because everyone is always agreeing with each other. Just so much agreeing! There's never any conflict or controversy, and definitely this isn't a place where over 75% of posting is related to disagreements between posters.
Unless that is not true, in which case I would be disagreeing with you. But I can't do that because this place is an echo chamber! So it must be true.
Posted by rav (Member # 7595) on :
Activity on this forum has been much lower than it was 15 years ago. I used to think the same thing a long time ago. You're not a thread killer, your activity level is just higher than others on the forum for the time being.
Posted by Glenn Arnold (Member # 3192) on :
Perhaps we just need a "like" button...
Posted by Carrie (Member # 394) on :
Well, I'll take whatever blame you like, but it's been months upon months since I've been around... so... yeah. Guess I'm proving a couple of points here.
Posted by JonnyNotSoBravo (Member # 5715) on :
quote:Originally posted by Strider: Glenn is the thread-killer. Glenn is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face Glenn. I will permit Glenn's posts to pass over me and through me. And when Glenn's posts have gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see their path. Where Glenn's posts have gone, there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
May thy knife chip and shatter.
Posted by Nick (Member # 4311) on :
I know the feeling. It started to feel stale when I decided to leave. I needed to get away from spending so much time at the computer. I check in here once in a while(like now), and every time I do, it's more of a ghost town.
So sad. I joined this place in my freshman year of high school 15 years ago. It used to be such an active hub of good discussion with people of varying viewpoints as participants. Social media kinda killed this place(and other forums like it) I think.
Posted by dkw (Member # 3264) on :
Hi Nick! Long time no see.
Posted by Nick (Member # 4311) on :
Hi dkw! Yes it has! Hope you're doing well!
Posted by JanitorBlade (Member # 12343) on :
Hey! Nice to see you around again Nick.
Posted by Heracles (Member # 13531) on :
I've been reading here for awhile, and I haven't noticed much of threads dying after you post Posted by Occasional (Member # 5860) on :
DustinDopps, I agree with you. It was made this way by the very responses like Samprimary and a few others. They cannot tolerate differences of opinion. Sure, they like to think that they are discussing when they disagree with other posters. However, what they really do is harass and make fun of and generally dismiss those who don't think like them. Makes for a hostile place where disagreement can only be minor and have a stamp of approval. I am only commenting right now, in fact, because I know not why.
Posted by Yozhik (Member # 89) on :
Agree with Occasional and Dustin.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
Fascinatingly, there are several healthy communities that have spun off from Hatrack made up of people who are not Dustin, Occasional, or Yozhik. Which makes you wonder why THEY can't find a vibrant place to chat, and prefer instead to slander the people who have.
Posted by Yozhik (Member # 89) on :
Nobody is slandering the people who left here for healthy communities. We're criticizing certain forum members who drove most of the interesting people away from here. I believe there was one fellow who joined here a while back with the express goal of destroying the community.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
That's if you believe him; I never did.
I can't think of anyone interesting driven away by Samprimary, myself.
Posted by scifibum (Member # 7625) on :
I can think of some interesting people who I probably helped to drive away, but I don't know whether to tend toward regret at not being a nicer interlocutor or embarrassment at the hubris of thinking that it mattered a lot.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Originally posted by Occasional: DustinDopps, I agree with you. It was made this way by the very responses like Samprimary and a few others. They cannot tolerate differences of opinion. Sure, they like to think that they are discussing when they disagree with other posters. However, what they really do is harass and make fun of and generally dismiss those who don't think like them. Makes for a hostile place where disagreement can only be minor and have a stamp of approval. I am only commenting right now, in fact, because I know not why.
Apparently because you can't resist coming back to post the king of dumb takes.
The apparently missed point of my sarcastic response to "i don't like this place because it's an echo chamber" is because that's always been a dumb take on hatrack since long before you decided that was the new truth of hatrack and then you turned into a standoffish fly-by-nighter who seemingly only comes back to remind us that you're still salty.
"This place turned into an echo chamber" is just what forum people of all different kinds say when they got used to an environment that explicitly preferences their views or at least deferentially offers those positions a bubble of obligatory kindness and politeness, and so they were exceptionally brittle about how times changed and those views are way more controversial in the forum community and now poorly arguing for those views will engender constant criticism. This is what happened to you, because you would make some startlingly dumb arguments and suddenly one day the world wasn't such a nice place for self-righteous people who were arguing really terrible things.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Originally posted by Yozhik: I believe there was one fellow who joined here a while back with the express goal of destroying the community.
There was also that guy who plainly declared that he was nothing but a troll and said "At this point trolling is the only worth I give to this sorry excuse for this message board" and said he was only still here because "it bugs the heck out of so many of you."
You mean people like that right?
spoiler alert it was Occasional
Posted by Occasional (Member # 5860) on :
Yes that was me. I did that only AFTER I decided this place was on its deathbed. Thought it would be a good time to put the nail in its coffin. Looking around it seems to be not exactly gone, but certainly the living dead.
Posted by BlackBlade (Member # 8376) on :
Oh wow! You mean you did us the courtesy of rationalizing something before doing it? That's great! Very unusual quality. And then you looked at the results and justified having done it after the fact. That's amazing!
Most people never do that!
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
I think what it takes to really make the Occasional hypocrisy circle complete is to remember that he's in here now complaining about people who "cannot tolerate differences of opinion" and that this is a "hostile place where disagreement can only be minor and have a stamp of approval" and yet he spent literally years here arguing that it was unacceptable that Orson Scott Card let political progressives be able to speak their mind here and explicitly wanted this place to be forced to preference and restrict itself to views that he considered conservative and traditional enough that they would not offend him.
If you look at the people who frequently came in here to complain that this place can't tolerate differences of opinion, they're the ones who were not down with differences of opinion and you could bet good money that they largely retreated over time to closed off dipshit forums where speech is adamantly restricted to a narrow ideological range of acceptability.
Occasional, you were never here for open discussion. As I've mentioned to you before when you were adamantly proving it, you only ever wanted Discussion-Within-Occasional's-Desired-Limits-Of-Nonoffensive-Positions. You're basically the biggest snowflake to come out of this place. You grew to hate and then started trolling this forum because it permitted people to offer views that offend you. You have essentially told people, multiple times, "I am not interested in your position, I in fact wish that people who are not part of a generally conservative opinion were not allowed to have the same rights to publish those opinions here" and then you once tried to participate in a 'conservative overthrow' of the board which really didn't make it past the planning phase, apparently. but we've the two of us had this discussion already — you are very predictable and you never learn.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
also my desire to give you a long Q&A about the fundamentalist, essentially theocratic mormon community you want to stake roots in, that whole plan of yours? My desire to hold a legitimate Q & A about what you think it should be that I first expressed in 2012 is still on the table. Please let me know at your earliest opportunity!
quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: See this is a really for real serious thing. I do, legitimately, want a long-term session of questions with Occasional to figure out the real picture of what he wants for a deseret nation and how he expects it to come to be. There are SO many questions, because the image of what the right and proper new mormon nation is going to be. We know some snippets, such as to what extent divorce is going to be disallowed shy of abuse, and more importantly we know that Occasional has given the a-ok for state-sanctioned torture and that anything, including cutting off a prisoner's genitals, is alright for the purposes of extracting military information. So Occasional's deseret would have torture camps. But this still tells us so little about his vision of theocracy and to what extent it would be modeled, as he described, on the lessons of saudi arabian society, and "true" mormonism. I WOULD LIKE TO GIVE IT ITS FAIR CHANCE TO BE DESCRIBED IN FULL WITHOUT ERROR.
Posted by naireveS (Member # 13604) on :
Hi. New here. Truth to be told, I am excessively intimidated to post anything, beyond this current message, after reading Samprimary's rantings.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
What do you find intimidating?
Posted by naireveS (Member # 13604) on :
Hello Tom
Samprimary looks like warning us all the time "do not mess with me" which is kinda scary you know specially if one disagrees.
Posted by kmbboots (Member # 8576) on :
If you have well-reasoned positions you should be able to back them up and there is nothing to fear from Sam. If not, maybe you will learn something. Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
Feel free to mess with Sam. He's a big softie. That said, if you disagree with Sam, you're probably wrong -- except when it comes to upcoming election results.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
shut up. trump will never win the election and that's that
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
I also have two generally super useful pieces of advice for new users on forums like these
1. don't be intimidated by hypothetical targeting as if like people are going to lash out at any user for the same reasons they are lashing out at (established, terrible) existing users, but 2. note that after our last few cycles of ridiculousness we assume there's only like a ten percent chance that you're actually a new user and most of us are automatically assuming that you just registered an alt sockpuppet and you're totally not new and you're either like someone in this thread or Clive Candy again or whatever. 'hi new voice here and let me just say' are alts until proven otherwise
Posted by naireveS (Member # 13604) on :
Looks like paranoia, yet , you have been here before me.
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
i'm new here and who is this "clive" ???
Posted by naireveS (Member # 13604) on :
Clive Barker?
Posted by Sean Monahan (Member # 9334) on :
quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: but we've the two of us had this discussion already — you are very predictable and you never learn.
Totally off-topic, but Sam, how did you type this emdash?
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
Practiced habit. Windows PC with number pad. I hold down the left alt key and type out 0151 on the numpad.
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
There's just not many people around, and it's Saturday.![[Frown]](frown.gif)