Back in Jan '01, this was my first one. I think I lurked for about a week, then dived in.
I’m still lurking here. I found the SDMB in 2000, loved it, posted once or twice, then got shy and wandered off to Livejournal where the communities are many and mods are few. LJ is like the wild west where men are men and bloggers are scared, so I don’t have to worry about leaping in with muddy boots on. This place is much more refined, I don’t want to taint it with my peculiar brand of natter but I loooove to read as it’s like the best magazine around.
Still, 6 years of lurking. How embarrassing.
None.
Smae now I come across links in Google, browse them for whatever I am looking for, and then forget all about them - usually due to the literacy levels of the contributors.
None. I always hated message boards, chat rooms, etc. and never participated. Then a friend (years-long SDMB lurker) pointed me in this direction. I can hardly say I ever “lurked,” since I probably signed up for a Guest membership within a week of first laying eyes on this site, and paid to join shortly thereafter.
Since then I spend way too much time on here to look at anything else.
Not too many. I used to lurk/post a little at a couple of right wing messageboards, including the Ann Coulter chat board back when it was on EZboard. No, it’s not like I was right wing. It was just fun to post my views and have everyone go Bensonhurst.
There’s nothing quite like getting flamed on a right wing messageboard. You find more explanation marks in their posts than you do the letter “e”. They’ll call you every name in the book in all caps, but half the time they forget and hit the shift key at the beginning of a sentence ("yOU ARE A LEFTIST SCUMBAG!! fUCKING DIE!!!). They’ll call you a moron while misspelling “illiterate”. Fun times! Eventually, they got fed up and banned me (several times, actually. I didn’t know how to quit, and they didn’t know how to search by IP addresses), and I finally tired of getting all the monkeys to throw shit. It was just too easy to get them worked up.
I picked one right wing MB to lurk at, but even that got old. I haven’t been to another board in months.
And the hell of it is, I’m not even a leftist. I’m a moderate conservative.