Quote:
Katherine Derbyshire wrote:
I think, by now, the positions and training philosophies of most of the frequent posters around here are pretty well known, as are the areas of disagreement among them. So I'm not sure what it accomplishes to state those positions over and over, with increasing volume. The horses are dead, folks.
|
This.
There are a number of subjects that seem to inspire two very different kinds of posts (often from the same people in a different context, BTW). One is when a bunch of people interested in the topic get together and have a discussion on their shared positive training experiences, things they've learned, suggestions of others to train with, neat things they noticed, etc. The other is more about arguing with people who aren't particularly interested in what the poster is doing about why they should be interested in what the poster is doing instead of in what they are actually interested in, and often happens in the context of a thread started to discuss something that the original posters were interested in discussing. These distinctions happen in many subjects, the internal training stuff is just one recent example but not the only one.
The first feels to someone reading like a positive discussion, and is possibly even interesting to others, at least some of the time (though other times not, which is fine too). It reads like content about something. It occasionally draws you in and makes you read bits of it and go 'hmmm'. The second, whether the poster intends it that way or not, feels to someone reading more like a rant than like content, and is almost guaranteed to make anyone who didn't already agree with the poster before they started talking get very turned off by the subject (and possibly by the individual as well).
I'm going to assume that most people who have favourite subjects that they post passionately about do so at least in part because they genuinely want to get others interested in what they're talking about, not turned off or disgusted or bored. I think any of us in that position would do well to consider our goals and what is productive or counter-productive to our goals. As well as accepting the basic human fact that however hard we try we can't decide what others will be interested in; we can only do what we can to make it more likely (and not less likely).