One Trick Pony

Over the years, there have been people who have joined the forum seemingly for one purpose only. In many cases, they are spammers whose only interest is to insert links to their website or to that of whoever might be employing them. These are annoying but easy enough to deal with. I place them on a permanent ban and report them to an anti-spam program that I am a part of.

However, others have come to press a particular political, religious, social, or medical agenda, and they will engage only in threads that discuss this one issue or, worse, they will make every attempt to divert every conversation into one that discusses the only topic that they have an interest in.

This can also be annoying, but more difficult to deal with. Choosing a hypothetical topic that doesn't point to anyone who is currently a member of the forum, let's imagine that someone joins the forum solely to convert everyone here to Christadelphians.

If that member were to create a thread about the Christadelphians, he could define the religion and explain it to all of us, answer questions about it, and encourage people to join. He probably wouldn't be particularly successful in this endeavor but maybe a few of us would learn something about his religion, and I don't suppose any harm would be done by it.

That's not usually what happens, however. Most likely, even if a Christadelphian thread were created, not very many people would join or participate in it, so the Christadelphian would start diverting every other religious thread into a discussion of his chosen belief while showing no interest in anything that anyone else is talking about here.

As far as I can recall, we haven't had any Christadelphians here but we've had people whose interests appear to be narrowly focused on one topic, and I don't think I'm alone in feeling annoyed to find every imaginable thread diverted.

To an extent, we've seen this with COVID and COVID vaccinations. While those who inserted these topics everywhere did participate in other discussions as well, Yvonne and I have both spent a lot of time merging threads or moving posts to one of the numerous COVID threads we have, and we still have more of them than we need. This isn't the same thing, however, because the virus, the vaccinations, the masks, and the lockdowns did affect nearly every facet of our lives, but so much of it was repetitive, and the same people saying the same things in countless threads was kind of annoying, even when I did it.

Still, these weren't one-trick ponies. While there were some who spoke of very little else, that wasn't the case with most.

If you find yourself saying the same thing over and over and over again, maybe it's time to talk about something else.

When you post something about your favorite topic, consider whether the unwritten response of others might be, "Here we go again...".

If you're here to push a particular religion, an anti-religious philosophy, a political view, or a particular medical view, we'll allow you ample opportunities to do that, but you're going to be more effective if you take the time to get to know people here, and that involves taking an interest in what they have to say, too.

If you do that, who knows, you might even develop new interests of your own, and that can't be all bad, can it?

 

There are members whose posts I view as simply more of the same, and it's as if they're trying to beat everyone into submission or to wear them down. The truth, I think, is that while people will eventually quit arguing with them, it's only because they're no longer reading their posts. That's not effective and, whatever it is that someone would like to say here, I'd like to see them become more effective.

 

I met with a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses for quite a long time and, while I never became a Jehovah's Witness, I didn't mind listening to them because one of them, in particular, could discuss a variety of topics and seemed interested in other things. Older than me, he was living in Germany during the beginning of Hitler's coming to power and was able to discuss history, politics, and other subjects. Thus, he was a more effective JW missionary.