Why posting on forums is overall bad and what is still good about them?

I’ll post below my view on posting on Internet forums and what I have learned out of this.

First of all, I’ll present my experience with these. I have first joined an Internet forum in the spring of 2002, just a few months after I got to have Internet access a few times a week on a regular basis.

I joined a rather large Romanian forum (it still is even today; Large number of persons in there, great flow of messages).

I stayed on that forum until, five years later, I got to 1,000 messages. I don’t know about you, but writing 1,000 messages on an Internet forum, in a time frame of 5 years, is quite a lot. A lot of effort to read what others have said, to comment upon, to be active. You get the picture, lots of activity, and lots of reading.

I also was active on a smaller Internet forum, with only 300 messages from my part, but the reading was quite big in there too.

And some smaller accounts on various forums, some even created by me, but due to lack of activity these matter less.

You can say that I’ve wrote more than 1,500 messages on Internet forums so far (perhaps even 2,000).

What have I learned that I didn’t like that much?
1. At the time when I joined the first large forum, in 2002, Internet was scarce in Romania; Few people had Internet access, mostly due to costs and downsizes (PC, Internet line, hard to get a good connection, you had to be a bit IT-savvy) compared to revenues and advantages (small salaries, few web sites on the Internet to benefit from); What this barrier meant was also a great filtering system: the people that frequented the forum I was on in 2002 were usually either very good with IT or earning lots of money (so good with other things); And most of the time it was a combination of the two; Great people, I can say, lots of things to learn on a personal and professional (mostly IT) level; Time passed, and Internet access became easily available; The old generation slowly left the forum (only a few remained), while the new generation came in a hurry; Well, I can say that the level of expertise on that particular forum greatly decreased and I decided to leave;
2. What I also didn’t like about forums was a spirit of sarcasm; This was right from the beginning; There was a very false and annoying feeling of “I know everything” from the persons on the forum with most messages; You asked a not-that-smart question? Bang! You got an acid reply; You said something that could be interpreted? Here comes a sarcastic reply; This is a bad habit I learned on the forums, and which I try to repair now.

What did I learned that I love?
1. A lust for the fight itself; In the forums there is always an intriguing thought, a dispute, an argument; I learned a lot of things on how to handle a debate by participating in forums; What a lovely thing this is;
2. A pleasure for the smart things; Writing things on forums helped me understand myself better and better structure the information on the world I live in; I am the person I am today partially due to the fact that I’ve participated in forums.

I hope I haven’t scared you with the bad thoughts on forums and I hope that if I get bad feelings on blogging, I’ll write time as they arrive, not wait for years, like I’ve done with the forum postings. Overall, my forum experience is great, but nowadays the generation difference makes it a rather unpleasant experience. But I did have a great time back in 2002+.