💾 Archived View for midnight.pub › posts › 2268 captured on 2024-12-17 at 18:49:01. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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/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 wrote (thread):
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 ;)
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.)
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....