Why are you not posting

There had to be one person on ilx who liked me better

Interesting post from mike t-d...I've been here for a similar length of time, find it fascinating, and am also very much in the 'observer' category.

The reason is time really. I feel that to be a core committed member you really have to be dedicated to putting the hours in and following and responding in real time to the cut and thrust of posts. As it is, I'm content to dip in - mostly as a passive consumer.

I’m sorry, deems, it’s just that my main commitment itt is to relieve lurkers of their lingering shyness. Not being arsed to post is a perfectly legitimate position, however.

I applaud the effort

Wouldnt think of neither luna nor mike-t as particularly invisible posters at all fwiw

There had to be one person on ilx who liked me better

― scampless, rattled and puce (gyac), Wednesday, 3 March 2021 17:17 (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

POLL

On Deem's observation that "we discussed a lot more stuff and lot more breezily here once", this is true and there's often a rush of nostalgia when I see an early ile thread. People were a lot more open about their personal situations in the early days, which made for more distinctive voices - but quite understandably that kind of candour has mostly disappeared.

people are more wary about sharing stuff on internet now, i think

I think these are in fact less dangerous times to post personal information. Much less chance of someone, for example, idk...making a ytmnd of your sexual confessions using a picture someone else lifted unasked from your Facebook. If anything we should feel more comfortable posting all sorts of nonsense

I'm posting less - mostly due to being increasingly insanely busy for a way longer stretch of time than I had hoped/anticipated - but I do like to think, or like to believe, ilx is a place one can always return to, even after a (long) hiatus. Which isn't about having earned your stripes or being what mike describes as being or having become "an ilx person".

I don't see colour ilx people, I see a community with people drifing in and out, some always here, some perhaps overstaying their welcome, but a loosely connected yet connected array of individuals all the same. There is no "ilx person" imo, nor should there be.

But this is all perspective, I can see how others feel different. Regardless mike, to me you are def part of the community.

I really appreciate this place. Thank you all for tolerating me.

Thanks LBI, I appreciate that.

Seconding that - you're OG as far as I'm concerned!

But the newbies are also welcome I *guessss*

I think my brain has always had a bit of trouble with the text only format in terms of tracking individual personalities. A group of the longtime posters that I can match to a face or some other more straightforward memory, are easier to respond to. The new layers have gotten deeper and denser over time and without energy to sift it all, it’s maybe better to opt out.

as a lurker, as a college student, i used to feel like mike the diva felt, overwhelmed by how knowledgable and interesting the people here seemed, especially compared to the rest of the internet. these days i feel too close to ilx to really say what it's like, if it is good or bad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_z_UEuEMAo

when i started posting, i was super intimidated. i think i started posting here -- and posting in a very transparent way, just writing what i thought even when i knew it would sound dumb to the cognoscenti -- because at some level, way below the threshold of consciousness, i wanted to be rejected by this community i admired. this is a weird thing to admit -- i just thought of it and i'm not even sure it's true. but when think back to who i was at 24, i really hated myself. i had no career prospects and i had just been dumped by a person i thought i was going to spend my life with. in any case, this community didn't reject me after all. that meant a lot to me -- probably more than i even realize.

again, i'm backtracking a lot here. i am no longer starstruck by the posters whose bylines i recognized or whatever. but yeah, when i was in my early twenties, i absolutely felt that way.

always liked your posts treeship

thanks dan. same to you.

treesh our origin stories are remarkably similar tbh

it's weird because i, in most respects, have a pathological fear of rejection. something to discuss the ol' psychoanalyst's couch.

Eh not the whole profile now buck, just the origin story

Physician, heal thyself.

fwiw mike-t-diva I always think of you as one of the disco experts around here

I would post more but often what I have to contribute is redundant - nearly always, someone has already said it faster and with more eloquence than me. When I see people casually tossing out posts full of insight and with flair and humour, I want to be positively contributing to the conversation in the same way.

Yeah, disco and Discogs are mostly where you'll find me posting...

I feel like I should post more, tweet more, email more, zoom more, talk to people 2m apart more. Shit is exhausting tbf.

I would post more but often what I have to contribute is redundant - nearly always, someone has already said it faster and with more eloquence than me. When I see people casually tossing out posts full of insight and with flair and humour, I want to be positively contributing to the conversation in the same way.

this for me.

but also I'm busier than ever off board and can't even lurk as much as I used to. hard to believe but there are even days where I don't look at ilx at all!

mike t-diva, I relate strongly to a lot of your post. I was a lurker far longer than I ever posted. Started posting again because a) this place has become much smaller, and because of that more tolerant; and b) from a selfish pov, I might get the occasional zing or apathy, but at least I don't get someone's racist friend chiming in as I would on Facebook or an avalanche of look-at-this-nazi posts (meaning quotes of actual nazis, not that I get called a nazi) as I do on twitter. If you have numerous online communities outside of social media, gotta say I'm jealous!

I lurked for years before posting, never posted enough to be a regular. Went through periods of not posting at all because I didn’t feel that I could commit the time and energy to even be noticed, let alone engaged with. But thanks in part to the occasional otm and an unexpected excelsior, I’ve come around to being comfortable as an occasional poster, and I don’t feel shunted aside for not being a regular anymore. All it takes really is a bit of friendly interaction and engagement to make someone feel welcome, and for all the talk of how ILX used to be different and better in some ways, I think that’s one thing that nu-ILX does better. There are people here I think of as friends - whether it’s because of a kindly interaction at some point, possibly forgotten by them but not by me, or because of my early sojourn in the slack, at a time when I really needed people and they were there for me. But as the slack grew I found it impossible to be an occasional contributor and still keep up, whereas back here in the warm confines of ILX, it seems to work out fine.

i've already embarrassed myself enough

But as the slack grew I found it impossible to be an occasional contributor and still keep up, whereas back here in the warm confines of ILX, it seems to work out fine.

Very much my experience as well. As LBI put it upthread, you can drift in and out of ILX and remain a member in spirit, and this flexibility is part of the appeal, as though every return were a new beginning in medias res.

For a moment I thought that was referring to the ILX Slack channel.

You were correct!

oh wait yes lol

“as the slack grew” must have seemed a cryptic phrase haha

nashwan sowed seeds of doubt in my mind and so for a sub-caffeinated split-second there I parsed 'in the slack' as slang for 'in the slammer'.

*dialectal slang

tbf nobody keeps up with the slack

i think i'm somehow not emotionally cut out for the strange sort of public intimacy that comes with being a truly prolific poster. i was 18 the first time i posted in ilx's tetchier days and i received a fairly catty response from a (former) regular who i promptly insulted as if this were some random internet shitbin. i was still wrapping my head around the idea of a forum where posters generally knew and respected each other and so i was embarrassed enough to stop posting for a while. i got into tons of great music, posted sporadically and stupidly from time to time, grew up a bit, stopped smoking weed, posted more coherently and felt a bit more "accepted" but never enough to become a regular. i've been reading and intermittently posting here for well over a decade, yet i'm still very much on the periphery. i keep a barrier up, though i have a ton of love for posters who don't

I don't have anything interesting to say on here. What's changed I think, is not that I have run out of interesting things to say on here, it's that I have become painfully aware that the things I have to say on here are not interesting.

I don't mind joining in chatter / recommendations from time to time, and I do mostly enjoy reading the conversations.

like mike t-diva & others here i went through periods of lurking and posting over 16(?) years, making it through The Brutal Years by changing usernames and never ever ever talking about myself to avoid provoking zings and pileons. until at some point after a period of lurking and getting a sense that the sharp edges had dulled a bit around here i decided it felt weirder to lurk anymore, like i wasnt admitting how connected i felt to this place, and decided to start posting more openly and treating it like what it was for me - a community that was very important to my online life. (although my posting style has not really improved over the last 15yrs and remains close to what boxedjoy described, redundant thoughts others have said faster & better.) tbh looking back now i regret staying aloof for so long and not having it in me to put myself out there more during the years of ilx's tumultuous adolescence, for the relationships i didnt build.

I don't even know if I'm posting -- like I have no idea whether my level of engagement with ILX is what people are referring to as "regular" -- I have been doing it a long time though, fortunately I didn't know my shit was supposed to be original or interesting

I think most of us posters are like anonymous ancient or medieval workers, each carrying a humble stone to add to a structure that becomes a great pyramid or cathedral.

(This is really "why ARE you posting".)

An Elder Brain Architect-Deity guides our hands.

but whose stones are the most otm?

“as the slack grew” must have seemed a cryptic phrase haha

― epistantophus

haha, as i was first reading your paragraph i honed in on that too and smiled at the ambiguity :)

i have dipped into the slack a few times, and in a different time for me, or different circumstances now, i think i'd enjoy it there too. but i already have a few "slack-like" places with friends and people i know, and i prefer to stay on the slightly more asynchronous ilx boards, even though when i get Pepped up i may post so often that it's like a yahoo! chat in 1998 (which was my posting prime, tbh)

i would like if everyone on this thread posted more, just throwing that out there, but i understand why you might not. fwiw, it took me a long time to feel welcome here, and part of it was just being ignored for a few years and just sticking around until enough of the old schoolers had left that i had graduated to middle school. or 6th grade. one of those. i'm still in 6th grade, on ilx, and i am the tallest boy.

anyway, i guess i just hope that the people who don't post are doing it for positive reasons and because it fits their lives and personalities and preferences for communicating, and not because they're worried what people will say, or worried about that sting when you put a lot of time into something and no one responds. or someone responds in a dismissive way. or i accidentally post a giant image of a cat puking right after what you posted, but it had nothing to do with you and was actually part of a long-running series of cat puking images that i've been posting for years that are all connected, and yet no one has made the connection yet. like that, kind of. in can sting, in the moment. it's easy for me to advise "just don't worry about it!" or, on the exact other side of the advice-effort-continuum: "think of it as like a writing exercise or prompt for yourself that is valuable in and of itself, and if someone else has something to add, all the better", or in the middle, "try asking a question of someone else" or "find the one thread that makes sense to you and become part of the walls", or any other nonsense. it's all dumb. it's all good, it's all pointless. none of this truly matters. so if you're happy to lurk, then i'm happy to know you're lurking. but if you're discontented with lurking, in the words of Peter Sloterdijk, "You Must Change Your Life"