Random Synapses

Hello everyone, my name is Titel and I am a former forum addict. It’s been a few weeks since my last forum post, and the craving for visiting them and posting is 99% over. It feels good to break out of the “waking up, checking e-mails, visiting forums, posting replies, oops I have to rush to shower or I’ll be late for class” pattern. The day suddenly has 2 to 6 hours more to use for my own benefit, not others’. But how did all this start?

I’ll briefly get into how I discovered computers, after my first Z80 and then the first contact with an IBM PS/1. Should be sufficient to say that from early childhood, I found out that there are so many things I could learn by myself and very easily. Instead of playing hide-and-seek with other kids in the neighbourhood, I was reading Jules Verne’s amazing books. Needless to say, by the time I was 14, I already read a decent list of books about personal computers, knew how to use them and understood how they worked - without owning or actually using one yet. My parents were getting one shock after another, when I was visiting computer fairs to ask detailed questions to the exhibitors and getting many “uhh, we’ll have to get back to you after we find the engineer who knows this” answers, or when I received a $10 XT PC with monochrome monitor, 360 kB, 5.25″ floppy drives and no hard drive, and I ran my fingers acrossed the keyboard typing DOS commands as if I’ve been doing it forever. It was really something back then, in a post-communist country cut off from the capitalist world and the scientific advances in electronics and computers for so many years.

The story begins in high school, when I had more knowledge about computers than my professors for computer classes. Labs were boring, implementing trivial sorting algorithms when I had already gone to terminate-and-stay-resident programs and finding all prime numbers up to 1000 for a math homework years before. From reading books, I switched to reading specialty computer magazines: BYTE, CHIP, PC Report - the last one was initially printed like a newspaper, but had a section where readers could ask questions and answer others’ questions. Since I was one of the few who knew how to log on to a linux server and use the e-mail system, I started submitting miniature articles as answers to some of the questions asked in the monthly magazine. To my surprise, the magazine published them, and the other readers voted my answers repeatedly as “best answer of the month.”

Soon, this activity became more interactive, the magazine opened a website for questions and answers from readers, so we didn’t have to wait for another month until they were published on paper. Imagine how “elite” I was - there was no such thing as an Internet Service Provider in my home town back in the mid ’90s, and I was proud to have access to my high school’s server and connect to the Internet with a blazing fast 14.4k modem. Laugh all you want, but it really was cutting-edge. Anyways. I continued writing answers, the magazine continued publishing them, the readers continued appreciating them, and I was receiving awards from the magazine - free subscription, or a prize in money. But having my name showing up in the top of each month’s best answers was great. Even a “thank you” received by e-mail was enough of a reward for me.

And this is how I became addicted to write answers from my continuously growing experience and knowledge, and be appreciated for it. It’s interesting how the brain can become addicted to dopamine (the “feel good” hormone) and push me to write more helpful answers to receive more praise. “Bark! Good dog, here’s a treat for you.” See the resemblance?

However, PC Report’s PC Concrete interactive discussion forum became too slow, because all messages were being checked by the discussion moderators and only published online a few days later. Switching to automated bulletin boards (which I call discussion forums) was imminent and brought a lot of benefits, such as the ability to edit my own messages and posting messages in real time. So, in the past few years I became a regular on several forums, enjoying participating to the community and even being named volunteer moderator or administrator with more duties thanks to my responsible nature and getting involved so much. I had the chance to practice creative writing often, to share knowledge and learn from others’ experiences, to make lots of new friends - and I’m grateful for that. But… I wasted so much time on forums, so much work for helping others for free when I could have invested in my own studies or business, and especially so many moments of anger when certain people think it’s fun to take my messages into little pieces out of context and “prove” that I’m wrong. Why bother with them, when they can’t appreciate free help?

So, I’m done with participating on forums. And you know what? It feels good. It was about time. All good things must come to an end. Years have passed, I have other priorities in life than doing voluntary work and postponing my own career.

My best regards to my former forum colleagues.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 10th, 2004 at 6:12 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.