Some, whom many suspect are just pissed off that their posts have been
deemed "not worthy" of reading every word of :-), have suggested in the
past that one cannot get a true picture of what a poster is "trying to
say" from Message View.
I disagree, but it might be because of my training in the more occult
arts, plus long experience on the Internet since before it was called
that, and on FFL itself. I find it difficult to believe that *anyone*
here can't figure out what a poster whose stuff they've read for years
is "on about" from the first few words of most of their posts. Once you
know that, and when you realize that you've seen it all before, why read
through all the verbiage again?
Sure, they may "do a Robin" and say the same thing over and over again,
twenty different ways in one post, but in my experience the "what" they
were trying to say was clear in the first few words, so why bother with
the rest? More important, I've found that one can get a reliably clear
picture of the INTENT of the post just from those first few lines.
For example, if a poster is replying to pretty much everything another
person writes, even though that person has informed them in the past
that they have no intention of *ever* replying to them again (as a
couple of people have done with Curtis), the INTENT of such a poster is
pretty clear. They're either trying to "get" the person they're replying
to, or trying to taunt or insult them into changing their mind and
falling into yet another sucker-bait, endless, tarbaby argument-trap.
The same is true if the person has a long, long, long, long track record
of dumping on another poster on the forum, and chooses to mention their
name in the first few lines. You know the instant you see this that it's
going to be a "hit post," so why bother to read it, unless you're one of
those people who *gets off* reading such stuff.
My take on Fairfield Life is that very few people seem to notice the
INTENT of people's posts. They get sucked in by the flowery language
used, or by other things, and often don't seem to notice that there is
often no other conceivable purpose for the post *other* than to dump --
once again -- on someone they've developed an obsessive habit of dumping
on.
For me, the "deja vu" characteristics of such posts just leap out at me
from the first few words of them. I've done experiments in the past --
assessing what the INTENT of certain people's posts are from the first
few words and then reading the whole thing to see if my original
impression was correct -- and I've found that I was rarely wrong.
If you CAN'T do this, I might suggest that there might be something
lacking in *your* reading skills, rather than mine. Just sayin'...
