DaveGoff, not anonymous

Hello Steemit,

I was referred here by a friend that is really excited about the 'site, so I decided to take a look.

I won't be anonymous and I won't be using some crazy username, my name is me. I remember back in the days of newsgroups I frequented a great many boards including some having to do with magic, magick and paganism, and all of those had people posting with their "magic name". It seemed odd to me. If it is your magic name, why would you post it publically to a forum that, as far as I could tell, was full of people sniping at each other?

A little aside; the newsgroups and emails lists of the 90's weren't always about sniping, they usually started out as great discussion among people genuinely wanting to share tips, tricks and thoughts with each other, but there was a lifecycle for each one: excitement, sharing, community, drama, sniping, infighting, desertion, and abandonment and then it fades into obscurity.

This was true no matter the topic. I saw it happen on music forums, spirituality, games, literary interests and everything else. Of course, things like politics were especially susceptible to being co-opted by ego-driven sniping.

It seems like things like reddit work better in this respect than most things I've seen. Oh sure, there are still trolls and sniping but it's better than the crap I'm talking about.

Huh... apparently, I decided to talk about forum life cycles.

Anyway, hello steemit. I hope you are all doing well.