“Talk softly and carry a big stick” was Teddy Roosevelt.
Speaking Quotes of Franklin:
Speak and speed: the close mouth catches no flies.
In a discreet man’s mouth, a public thing is private.
He that speaks much, is much mistaken. {mine}
Of course Mark Twain said:
“It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”
Jim
More and more. I read something and it pisses me off or I know it’s flat out wrong, but then I say to myself–do you really want to go there? Do you want to enter the fray and have to defend your remarks and :rolleyes: cite every syllable :rolleyes: ? Sometimes I think the SDMB defines picayune obsessiveness.
Most times it’s no, I don’t. I have slowed my posting down considerably, but I still enjoy the light banter and fun stuff here.
Nothing drives me battier than when an OP states something about blue and someone else comes in and says “you didn’t/shouldn’t include royal blue”. And then a few other posters comment that “blue” means all blues or that OP meant only sky blue and we’re off on the Tangential, Irrelevant Express (again!).
Oops-now I’m OT. Damn.
but yes, often now, I don’t contribute.
Teddy R., you say? Well that doesn’t surprise me because he also invented bi-focal glasses. And he put a chicken in every pot. And he conquered the Yucatan. He was a kick-ass president.
About one in four. I’ll get it halfway typed out, and then just kill the window. Sometimes I’m not as witty or insightful as I hoped I would be.
Whenever the depression is acting up. I’ll start typing, and a little voice in the back of my head will remind me that no one really wants to hear what I have to say. So. yoink. Deleted.
Interesting. I hardly ever abort a new thread. I guess that if I’ve gone through the process of conceiving of a new thread and deciding it was worthy enough to warrant clicking on the little button with the inkwell on it, the momentum that I’ve already built up carries me through to the conclusion.
I’ve killed more new threads than I’ve started. Usually I realize that while I think it’s amusing or interesting I don’t think others would.
I probably delete 10-20% of my replys before hitting submit. Again, in those cases I think what I was going to post is uninteresting or unfunny (I hang in MPSIMS alot) or just plain stupid.
I was going to reply to this thread, but then I decided not to.
Seriously, I do this every once in a while—start typing a reply but then don’t submit it. I’ll figure it’s very likely that someone else will come along and make the point I’m trying to make, but better and more clearly. Or someone who knows what they’re talking about better than I will provide a more authoritative answer. Or that not enough people will get my allusion or find my smart-aleck remark funny.
Maybe a couple times a day, I’ll start to post a reply to something, read what I have to say to that point and scrap the thing. I think it has more to do with my mood that day, or what else is going on. Sometimes I feel more like contributing than other times.
I don’t necessarily feel a need to be useful or profound, I don’t think we need to hold ourselves to that standard.
I would say I do this the majority of the time, especially within the last few months. I read the boards a ton still, but post about 10% of what I used to.
All the time. Heck, I’m here every day, and just look at my post count.
That probably didn’t need to be said, did it?
It is pretty common for me. I often don’t have the liesure to articulate well what I am trying to say. Sometimes I find that I start a post and then feel it is poorly phrased, but I just don’t have the time to spend on it, so I will kill it.
Often for me, especially when the scrollbar activates in the Quick Reply box.
Quite alot. After surfing the pit for a few months it’s easy to see it doesn’t take much to get your ass in hot water . That , and the newby factor makes it seem a waste of time. I wouldn’t have posted here except that was a question I felt I could relate to.
About half my posts get trashed before I hit submit. Sometimes I realize that I have nothing really useful to post; other times my job intrudes before I can properly finish.
Most of the time. Ususaly because I feel that what I’m about to post was already answered and so would be redundant or worse, blatantly copying the idea.
What she said.
The posts I kill fall into two categories. Either it’s a joke that didn’t turn out to be very funny, or it’s an answer to the OP that I’m not really sure of/have no idea where to find a cite.
If I’m putting myself down a lot that day, the percentage goes way up. In the last four days, I must have trashcanned 3 dozen jokes and 10 answers, thinking, “Nobody really wants to read this.”
More often than not – probably half.
I’ll read something I wrote and be disappointed in how poorly I communicated. My prose is usually flatter than hammered shit.
Thank you for that.