Forum motivation question

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gyraf

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Hi Group!

Got a question from an anthropologist doing a study on DIY forum culture.

Simple enough: What is your motivation for participating in discussions with and helping people that you've never met?

Answer is I simply haven't thought about this - yes, it's motivating and definitely worth the effort most of the time.

But how/why?

Any thoughts?

Jakob E.
 
I do it out of self interest. The idea being, that we all know different stuff. Therefore, if we all make the effort to answer what we can - hopefully - the knowledge base will average out enough so that when I need a question answering, I get an answer  ;) Does that make sense? I guess there's also the fact that it's rewarding to know you've helped someone sort out something they've been struggling with.
 
Interesting question.

For me, the chance to develop my electronics skills and knowledge with the help of many very clever people here.
Then passing on advice and "tips" to others who are just starting out = very satisfying to solve a problem and help
someone finish a project that they will use and love as it's hand made.

There are also several people here that I know personally and it's a great bunch of "like minded" people.
:)
Marty.
 
It's an interesting question! I agree that it is nice to help out, and also a great place to come if you have a problem.

I think a lot of us like solving problems and puzzles too.

Or perhaps we are still like the kid in school who puts his hand up and says "I know that one". I guess the kids who stared at the window don't come here....

:)
 
Mannng .... give the guy a soldering iron for a couple of minutes - I'm sure you've got a couple of spares - and perhaps he's going to "get it" all on his own, no questionnaires needed.

I mean, there's no thing like a first-hand experience, right?

WeCanDoItPoster.jpg


eh eh ... so sweet, uh?
 
I think there's an intrinsic satisfaction in being able to help someone solve a problem...and it's reinforced when someone else is able to reciprocate that back to you.  I feel indebted to someone that's helped me, and I feel resolved when I can pay it forward to someone else.
 
It could joke that it's a purely selfish thing.

Think about how many activities you do that return more than what you put in? I put in one post I deem "useful" to someone else, but in return I get 5 posts that help me.

Also, I can't think of many places in the real world, where you can have access to so much relevant knowledge. Hackerspaces come close, but even at my local one in Dallas, the only audio folks are "hifi" with wildly varying opinions, rather than facts! ;)

 
Humans are social animals and internet communities satisfy a human need for contact with other humans.

Different individuals participate in different ways for different personal reasons, sometime multiple different reasons for a single participant.

JR

 
I can never pay back all of the help I got when I first started in audio, but I can start to pay "forward" via forums like this.
Best,
Bruno2000
 
It's in a way helping myself.
It has much to do with my answer to the question: "Who am I?"
Are we separated individuals or different facets of the whole creation?

Another perspective is: It just works. If everybody help each other it makes the world a wonderful and rich place.

:)
 
gyraf said:
Simple enough: What is your motivation for participating in discussions with and helping people that you've never met?

Back when I was a newbie at live sound mixing, I discovered a forum on CompuServe (!) which was very helpful. That forum eventually migrated to the WWW.

My participation in the forums was two-fold.

One, it's basically pay-it-forward. I had a lot of questions when I started out, and I thought that as I gained experience (as well as providing the perspective of someone who's an EE) I'd be able to help others.

The second is that, as JR says, we're social animals. As I started touring, I met IRL ("in real life," as they say) a lot of the folks with whom I'd been interacting on the forum. It certainly helps to have "met beforehand" a person who works for a band or a venue on day-of-show.

Oh, yeah, regarding that forum (it's now the ProSoundWeb Live Audio Board), at some point a couple of years ago, three things happened.

One, there seemed to be an increase in the number of clueless newbies whose posts were written in a way to make the person seem as if their knowledge was greater than it actually was. I was one of the old farts who were "present at the creation," and my role seemed to be as one of the guys who would "chief" the newbies. ("Chiefing" was a term used by the founder of the LAB, and basically it meant "schooling the dipshits so hard that they'd think twice about even posting on the forum." Yes, it was mean, but it was really "welcome to the Real World, kid," as the Butch Hancock song went.) And really, how many "what's the best kick drum mic?" threads are necessary? (Answer: identically ZERO.)

Two, the forum went through a weird gyration where they were moving over to a new forum server/software and the Powers That Be decided arbitrarily to shitcan the old threads. There was a lot of complaining and such about the moderation and the control of the forum (I was, and am, supportive of the board moderators, who I've met on gigs and such) and that overwhelmed the S/N of useful posts.

And third, we had a kid (he's almost 5 now) and I decided that I was way too old to work in a small rock club as a sound guy, so I gave it up (and I don't miss it). Now I just work for one band who are old friends and we do shows one weekend a month.

So at that point, I decided to step away from that forum, as well as a couple of others. Because I realized that I didn't care.  I did get some emails from friends on the LAB (as well as from those who were part of a splinter forum) asking me to participate (mainly because someone probably needed chiefing), but I told them basically what I wrote above. They all understood complete.

-a
 
gyraf said:
What is your motivation for participating in discussions with and helping people that you've never met?

My motivation in participating in discussions is to expand my knowledge.

In helping others is believing in common good.
 
Many answers... I can give my ideas and get others ideas, all together can develop something that couldn't be developed alone and maybe it gives me tools for work sometime... also knowledge, I give my own and if something is wrong in any level someone would tell me and I get from their own knowledge.

Give and recive, not just give I guess... Knowledge, ideas and development for me and others!

JS
 
I put in one post I deem "useful" to someone else, but in return I get 5 posts that help me.

my reason is to learn, I have my own forum and I have learnt that the place to learn is where are questions.

the second reason is diy people is a different kind, I can talk hours of geek/nerd stuff but most of the people are not interested. I have traveled and known diy people from Colombia, USA, Germany, Sweden, Finland and we have the same interes in this kind of things maybe we even think in the same way.

sociologist are studing how forums are developing and some think that forums will change in the near future. we have had two sociologist studies of the comunity of my forum.
 
The content of this forum represents a sweet spot between my career (EE) and hobby (writing/playing/recording music).  There are so few people that I know in the real world who share these two interests that I often turn to this place to connect me to a community of like-minded individuals.

 
My motivation to participate in discussions and helping people I have never met began with a quest for knowledge. I encounter RTFM issues all the time, however, a lot of manual are not so easy to understand. A different perspective can bring clarity to new concepts. I also like to think I'm a smarty pants, and need to be humbled often. I joined a music recording forum to learn what a driver is because I started to repair digital equipment at my day job. I joined this forum to try to keep in touch with tube technology, some day I'll go back to that for my day job.
 
Helping it perpetuate , stay alive, means there will be this resource when I need it ,
I try to help when I can actually be of help , and after a while there is a sense of pride & investment
It's more Home or  " my place " then any other grp , so you don't want to see it diminished
 
Am I gonna be the only one who thinks foolishly he's on a mission to dispel myths, fight audiophoolery and try to herald the fact that audio is actually a science?
I'm not here to give lessons either (sometimes I receive well-deserved lessons), but I think that clearing the path for newbies is something that helps them accessing knowledge more quickly.
I've always had this attitude in my professional life, where I was constantly facing uneducated customers making uneducated choices; I've spent time with them, explaining, teaching things they didn't have access to. A sound engineer doesn't need an EE diploma, but I think he needs more formal scientific knowledge than what he gets when he does the SAE.
I did that because it made my life easier and it proved successful.
I had a terrible frustration in my youth not having a real mentor; audio technology was commonly reffered to by teachers as "music-box engineering".
I had to learn the hard way, by begging electronic magazines and equipment manuals; fortunately, in that time there were magazines like Popular Electronics and Le Haut-Parleur where you had some schematic analysis; I still remember the day I saw the schemo of a Truvox tape machine!
Today it's much easier for a newbie to get all sorts of information, but I think they need help to discriminate tbetween quality information and smoke.
Now I don't really know why I do that; probably I have a secret inching of being a guru, having a bunch of disciples in adoration... :-\
Given some thought, it may come from the fact that I actually HAD had a mentor, my dad, who explained me the vapour engine, the petrol engine, the diesel engine, the gearbox, the differential, the rudiments of electricity. It may be a way of repaying him...
 

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