Welcome to Debate Club! Please be aware that this is a space for respectful debate, and that your ideas will be challenged here. Please remember to critique the argument, not the author.

Feel Free to Add Me!

Options
chris_in_cal
chris_in_cal Posts: 2,177 Member
in Debate Club
Is the disempowering and unhelpful thing here on MFP? I mean of all the disempowering and unhelpful things here on MFP is this the one with the highest volume?

Maybe a should have made this a poll.

Replies

  • cmriverside
    cmriverside Posts: 33,958 Member
    edited September 2023
    Options
    Is the disempowering and unhelpful thing here on MFP? I mean of all the disempowering and unhelpful things here on MFP is this the one with the highest volume?

    That makes no sense...are you talking about "Feel free to add me?" How is that disempowering and/or unhelpful?

  • chris_in_cal
    chris_in_cal Posts: 2,177 Member
    Options
    It is the most common post from a person who is a one time only logger on this website, just one single post and never returns. If I could do some kind of power search of this forum: (all the people who have only posted one time and never returned) + (their post contained the phrase 'feel free to add me')

    My proposition is that it would be a very high percentage.

    What is that person asking? What's their point? When some other person here feels a connection , the energy they take to 'add them,' the curiosity whether the poster will accept the friend request. -> all for naught. The OP is never going to return.

    It is a separating signal from noise problem. We all do it regularly, all the time, to be effective and efficient. It is always a question of how much cost is there in dealing with the noise. Just like spam email. First we want our Internet provider to filter it out so we never see it, second if it makes it through we want to one-click delete it, lastly occasionally the spam is framed in such a way we open it and read it before deleting.

    Of course the empowered phrase would be "Look out you interesting regular posters like @cmriverside and @chris_in_cal , I am going to add you."
  • sollyn23l2
    sollyn23l2 Posts: 1,612 Member
    Options
    chris_in_cal wrote: »
    It is the most common post from a person who is a one time only logger on this website, just one single post and never returns. If I could do some kind of power search of this forum: (all the people who have only posted one time and never returned) + (their post contained the phrase 'feel free to add me')

    My proposition is that it would be a very high percentage.

    What is that person asking? What's their point? When some other person here feels a connection , the energy they take to 'add them,' the curiosity whether the poster will accept the friend request. -> all for naught. The OP is never going to return.

    It is a separating signal from noise problem. We all do it regularly, all the time, to be effective and efficient. It is always a question of how much cost is there in dealing with the noise. Just like spam email. First we want our Internet provider to filter it out so we never see it, second if it makes it through we want to one-click delete it, lastly occasionally the spam is framed in such a way we open it and read it before deleting.

    Of course the empowered phrase would be "Look out you interesting regular posters like @cmriverside and @chris_in_cal , I am going to add you."

    Almost all 1st posts are one hit wonders. The vast majority pop in, make a post, and disappear. I wouldn't expect to get any kind of engagement from anyone new. They reach out to people and send out friend requests on their own if they're interested.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,150 Member
    Options
    Yeah, I don't get it either. It doesn't seem disempowering. (Disempowering to whom, in your view? The person who posts, or the person who actually tries to add them?) It may be unhelpful to the person who posts. Is it unhelpful to anyone else?

    Yes, there are lots of those posts.

    Me, I'm not hot on the MFP friend thing . . . but I've posted a longer version of that multiple times. I often post on vegetarian weight loss posts where people are trying to hit nutrition goals on lower calories, give a few ideas. I add "I'm a crummy MFP friend, but if you want to see what I eat to get ideas, my diary is open to friends, feel free to add me". (I'm certainly not going to add them on speculation, and don't choose to make my diary MFP-public.)

    As others observe, there are lots of other common one-post examples. Yeah, "add me" is one, but so is "want accountability buddies", "back for the Xth time" (oddly enough), "tips to lose weight?", "what should my calories be", "Hi, I'm Joe/Susie, determined to change my life" . . . etc.

    That's all kind of sad, but there are lots of cases in life where people have impulses and don't follow through. Nothing we can do about it here, I think?
  • BOC57
    BOC57 Posts: 44 Member
    Options
    I'll chime in here. I thought I'd check my own posting history before I responded. What do you know! I'm a one hit wonder!
    Why is that? I'd say it's because I came on and tried to make a connection some where. I don't believe I ever asked anyone to feel free to add me. Is this a sad thing? I don't think so. I think it is a way to try to find common ground with people who have similar health goals. I've got plenty of real world friends but not all of them share my quest for health and fitness. But I am more than slightly on the ADD side so if response is not great after that first post I lose interest. I will respond to others posts if I feel I have something to share but am generally not interested in the "add me as a friend" thing. Beyond that I don't spend very much time on line because it will suck me down the rabbit hole of scrolling. So that is my reason for posting once but who knows what motivates others. 🤷
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,150 Member
    Options
    Personally, I think the big deal is the difference between wanting to lose weight, and being fully committed to losing weight.

    Probably most overweight people want to lose weight. They just don't want to really have to do anything, especially not anything inconvenient or unpleasant. I was in that spot for decades myself.

    So that's not a diss. It's human nature. There are dozens of things I want, but don't commit to. I want to re-landscape the weeds under my 2nd floor deck. I want to play bluegrass banjo semi-competently. I want to establish a consistent meditation practice. Etc. If any of those (including the "etc.") reach the top of my priority list, and I commit to them, I'll make progress. Otherwise, no. "No" is the current state.

    Lots of people seem to arrive here believing that someone else can provide them with "motivation" or "accountability". I don't think that's realistic. I think those things come from within. To accomplish anything, we've deeply gotta wanna, i.e., commit to action inside our own head. (If I knew how to flip that switch even in myself, I'd bottle and sell it, make millions.)

    Other people can provide support, offer ideas for tactics, suggest practical tips, help analyze/diagnose problems, provide a social context where weight loss and health are "normal" things to focus on (something we may not all have in real life), and that sort of thing. For that to happen for me, it's I who need to engage, seek the help and support, participate, etc.

    Finding and taking the reins, driving in a positive direction, sticking with it long enough to progress: That's empowerment. It's how progress happens. Someone else can't somehow "do progress to us". It's on us, primarily.

    P.S. to @BOC57, you're not a one-hit wonder . . . at least not as I think of it. I think a "one hit wonder" is someone who shows up, makes one post (ever), then disappears from the Community and often from the app forever, based on dates in the profiles. You've started several discussions, replied on others, been in the Community and app starting in 2011. Not a "one hit wonder" at all.
  • paperpudding
    paperpudding Posts: 8,992 Member
    Options
    But how do we know that people who make one post asking for people to add them as friends don't then continue connecting with those friends outside of forum posting?

    Isn't that possible?

    ( I don't do MFP friends so genuine question)
  • DFW_Tom
    DFW_Tom Posts: 218 Member
    Options
    Don't know and don't care. Wish MFP would require new members to post in Introductions before they could post in other forum areas. I figure the "one-post-only" members aren't serious and are only looking for quick fixes via others.
  • paperpudding
    paperpudding Posts: 8,992 Member
    Options
    I don't think members should have to post an Intro first.

    And if they post one post and get the answer they want or realise MFP or at least MFP forums, are not fir them then that's ok.

    We can't dictate how others use it.
  • chris_in_cal
    chris_in_cal Posts: 2,177 Member
    Options
    paperpudding wrote: »
    We can't dictate how others use it.
    Correct.

    It is a social engineering problem that is very complex. It isn't a personal responsibility problem of users.

    Facebook, X, YouTube, TikTok, DraftKings have worked pretty hard on the problem to make their products successful.

    It is an MFP social media team problem...ask SparkPeople or MySpace or AOL online if it's not a valuable problem for their companies to address.

    I'm an MFP user, I both enjoy it and appreciate the tools and resources it provides. Improving would be great, staying flat elicits the above grumbles, and decaying will lead to the tech companies death.

    I've voting for MFP to improve.

    As the subject of this thread, rando one time posters taking oxygen with their "Feel Free To Add Me" post is a canary in the MFP coalmine.
  • cmriverside
    cmriverside Posts: 33,958 Member
    Options
    ^^in addition to the other platforms for social connecting.

    This one is just too niche and concerns a subject that most people lose interest in fairly quickly.

    We used to have loooooooong argumentative style threads. That was worse, IMO. I prefer the gentler kinder forums of today - but those arguments were entertaining. Pre-moderators...or when the moderation consisted of - - -Mike.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,150 Member
    Options
    chris_in_cal wrote: »
    paperpudding wrote: »
    We can't dictate how others use it.
    Correct.

    It is a social engineering problem that is very complex. It isn't a personal responsibility problem of users.

    Facebook, X, YouTube, TikTok, DraftKings have worked pretty hard on the problem to make their products successful.

    It is an MFP social media team problem...ask SparkPeople or MySpace or AOL online if it's not a valuable problem for their companies to address.

    I'm an MFP user, I both enjoy it and appreciate the tools and resources it provides. Improving would be great, staying flat elicits the above grumbles, and decaying will lead to the tech companies death.

    I've voting for MFP to improve.

    As the subject of this thread, rando one time posters taking oxygen with their "Feel Free To Add Me" post is a canary in the MFP coalmine.

    Text-based social apps are declining, video based are more popular. That may show up less in the user counts, but more in the activity-type counts or engagement stats.

    I think MFP may decline, but I don't think the Community part or even the friend/timeline parts are necessarily the most important place to look for canary carcasses. (Though I do think the friend/timeline environment is a very, very poor design and implementation. Horrible.)

    It think riverside is right, that weight loss is a thing that masses of people try for a day or week or few, then give up; and that shuffling tactics from one time to the next is relatively common. That's not about MFP, it's about human nature. No design features will fix that.

    Posting once or a few times in any kind of chat/forum, then leaving, is also a common phenomenon. I go back to earlier days of the internet, 1980s, when there wasn't even the world wide web. There were chat environments there (chiefly UseNet News) and these exhibited this same effect: Active communities were mostly a core of more engaged people, and there were a lot of "onesy-twosy then disappear" participants. (I think those people are more noticeable here because we invest our time to help them, and they just ghost.) I assume chat-group-like experiences on early ISPs like AOL were probably similar, but I didn't use those. Now it's also true in Facebook groups and that sort of thing: Most people post a time or two, maybe a week or few of early enthusiasm, then lose interest . . . maybe outside a small core of devotees.

    A trigger for more canary carcasses that will really lead to MFP decline, I think, is the seeming turn of mainstream (non-hyper-marketed) weight loss advice to turn away from recommending direct calorie counting to recommending healthier eating, intuitive eating, and that sort of thing (with guides and rules for those). The more people who believe that calorie counting can't and doesn't work, the more probable dead canaries here become, and maybe eventually dead MFP.

    See, for example, this thread, as an example of that last: https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10899695/eat-well-live-better-class-vs-mfp/p1
  • _Brigit
    _Brigit Posts: 48 Member
    edited September 2023
    Options
    This is my 6th account. Trying to get fit, eat better, lose weight are all difficult things for me to stay motivated to do. Sometimes I start off strong trying to do the fitness thing but soon lose momentum. But coming and going works for me. If I need a break I take one. If I come back: it doesn't hurt anyone.

    I never made a "feel free to add me post." But I bet some of those people who do, then leave, come back.

Categories