So, you’re sitting there perusing GQ or IMHO or even The Pit. You see a thread that piques your interest. You decide to add your pearls of wisdom to the discussion at hand. You begin typing your reply and you get to some point where either your thoughts aren’t gelling like you thought they would or for some other reason you decide to simply hit the “back” button and forget about a contribution to this particular thread.
OK - so fess up, how many of us have decided not to post only after going and getting links and cites, pulling other poster’s quotes, formatting text, etc.
My worst? I recently decided against posting only after I had spent a good 20 minutes putting the post together and had previewed it four times… I realize that by viewing SOME of my posts, you may get the idea that I consider anything to be a valid post, but no.
So what leads you to start and then decide … “um, no.”
Oh man, I once spent about 30 minutes working on a post, looking up stuff on the web, and then I started thinking, this is really a great debate, not a general question, and I’m not really answering the question, I’m just posting my experience, which is not what you do in General Questions. Then I thought of all the grief I’d go through defending my answer and blah blah blah, just killed it.
Basically what leads me to start and then decide no is that the person wants an answer, not my personal experience on a similar topic.
p.s. This is my third time preparing a post for this thread (NOT)
I do that all the time. As you can see, I don’t post much, I write posts all the time thogh. I just think better of it before submitting. Sometimes it’s because someone else has said what I want to say already, other times I’m too irritated and don’t really want to start a flame war.
I’ve done that a few times in GD. There were a couple of threads (at separate times) dealing with the topic of mental illness. The last thread coincided with a huge family crisis involving my mentally ill brother. I typed for probably 15 - 20 minutes and decided the post was too emotional to submit. It was cathartic in some ways I guess, but I don’t regret not posting.
I also once typed up a long thought out post and previewed it several times. I pressed submit and the post was promptly eaten. I went back to the thread to reply again, and realized the thread had been resurrected from over a year before.
Probably a couple dozen times, usually in GQ. Usually, it’s a topic I feel somewhat expert in, and so I spend upwards of half an hour crafting an often multi-paragraph response. Then I hit “preview”, and see that someone else has said what I was trying to say. When this happens, I’ll completely scrap my post if it has nothing more to add, or edit my words down to add to what the previous posters have written.
Otherwise, it’s usually an anecdote or arguement that seems to go nowhere, or a few words that are essentially a “me too”.
I probably press “submit” on only a third of the posts I compose. It’s weird, 'cause I write slowly, trying to find a way to make a point without being misunderstood, to contirbute to the conversation, and without fluff.
Then I decide that my whole post is fluff, and I just kill it.
Also, when I try to post something funny, two out of three times it comes out too stupid to post. If you come across one of my attempts at humor, and it sucks - realize that there were probably two jokes even worse that I didn’t post.
I entered my SDMB adulthood on the day that I gained the ability to reread a potential post and decide that it really shouldn’t be submitted.
Many times, I realized I was just doing a me-too, or a FOAF report, or in general I wasn’t adding anything to the thread.
Several times, I finally realized on the third preview-and-revise that I didn’t really understand what a previous poster was saying, or that my resonse was going to provide more heat than light, and I cut a multi-paragraph, cross-referenced, snidely-worded monstrosity down to, “Uh, whoops, yeah, Poster X is right.”
And sometimes in the Pit I realize that I ought to just be let it go, be the bigger person, and walk away.
Quite a bit. I once wrote a lengthy piece which must have taken most of an hour to research and compose and then changed my mind.
Several times, I’ve been on the verge of hitting “Submit” and thought the better of it. Sometimes it was because I thought what I wanted to say was too controversial and decided to re-word it. A couple of times I feared being flamed, or thought that it wasn’t interesting enough or didn’t fully fit in with the topic at hand. (Though sometimes I just can’t help myself. If I’m not the Queen of Hijacks, I’m at least one of the Crown Princesses.)
Too little, on occasion. (There are a couple of posts that I regret, or at least would snip certain bits out of. Nothing too bad, but still…).
I’ve gone throught the steps the previous posters described, getting progressively more selective on what you should contribute. However, I try to do that before starting with a reply. Several times i’ve seen a thread and considered replying to it but postponed it for a while, then after an hour or so could see whether I would go through the effort of actually writing something or not. Once or twice a day I start with a small comment then decide against it. I’ve never thrown away a really extensive posts (although have had on eaten up).
I’m with you guys for being a little fastidious on adding to a thread. Since I’m not one of those posters gifted with a brilliant sense of humor, I feel a mere me-too is not really worthwhile to add.
I bet I have about 5000 pages of stuff I’ve written over the years for various forums and decided against posting at the last minute. I likely also have at least 2500 pages of stuff I’ve edited from posts which I did post.
Being new to this board, my answer is based on behavior on other boards. Much more often than not, I think. Unless I have a question, I usually don’t hit submit.
Often, it’s because I’m attempting to reason with someone who is unreasonable, or because I’m being short with the sort of person who, in real life, I must work with slowly and carefully because, you know, troubled people don’t respond well to complete honesty.
It depends. If I’m “feeling it” I’ll post basically everything I think of and feel pretty good about it. Sometimes, like right now, I just don’t feel it and delete most of posts after typing them. Or sometimes I’ll just decide not to post it right in the middle of a sentance.
Although it’s not a great number. Maybe 100-200 posts over my 2+ years here.
