What's happening?

/me enters The Midnight.

It looks ghastly.

Doors and windows wide open, a hurl of the westerly wind will sweep scraps of deleted message notices everywhere. A wolf is sitting in a corner practicing their howling, it seems. Strange. There is dust pretty much everywhere, and ~bartender seems to be somewhere else. Sigh.

To be clear: practicing deletion of messages might be technically funny, however, it renders this place unusable. Dear ~tffb, stop doing this. And by the way, your use of words and hints and associations and games is way above my non-native English. If The Midnight would feature a "kill file" (old name for black list), I would have added your name to it long ago.

So, this place now seems to be unusable to me. Sad.

~ew

/me turns around without greeting ~bartender, without having a jar of delicious home made lemonade and without having a chat, and leaves.

wolfinthewoods

i do agree

the deletion is...disruptive

i do enjoy ~tffb's content

so i hope they're well

as far as howling

well i howl

because it

seems sensible

to howl

into the void at times

i like that

there's an intimacy

in posting our honest

feelings and thoughts

although i genuinely

appreciate the dialogue

between patrons

however brief and sporadic

i dig the

low key vibe

of there being

a certain lack of

i n t e n s i t y

that comes with responding

in other spaces

i can understand

the loss of what was

although as for this pub

i arrived

not too long ago

so have no idea

of what came before

but i can say

i've genuinely appreciated

the folks i've met

and interacted with here

and i've been given

heartening responses

indicating that others

feel the same

i can't speak for

everyone though

and healthy criticism

is always grateful

to this wolf ;)

inquiry

fundamentalists

are quick to judge

in prelude to

shunning/ghosting/canceling

it's a cornerstone

of the religion in which

self is god

wolfinthewoods

yeah

an odd post

since the discourse here

is nothing

if not civil

i can see the misgiving

with the

seemingly

graveyard of posts

it is...jarring

but, eh

it doesn't stop me

from enjoying this place

i do hope tffb is doing well

seems like

they're going

through a rough patch

but i'm sure they'll

speak further

when the time

is right

inquiry

I think there are times

when silence toward others

is other than civil

in a place purportedly a community

for example

wolfinthewoods

in this sense

transmitting a communique

and then jamming

the ability to respond back

inquiry

well put

I hope to remember

that

the next time I get in

a post-deleting mood

alex

Hm, I already was wondering what was off about this place when I returned but then again my medication may have blurred my vision from seeing the obvious.

While I'm not the type to call out people like that anymore, this kind of "mass-deletion" is very off-putting, especially after having read some of their posts. I get it, Midnight is a digital black/bulletin board where you can put up whatever you like, however I don't think Midnight is the place to constantly publish vents like on a typical "alt account" on popular microblogging services but then either don't know how to delete posts properly (which Midnight actually allows) or, what I personally consider more annoying, to look "mysterious" or "special" in some way. And as much as I don't want to assume the intentions of other users, Midnight used to feel like a place for those NOT wanting to be exposed to the usual Web 2.0 social media stuff, including this kind of user behavior you called out, so I wholly understand and share your frustrations.

But hey, when ~bartender is not around, we can raid the bar, right? (And while you're back on your way out, I'm taking a bottle of rum and try to comprehend the fact that Midnight is starting to look just like my parents' old pub that has been abandoned since the late 90's.)

inquiry

In the context of the purchasing/tipping currency arguably being words, I'm not sure relatively infrequent patrons are in the strongest position to evaluate the purchasing/tipping behaviors of the regulars.

inquiry

I can't speak for ~tffb, but I did the same a ways back, but long enough ago that none of my posts show on the first page.

For me it was mostly a response to concluding I didn't really belong, and thus didn't want my verbiage persisting here - a sort of "What's the point of having a persistent presence if/when almost nobody acknowledges posts and/or wishes to interact?"

That may sound ridiculous to those of you who seemingly have ice in your veins with respect to whether or not you're being read - a condition that seems practically a price of admission to "smol" spaces. But I quite simply have not yet arrived at that enlightened state of not giving a shit whether or not putting effort into writing is balanced by evidence that it had any value to others.

That said, there are half a handful of contributors here whose writing and "replies interaction" I regularly appreciate. So I lurk to reply. But I can't see regularly exposing my thoughts/experiences in a place where essentially nobody cares enough to acknowledge it, as petty as that may sound to the icy veined....

_That_ said, I've been injected text into online places for over three decades due to my naive belief that someone might find it worthwhile enough to respond to, and that such a response might lead to an ongoing interaction beneficial to both of us, and so it's long been a rather primary habit. My solution was to create a standalone blog that I mostly don't advertise save in low traffic, what-might-be-called "goofball" places. I create entries there many time a day, and do so while convinced a fantasy that others read and enjoy there is a reality. Oddly, what gives that fantasy a chance of feeling like a reality is knowing for sure nobody is reading it, because then I don't have to feel unworthy of acknowledgement or response because, well, I already know the readership is zero.

Does that make sense?

It was actually revelatory to me: that receiving no acknowledgement in a place where I know nobody is reading feels infinitely better than receiving next to no acknowledgement in a place where I know there are many readers. If anything, the latter feels somewhere between silly and embarrassing, a la "Ha! Look at that pathetic attention-seeking numbskull posting again despite all of us being able to see he doesn't receive any replies anyway! LOL!!!"

So, I honestly don't get how followers of the smol religion do it. I can merely imagine several explanations ranging from selfless enlightenment to being dead inside.

What I know for sure is it feels very... not _wrong_, but pointless to me: a bunch of people posting in the same place, but only a very small percentage interactive over the thoughts.

Then it occurs to me that many Smolians come from a place of having over-indulged "social media". Well, I didn't. I was an early adopter of the likes of Facebook and Twitter, but fairly quickly an early quitter, because most of my online experience was USENET longform, and so posting brief quips, photos, etc. seemed like settling for way less. So I didn't come to smol spaces as therapy from addictive short form interactions. But since most others seemingly have, I wind up feeling out of place, which feeling can quickly degenerate into feeling unworthy of the silent masses' acknowledgement.

Heh.. I hesitate to post this reply, because I'm mostly on a path to becoming free of attachment to this an so much else, and writing this has stirred emotion in the vicinity of frustration that I'll likely look back upon (you know, three seconds have hitting the "Reply" button..) as reasonable inner flogging for sinning-against-that-path.

But you've heard of backsliding, no? :-)

I guess I'm just a sore loser, where what was lost was the glory days of pre- "Eternal September" USENET, where spending goodly time/energy creating and polishing lots of paragraphs guaranteed more gloriously inline-quote-infested long replies than one had time in the day to absorb, let alone respond to. But it was fun as hell trying to keep up with, because the exchanges were challenging, enlightening, and guaranteed more of the same.

Oh well....

kavehorvanya

oh this is the first time ive seen anybody acknowledge the loneliness of posting in this place, it's quite cathartic. obviously i love the Midnight, even if i'm of those people who dont post or reply often and so am equally the cause of the feeling as well as a victim of it... thank you for sharing your thoughts!! :)

inquiry

I've still not figured out what keeps drawing me here. It could be as simple as habit. But I think it's more experience-based knowing that there'll be an occasional explosion of activity, and it's usually super fun and intelligent, and I just basically don't want to miss out on it.

In that sense it reminds me of an extremely difficult two-deck solitaire card game my sister taught me long ago. It's not unusual to not win for *months*, even when playing it several times a day of that span. But I just sorta wanta be there to witness it happen given the odds against it.

Hello ~inquiry, thanks for going through the troubles of explaining a possible answer.

a sort of "What's the point of having a persistent presence if/when almost nobody acknowledges posts and/or wishes to interact?"

Well, while I can accept that others wish for interaction, I do not write for "them". At least not as a reason or excuse to write. I know, that readers exist and very occasionally I receive a quote or email message. However, I have been called guilty of producing almost exclusive "tech type" content. And yes, that's what I mainly write about. In the hope that it may be useful to others, as an acknowledgement to those who answer a lot of my technical questions by their writing. I have voice my personal strong opinions a few times, e.g. here now, or when ew0k excluded some gemini site from their ~antenna feed and the word "censorship" was thrown in. My choice. If no one reads my posts, fine. I have referred back to my own posts in the past. So they are for my future self as well.

Any expectation of interaction is quickly leading to extended online time, the word "addiction" comes to mind. And that is exactly how the likes of twitter and facebook work. This is why books on "Digital Minimalism" even exist. The question has been raised here not long ago. I have not been on social media other than uucp some 30 years back. I am stuck in the age of mailing lists :).

There is one more comment I wish to make. By deleting their own posts, ~tffb has also rendered the threads with answers unusable, they very much n-ack-ed the existence of those very interactions, they wished for. I don't get this.

Cheers!

inquiry

> Hello ~inquiry, thanks for going through the troubles of
> explaining a possible answer.

You know, now that you mention it, it is trouble. :-) It takes time to "get my thoughts together", wonder if I'm "missing" something, wonder how saying varieties of anything might lead to winding up alone in a space, then there's the actual writing which, of course, is fraught with errors along the way, not to mention noticing even more errors after post what one thought was error free.

Writing verbiage is right up there with writing software in the self immolation game, as it were.

Oh well. I go through cycles of things seeming important, then other things seeming important to the point of forgetting what previous important things were, all the way to concluding this is all a massive waste of time.

But then a moment of longing for interaction occurs, and I'm back to getting lost in a whole lot of imagination of persons, interaction scenarios, and much associated blahdie blah.

I keep coming back to a permanent, general purpose non-attachment seeming like the best solution. But then this "self" seems more like a piece of styrofoam being tossed about at sea than something determining its path/direction.

Thanks for replying!