I wholeheartedly agree to all of the above. Every day spent without at least a little bit of humour is a wasted day, and I've always tried to avoid people who are either unable or unwilling to laugh at themselves also. However, in my experience, there is nothing as fragile as "Internet forum friendship", or virtual friendship in general.
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- Thread starter GrandmaShreds
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I wholeheartedly agree to all of the above. Every day spent without at least a little bit of humour is a wasted day, and I've always tried to avoid people who are either unable or unwilling to laugh at themselves also. However, in my experience, there is nothing as fragile as "Internet forum friendship", or virtual friendship in general.
I will definitely and gladly introduce myself in this section, most likely today. But first, I need to take the mandatory couch pics, and I'm still waiting for the perfect daylight, being the perfectionist that I am.
soulman
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Ha ha....I must be one of the exceptions to the rule as some of my forum friendships have proven to be more honest and interesting than many in real life. For those I often look back to ones that began many years ago and among them I can number some of my very best friends and soul brothers and sisters. Music does have a way of uniting us more so than many other pursuits.
Trust me, although I have never done social media, I have a lot of experience with Internet forums. In 2004, speech recognition software became my main interest, after I had started using it in my job in which it became indispensable fairly soon, but I was also very interested in the underlying technology. So I started visiting speech recognition forums, wanting to learn everything about it. In those days, there were quite a few around, most of them based in the US, but then also a couple in Germany. In 2010, I started my own speech recognition forum in Germany, and I have been a moderator on the biggest forum in the US for a number of years. Today, there are only two speech recognition forums left worldwide, the big one in the US and mine in Germany.
To that end, I have got to "know" an awful lot of people and "become friends" with lots of people, virtually. Some of the old ones are still around, but many of them have disappeared, very often out of the blue and for no apparent reason. If we haven't started falling out with each other before it ended.
The problem with virtual communication being that people are never really sure of what the communication is about and how it is actually intended. So they may get things wrong very easily even if it has never been intended the way they get it. As an example, my initial post here was actually an attempt at being funny, which failed miserably quite obviously, and not surprisingly to me.
As far as "music does have a way of uniting us more so than many other pursuits", I know you will not like hearing this, but for the last three months or so, I have been perusing various guitar and specifically Les Paul dedicated forums. Here are just a few forums, where this obviously does not manifest in such ways:
– My Les Paul Forum
– Les Paul forum (although not as much as the one above)
– Gibson Brands Forums
And although everyone over there is definitely involved in music one way or the other, I have come across forums where moderators even tend to troll forum members.
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