I sympathise with
Eco. Can't help but fear that
this will all end in tears.
This daylog brings me to level three - and a yawning gap of hundreds more wu's to go before - when? Before I have editor powers? Do I want editor powers? Do I want to make everything my everything? What made me come here in the first place? I wanted to write again, and everything has proved conducive. That is why I'm here, and that's why I've stayed this long.
Now I find myself turning into an xp whore. I am neglecting my work to node. I am neglecting my email to node. I am neglecting my parents, my friends, and my cat to node. This has to stop.
There is a clique of people here who talk with reverent nostalgia about how great it was when everything1 was crappy, small and full of bugs. It's like a big in-joke. I suspect, however, that when everything was small, they talked about how great it would be if it became BIG and lots of people noticed. It's getting big, and lots of people come, but who stays? It has become apparent to me that there is still a small minority of people who vote, a large majority of people who make a couple dozen nodes, and a very few editors who are very devoted to everything -- and to one another.
Like SlightlyMadman, I read the editor logs with horrified fascination. Old users are mentioned with relief for their absence. Their writeups get nuked like dry bones that are swept to the back of the family tomb to make room for more corpses. I've looked up some of these old users and some of them remind me of me. People with some limited writing ability. People who don't really have an "in" with the editors; people who don't share the same political convictions; people who don't node their own fiction, poetry, witty quips or nonsense. Most importantly, I've discovered that despite the high xp I've received on mine, people who rant don't make it to m-noder - they burn out before they get the chance, and leave more bitter than they were before. I don't need or want to be more bitter.
The editors sometimes remind me of the in crowd at high school. Everyone wants to please them. Some years have passed since that horrible time and I've figured one thing out. The in crowd were never as popular as I thought they were. We didn't like them - no one really did. But it would be false to say that they needed us as much as we needed them as our touchstone of what was good and great. They didn't need mediocre people (or people wracked with self-esteem issues, who just think they are mediocre) any more than the editors do.
Then there is the trouble of the public domain. Right now a friend who, very sadly, I have begun to resent for many reasons I will not go into here, but are both bad and good, is reading my nodes. My father, too, came perilously close to finding out about my everything habit last night, as I was trying to find a site to show him - which would surely spell the end of this career. This was all fine while I thought I was speaking anonymously to strangers. I may be an exhibitionist, but if people I know read my nodes to find out what is going on in my head - that is, to know me , as opposed to the me prototype, the joy starts to trickle out.
Game plan, then, is to node better, node less, node impersonally and forget about the xp; let everythingians think what they may, and trust my own convictions and abilities.
Easier said than done.
One last rather provocative thing: I have come to suspect that a pedophile, someone I had the displeasure to meet as an adolescent, is an active noder here. If I find out for sure, and if everything stops turning me on, I take comfort in the thought that I'll node my revenge before I go.
Pedophile, you say? Pedophiles on the Internet? Say it ain't so...and watch out kids.
And finally, just for my least-fave everythingians, the soft-linking bastards:
Your radical ideas about Everything have already occurred to others
Your point being?
Wasted nodespace