June 26, 2012
If you are a member of this site, but you are not actively participating in the forums, you are missing out on the #1 benefit of this site.
I started my original website in 1996. I am one of the old-timers.
From the earliest days of the Web, I learned that people who participated on the forums of the free sites had opinions that were generally not worth sharing. They had very strong opinions, and they tended to express them in an aggressive manner. These people were called flamers.
When I started Specific Answers, I adopted Membergate software. One of the advantages of Membergate was that it has forums. It is possible to create a new forum in about 2 minutes. What I like most about the forums was that they were accessible only to site members. I found very early that the quality of discussion on a membership-based forum is considerably higher than the discussion that you find on free forums that are attached to a free website.
People who sign up for subscription-based membership are people who have goals that they're willing to pay to achieve. They want information, and they're willing to pay for it. They perceive that they are likely to interact with the higher class of participants when they belong to a membership site.
Your time is valuable. If you spend a lot of time debating with flamers, you will waste your time, and you will not get the kind of information that is practical, which can be used to further your goals.
Flamers delight in luring people into discussions with them. They are unteachable. They have no influence in life. My suspicion is that they don't have much money. They have no experience in anything related to their supposed areas of expertise. They have not spent long years in the trenches in order to master the skills associated with a particular job or calling in life. But they have strong opinions, and they express these opinions strongly.
When I join a membership site, I want to get feedback from people who have experience, and who have had enough success in life that they feel they can afford a few dollars a month to belong to a membership site. They will not waste my time. I am far more likely to get practical, cost-effective information from participants on a forum that is located behind a membership wall.
Because I publish at least 20 articles a week on my Tea Party Economist site, plus two or three articles on Lew Rockwell's site, a lot of people see my materials. Rockwell's site is the number-one site in terms of traffic in the libertarian movement. The Tea Party Economist is number nine. So, a lot of people see my articles. These are in addition to whatever free articles I publish on this site.
A percentage of these people feel internally compelled to share their opinions with me. A percentage of these, perhaps half, want to show me that I do not know what I'm talking about.
These people are strangers. On only the rarest of occasions do they have their own websites. They do not send me detailed articles criticizing my articles. They send me an e-mail, and very often it is an outraged e-mail. Here is an example: //www.garynorth.com/public/9699.cfm.
As you can see, the individual resorted to obscenities. This is the classic mark of a failure in life. This individual is incapable of organizing his thoughts in a coherent way, and he is emotionally incapable of interacting with people in such a way as to persuade them that he has an IQ above 90. He does not understand, or he does not care, that he is not going to persuade the recipients of his communications. He is like a child rolling on the floor and screaming. He does it to get attention, but in a well-organized household, a child will learn that his tantrums do not bring positive sanctions.
People on subscription-based forums rarely do anything like this. They know they will be thrown off by the moderator. They guard their tongues. But people who have neither the financial resources nor the personal success necessary to join a subscription-based site are ready to send their e-mails or post their flames under an assumed name.
What I have found over the years is that the number of people who are like the person who sent the e-mail is really miniscule on subscription-based sites. People who pay to get information are far more interested in getting accurate information than they are in spouting off. Even the ones who spout off are usually well informed, which means they're spouting off from a position of strength. The anonymous flamers do not have any position of strength backing up what they post, and I suspect it is because they don't have any position of strength backing up anything else in their lives.
I have written about this in the past. Dr. Tom Woods has produced a video which gets the idea across very well. He informs me that this has been his least popular video of all time. I can understand why. The posts were on his free site. He touched a nerve. How dare he say such things!
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