<p>I remember some of those posters, especially sarorah’s colorful posts. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>LOL yeah, sarorah was notorious for that. :p</p>
<p>I wonder why no one else really picked up on that.</p>
<p>Nah, I screwed my goals by becoming too philosophical. Being too philosophical can be really dangerous to societal ambitions (especially when you start playing around with moral relativism).</p>
<p>Not a lot of people noticed me on the HS forums though - a lot more noticed me on the caltech forums, heh (i was like the neurotic youngster there)</p>
<p>i remember the times when the HS life forum was dominated by the massive summer program threads (like the massive RSI one). a lot of us people who knew we never had a shot at RSI nonetheless posted there for the hell of it. and when sarorah’s game thread was actually in HS Life (and when CC displayed our age instead of our thread count)</p>
<p>yeah, i remember how everyone’s post count went wayyy down after they moved “I have a new game.” into the cafe.</p>
<p>they should have a separate cafe post count.</p>
<p>yeah. i wonder how many posts i have made.</p>
<p>IK: I’m only anticipating for the day when you exceed your Post counts by your thread counts! :rolleyes:</p>
<p>meh, it’s not going to happen.</p>
<p>i want to quit CC. and i don’t really want to start any threads anymore.</p>
<p>HUH?
For real!
I REALLY was expecting this to happen…a non-administrator w/ 1000ish threads!
what college are you going to?</p>
<p>im tired. and i know that reputations on CC are extremely ephemeral, so what matters is having important posts/threads that are searchable for posterity. More pointless threads will make it harder for people to find my more useful/insightful posts/threads.</p>
<p>I made so many threads because I felt like making so many. it was kind of fun to have a ratio > 0.5. But that was all I aimed for.</p>
<p>I had intended to leave CC for a long time - the only reason why I’m still here is because I don’t really have another forum to go to (another active forum that I’d feel comfortable being an active member in). I forum for the sake of foruming I suppose.</p>
<p>hmm…thoughtful…and true. </p>
<p>did u ever try to quit CC before?</p>
<p>It’s not hard actually…again, it’s not easy…I personally think it is doable. For me I had greater success than failure at trying it.</p>
<p>Yes, several times. I’ve posted “I’m leaving threads” twice.</p>
<p>I did succeed when simfish stopped posting circa September 2005 (this came when I had a new peer group that later dissolved by itself - however - now I don’t see myself finding any new peer groups in a long time). Simfish rarely posted from September 2005 - February 2007. Then InquilineKea’s posting spree at CC started March 2007 and hasn’t ended since.</p>
<p>right now, there are like 3 websites that I have to check daily or else I’ll go insane.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Which is precisely why you have to stay (else you’ll be forgotten).</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Nobody ever uses the “find more posts by user” button. Especially if said user leaves and everyone starts forgetting about him. There’s just too many new interesting posts to bother with the old interesting posts. (This is also why the same threads pop up every year, over and over again – everyone thinks they’re too good for the search function.)
If you want to be remembered, you can’t just quit. You have to be prominent, whether it’s by being insightful or by being cliquey or by being annoying.</p>
<p>(If you want your so-called “insightful” posts to be read by more than two people, you may or may not find [this</a> article](<a href=“http://encyclopediadramatica.com/TL%3BDR]this”>http://encyclopediadramatica.com/TL%3BDR) relevant.)</p>
<p>When it comes to forum behavior, one has to think about small-number statistics. Especially forums like CC. Perhaps the vast majority of people who visit CC are people who visit CC threads through the google search feature, in which case a person’s current prominence does not matter (they usually only care about looking at the “best” posts they can find - and oftentimes it’s by people like sakky, who literally post manifesto after manifesto on CC). And while a very small minority of people may use the search feature, the possibility that a sufficiently small minority may actually use it is enough of a possibility to change my behavior. If a single person uses it, then I could consider it a “success” - after all - a single person can drastically change a person’s life outcome. </p>
<p>I know two people who did stalk me through forums. One came to Age of Kings Heaven in late 2002 and started reading pretty much all of the archived 2001 posts (and he used the more cumbersome search feature on those forums - including looking for my old threads => although he did it since I was active). Another googled simfish and ended up looking at a substantial number of my 2003-2004 blog entries. Those two cases could be considered successes. (but they were motivated to look through the old posts of me when I was very active). Still, on CC, activity may not count as much when it comes to those who only use the google search feature. </p>
<p>also someone else searched for my old posts and found out that I was the person she was thinking of. A lot of curiosity on CC seems to come from regional associations. By “useful” here, I am just talking about posts that indicate something about me that someone might find useful in identifying me. (but clearly, game thread posts are not “useful” in that sense). </p>
<p>and this might be a personal idiosyncrasy, but for me, there are few messages more rewarding than “wow, are you the same simfish who posts at AoKH?” or “small world, interesting”. (actually, a couple of people I know from AoKH did find my posts here)</p>
<p>In fact, one person e-mailed simfish in 2007 (about a post that simfish had made in 2005) - owing to the google search feature.</p>
<p>Of course, I’m no sakky. (actually, when I stalked sakky [sakky encourages people to use that button as he gets tired of repeating himself], I had a funny way of mustering the attention span to read his posts. I use the forum search engine, look for threads where sakky has an unusually high number of posts (there’s a button for that), and then archive all the links somewhere so that I could read them one-on-one. And then I also sent all the links to someone else, who also pointed out interesting quotes of sakky. It was very rewarding.). </p>
<p>But I’m more interested in finding people who might find my posts interesting enough to contact me (after all, at least I am unusually thoughtful on most of the forums i go to - and this thoughtfulness is the impression i want to carry out to people) and my interest is in maximizing probability over minimizing time usage, so I’d at least avoid posting really worthless posts so that once I’m gone from here, there is a possibility that some lurker 2 years from now might find me interesting enough to contact me. (the probability is not that high, but it’s still worth it in my opinion). </p>
<p>of course sakky doesn’t really want people to talk to him for some reason :p</p>
<p>==
and actually, one of my closest friends only e-mailed me after a period of stalking me on CC, Amazon.com, and AoPS (he valued me precisely for my thoughtfulness).** Then when I met an EEPer on CC and posted on his thread (omg, an acad on CC, small world), he immediately clicked on the “view last 500 posts button” (it was 500 back then). he did that again when he got to know me well.</p>
<p>These buttons are more rewarding when your signal/noise ratio is high (in fact, the reason why I gave up stalking you after reading your googlepage was because your signal/noise ratio was pretty low :p). On the Internet, stalking is probably the only way to get more information about a person before asking the pivotal question “should I e-mail this person?” (especially for those who rarely use IM)</p>
<p>**
</p>
<p>lol…seems like you take after him…you’re posting manifestos now.</p>
<p>But what matters more, really? (when it comes to the very rare person who will click on that button)</p>
<p>(a) those who won’t pay much attention to your posts?
or
(b) those who will pay attention to your posts?</p>
<p>(A mixture of long and short posts is probably the best way to attract people of types (b) - most people take the end of excessive numbers of short posts, and sakky is probably the only person I know with a high (long post) to (short post) ratio). Currently I think my ratio is probably too low (considering the crap I’ve posted in the cafe recently)</p>
<p>Or actually, a ratio of posts that contain useful information to posts that contain useless information is probably better (there is SOME correlation between longer posts and more useful posts as people generally don’t post paragraphs of blabber on an online forum, although conciseness should always be a top virtue as longer posts do come at the expense of attention spans). But most one sentence posts (the norm at CC, especially at the Cafe) have almost 0 useful information. [especially when the post search limit is 250 and no one uses search.php - hell - the person who wanted to stalk sakky at deeper levels was too lazy to use it even though he asked me how to use it]</p>
<p>Obviously, “useful” here can only be defined in the eyes of the beholder - some people only consider information about the person as “useful”, whereas other people consider long well-researched posts as “useful” (the latter group is probably a minority). Some people consider both as useful though. It depends on other factors like spare time (most CCers have little of that). Though at this point, I’m trying to weigh my posts towards attracting those who consider thoughtful posts as “useful”, rather than those who consider information about the person as “useful”.</p>