Forum motivation question

For me it boils down to learning new things and the joy I feel when I manage to help others with my ideas.

I guess it's all about having ... giving ... sharing .. and receiving 


(thanks to Joey Tribbiani)

@ andy... Andy was also our resident language/grammar pedant who raised snarkiness in his slap downs to high art. His absence as language cop is/was missed, while the S/N was never as good as the very old days before it became a business that profited more from number of eyeballs than quality of participants. Fools were not tolerated in the very old days, and you had to get past the junk yard dogs.

Another trend that I see across many different forums is kids who grew up with google and instant internet answers, so get annoyed when real people don't accommodate their every whim (hey can you give me a schematic with values for that?) .

@ abby  Trying to stamp out audio-phoolery is a never ending task. I used to write a column called "Audio Mythology" back in the 1980's and some of those very same tired old myths are still with us. A friend has even given seminars at AES trying to skewer popular misinformation but magical thinking persists. It is part of the human condition and some merchants profit from it. This forum is really pretty rational, at least the parts of it I frequent. 

All web communities evolve as membership turns over, and different personalities become more or less of the mix. A little like herding cats. Ethan does a good job here.  Thank you Ethan

JR

2nd that , thank you Ethan

To learn.
One of the most important things to learn is that you don't know anything, in the context of everything.

"We know nothing at all. All our knowledge is but the knowledge of schoolchildren. The real nature of things we shall never know." - Albert Einstein

Hence, since the nature of people is to be a little selfish, I can only learn from others by giving whatever I can to others.
I am here to share, and to learn.
If I don't give something out, I can't expect people to give something back.

Apart from the motives altruistic and genuinly of the sharing/mentoring type noted already, I can't help thinking that sometimes it is more to do with either furthering commercial interests or exercising narcissist needs.

Surely the forum police, winnowing out those without 'true intent' and all that is understandable, and maybe even laudable.
Many of life's important lessons are delivered behind the seeming harsh hand of truth hard won.

But there is also the predictable incidence of posting hostile opinion and directives for no seeming reason except to satisfy the need for self aggrandisement.

The basic and tiresome 'everything I know is TRUE because I am by my own hand, WONDERFUL' dogma.

Ozymandias said something similar 

The forum exactly that - a place for the expression of most of the common human motivations.

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.

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Yes!
And it's hard to find a forum that is not full of people that are clueless but just want to have a stab at trying to reply to every single freaking post/question that shows up. Or try to do pissing competition.

Here, you can't, really. Like it was said above, this is a science and (luckily) this forum is full of like-minded (and some brilliant) people.

It also helps to understand tools. I think I never used a compressor as well as I do now after having built several, after the countless foh and studio recordings over the last decade or so.

It also creates contacts of people that can help you if your job includes maintenance (like mine). It hones your art when it comes to fault finding/troubleshooting.

When I was in my teens I joined the local amateur radio club. I learnt a lot from the old hands there and got many bargain parts from them too.  When I was working there were many other engineers with similar interests I could talk to. Now I am retired and  live in a small town and there's no local audio diy group so the internet is a natural place for me to hang out with like minded individuals.

Cheers

Ian

To meet women!

Gustav

There´s at least one of those guys here "who looked out the window in school".

I first checked out this forum for information, using it pretty passivly, because most of my questions have already been answered somewhere.
But it´s also a quite entertaining place to "be", guessing the characters of all the posters (you know all this nice women, taking on false EE identities). I think it has a lot to do with anonymity in forums(forae?*lol*), something I didn´t feel good about at first. But I think, it makes people feel safe, with such a distance between, they are maybe willing to give away more on a certain level than they would  if they were actually facing each other.

Also if you put so much work and care into something like building electronics and gaining knowledge, you usually want someone to appreciate it, who really CAN appreciate it. :

I came here originally with a foolish idea to build a simple tube preamp "to warm up the sound". I came from KVR which is basically a bunch of kids comparing plugins and it was quite a change with guys like NYD and PRR stepping in to help right from the first question.

I've since gone through all the phases from cloning and cap/opamp related audiofoolery to rigorous testing and finally design. I've been helped and tutored here so many times doing it to others is kind of a second nature, I never thought about this. Strange thing being an intermediately skilled EE, having no diploma to back it up and having been schooled entirely on a forum.




(Also it turned out tube preamps rarely "warm up the sound", but that's another topic.)


[edit]

Since all my progress is quite visible on the forum and often turns up in searches, it causes me unending shame. All my past audiofoolery is still very much visible in topics that are unfortunately quite popular. About weekly I have to answer private questions on those topics. Yes I was that stupid not too long a go, no I don't agree what I wrote back then anymore.  :-[

Kingston said:

(Also it turned out tube preamps rarely "warm up the sound", but that's another topic.)

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Bullshit!

Another example of pure, undiluted Kingstonisms.

Just put your headphones on top of your tube amp (or preamp) while it's "on", leave them there for a half an hour (or so), and after that, put them back on your head.

Report back.

(That's precisely why solid-state Class-A amps also warm up the sound).

On a more academic note - respondents reported behavior/reasons will probably not yield any valid data, unless you are venturing more into psychology or studying a response pattern -  but selecting a few cases and doing a timeline and/or network analysis on them might provide you with some really interesting data (and something to build concrete hypothesis on).

Case in point.

Kingston said:

Since all my progress is quite visible on the forum and often turns up in searches, it causes me unending shame. All my past audiofoolery is still very much visible in topics that are unfortunately quite popular. About weekly I have to answer private questions on those topics. Yes I was that stupid not too long a go, no I don't agree what I wrote back then anymore.  :-[

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I think when you take advice on the internet, it becomes your responsibility to help others when you can. I'm very grateful for what others taught me - PRR, NY Dave, Bcarso to name but a few. Since I can't return that favor to them - some have left others like PRR still know far more than I about pretty much anything - I try to help others with what I've learned in the meantime. I sure hope, those will do likewise in the future once they know enough about anything.

Also, this is one of the few happy places on the web. Knowledgeable people eager to learn more, people discussing and cooperating with comparatively little ego stuff going on. That's pretty rare these days. The handful of people from this forum that I've met in real life (e.g. Abbey, Gyraf, Tim Campbell) were about the nicest guys you could hope to meet.

Perhaps this world would be a better place, if more people were sniffing solder fumes. 

For me Bo Hansen's statement on the bottom of his post says it all:

I met a man with a dollar, we exchanged dollars, I still had a dollar.
I met a man with an idea, we exchanged ideas, now we each had two ideas.

There is so much more then money in our lives, sharing is a good thing!

Willem.

jplebre said:

And it's hard to find a forum that is not full of people that are clueless but just want to have a stab at trying to reply to every single freaking post/question that shows up. Or try to do pissing competition.

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That's the other reason I left that live sound forum. There were about three or four people who would post in every single freaking thread, and their posts were 95% off-topic!

-a

JohnRoberts said:

@ andy... Andy was also our resident language/grammar pedant who raised snarkiness in his slap downs to high art. His absence as language cop is/was missed, while the S/N was never as good as the very old days before it became a business that profited more from number of eyeballs than quality of participants. Fools were not tolerated in the very old days, and you had to get past the junk yard dogs.

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I tried to temper the snark with a series of "LAB Record Reviews," where I'd gush on about a record that I loved. The intent was hopefully obvious. It's good to step back from the technical talk and remind everyone that our work is in service of the music. I wrote about music that inspired me because I wanted to share that enthusiasm.

Which reminds me -- once I wrote a rave about a record called "Plants And Birds And Rocks And Things" by a band called The Loud Family, who were highly influential to  me in my early 20s. Loud Family guiding light and resident genius Scott Miller passed away about three weeks ago, at only 53 years old.

-a

Rossi said:

Also, this is one of the few happy places on the web. Knowledgeable people eager to learn more, people discussing and cooperating with comparatively little ego stuff going on. That's pretty rare these days. The handful of people from this forum that I've met in real life (e.g. Abbey, Gyraf, Tim Campbell) were about the nicest guys you could hope to meet.

Perhaps this world would be a better place, if more people were sniffing solder fumes. 

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    Exactly! I came here first because searches led me to comprehensive, accurate answers from smart, informed people, who weren't here to crack skulls, just to educate. I continue to visit here because the atmosphere is not about one-upmanship, but getting the problem solved, with some humor and humility. In this place, you walk carefully, because you know you are not the smartest voice here (by far in my case), and we're all here to learn, not pose. Well, most of us anyway.
    The rest of the internet seems to be folks desperate for attention. This place actually contributes to public knowledge, and my humble studio is much, much better than it would be without the help y'all have freely given.
    GroupDIY is a model for successful human internet interaction.
   

tchgtr said:

    GroupDIY is a model for successful human internet interaction.
 

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I joined only late last summer. even though I had my hands full around the first build (1176) I was quite dispirited seeing all the cool projects that have been abandoned and some posters (brilliant guys it seemed) that haven't logged in in years.
I felt I missed the wagon and all I could get to see was the dust settling.

Then I stumbled on all the posts from the vendors, and the angry copyright stuff, and the resale. I truly went through a phase I thought this forum was becoming a business entreprise - a channel for a few people to sell products and looked for alternatives on the web. Needless to say my commitment to the DIY projects I had embarked wavered somewhat.

What made me stay was the fact that there is still some research going on. Some design in the forum. A few new projects here and there being bred here in a co-op fashion. It also took me a good while to find 3, 4 people that I now follow on other places or know in person. It makes it a much better place to be if you do.


... But I still feel like I lost the wagon. The "Pub meet ups" thread is dead. This week Igor "left" us as well. May sound selfish as I still wanted to build a 4k ch strip, 2254, sontec, mixbuzz but more the fact that the man was brilliant and if you actually managed to translate his posts, they were full of useful information and years of experience.