Internet forums... ugh.

Remember in junior high when you had these cliques? The jocks, the band geeks, the popular girls, the smart kids, the skaters, comic book and dungeons and dragons guys, chess club, etc.? When you were 12, it sure seemed like you needed to belong to one of these cliques in order to fit in, somehow to fit in.

I think internet forums are kind of like junior high cliques for grown-ups. But as adults, it's a little different. I mean, you may find that you suddenly have a common interest with some other people and then you stumble upon this congregation on the internet in some forum, and there is a lot of benefit to joining it at first.

Let's say you buy a widget. You spend months researching widgets, select your widget, and then you buy one. Now you are not exactly sure how to get the most out of your widget. Maybe you need to install some applications on your widget. Maybe you want to use your widget for some specific use that is not well-documented. Maybe you are going to accessorize or upgrade it or you just can't figure out how to use it. Then you find the widget-talk forum on the internet! Wow! Suddenly there's this giant community of helpful widget experts, users of all kinds of needs and experiences, mobile widget users, home widget users, multiple-widget users, you name it. And they are all to ready to help you with your widget and accept you into the fold.

This seems all sunny and fine at first. Maybe eventually you figure out the things you wanted to know about your widget and then you just lose interest in the forum. I think this is typical, and probably 80% or more of the subscribers to most internet forums are these kind of transient users. They sign up, gather information from the collective for a while (maybe a year), then just drift off. Or maybe for some reason you find that the widget guys are just not really your kind of people. You don't want to go to widgetfest every month, you don't have a widget tattoo, you actually do things with your life other than spend it fooling with your widget, so you are not compatible with the widget clique and you move on. I think there are some percentage that wind up this way too. But then there's the rest.

The die-hards. Maybe 10%. Those people who have been on widget-talk for a decade. They always chime in with the answers. They seemingly welcome the newbies with open arms. They have all the answers. They are a little creepy.

Maybe all of the sudden you find that since you are not a perfect fit for the widget clique, you begin to feel the heat to either move on or conform. "Why are you even on this forum, if you don't love the widget like we do?"

I have seen this behavior on dozens of forums. I have been, at times, a member of multiple bicycling forums (local, international, road bikes, mountain bikes, single-speeds, bicycle mechanics...), musician forums (guitarists, Christian guitarists, recording engineers & producers, guitar brand-loyalty, etc.), engineering type stuff (guitar amp builders, analog circuit engineers, etc.), audio equipment forums (vinyl/LPs & turntables, tube amp guys, speaker builders, home theater guys, etc.), gun forums (local gun owners, CHL and concealed-carry forums, rimfire gun owners, air guns, brand-loyalty forums), political forums, you name it. They all wind up the same way.

At some point, I begin to see that it really is a clique, and there is a latent hostility towards those who don't conform, either automatically or willfully. Yeah they will tolerate your nonconformity for a while, some kind of assimilation period. But there is a time when you are just not exactly overtly welcome anymore. I don't know why they do this, but I think they all do. One forum I joined, this was almost immediate. It took about three days before I was emailing the admin about how to delete my account forever. Another forum, I have been on for about 1.5 years and it is just now coming to this point.

There is one internet mailing list (remember those? before the days of forums) that has not ended up in this state for me. It has some uniqueness. I think the main thing is that it is not publicly advertised. If you know about it, it's because you were explicitly invited. I think this winds up that everyone is kind of preselected for their chances of conforming to the clique. So you don't end up with anyone who doesn't fit in right away, and this keeps the peace. There are newbies to the list, but not newbies to the widget lifestyle, so to speak.

So maybe I should swear off of forums forever.