Why I Lost Interest in ATS

Two things before I get going here:
1) I love ATS and I have the utmost respect for it's founders and the members. This is a great site; what I'm going to rant about here isn't anything against the site specifically.
2) I'm probably going to write this in very generic, all-encompassing terms. I know it doesn't apply to all the members, probably not even most of the members. It's probably a case of a few bad apples spoiling the bunch, but it's just easier to generalize than to constantly write "most of ..." or "quite frequently..." I hope that's understandable. Anyways...

I first found this site over a year ago and I got hooked pretty quick. All sorts of goodies here, from ghosts to aliens to shadow governments, whatever. I found the articles first--I forget how, searching for 9/11 stuff or something--and then found the forums. Even better--thousands of people who are in to this stuff, and an environment where everyone can discuss rather outrageous ideas in a friendly, open-minded manner. As lame as it sounds, I actually awaited my approval notice with excitement when I registered, like I was joining an exclusive club where I might have found a niche.

I was quite active for a while; not as active as a lot of other members, but hardly a day would go by where I didn't put up a good handful of posts. Did I stand out? Not really, but I can think of a few places where my opinion might have made a difference, or where someone took what I said seriously.

Before too long though, I started to see a bit of a general pattern. Someone would post something, people would either argue or agree for a while, and then the subject dies. It's a message board, fair enough; that's how it works. But what bothers me is that most of the topics discussed on here are real issues, stuff that affects everyone, and nothing ever gets accomplished.

That may be a bit of an exagerration. I know a quick argument is the ripple effect: one person reads it, tells a friend, who tells a friend, so on and so forth. Then enough awareness is raised to where someone might ask a question of someone with a bit of power, and maybe it'll snowball into something bigger.

What I don't understand is why there's never any call to action. I mean, Catherder's thread on the Pentagon attack received 907,905 views as I write this. Even if only 1/5th of those are unique individuals, that's 194,181 people who can send an email, make a phone call, whatever. The minute someone starts talking about writing your congressman or whatever, they get ignored, but when someone starts saying that one politician or party is better than another, there's 20 replies that boil down to little more than "no, you're wrong."

Look at the 9/11 attacks, at least the official story. 20 guys with box cutters directly caused the deaths of roughly 3,000 people, and indirectly caused the deaths of many more in Afghanistan and Iraq. On each of those planes were what, 100, 150 people? Against 5? The victims on 3 of those planes did nothing, they let 5 guys with knives take over because that's what they've been told to do all their life. Just sit back and let the high jackers have their way.

Every day on this board there's countless threads about how a similarly small group of people are high jacking this world, and everyone just sits back and lets it happen.

I know this is a discussion board. It's not an activist website or anything like that. The purpose is to convey ideas, to share knowledge and beliefs. But what is the point of trying to change someone's mind (or even changing your own) if nothing ever happens because of it? Why sit around and complain about how poorly Bush (for example only) is handling Iraq if you aren't going to do anything about it?

That's why I've stopped paying much attention to ATS. With all due respect, the image I have of this site is that it's just somewhere people can come so they can gripe. Not to accomplish anything. That's fine, but not what I had hoped for.

Excellent post MCory1! It does seem that it's all good fun to speculate and argue but when it comes down to actual activism, it's all too much work. Maybe it's the disease that is rampant in our society today: Apathy (Loss of interest in events vital to ones own health and survival), Abulia (Loss of will), and Amnesia (Loss of memory).

Are we to blame for this condition though?

You have voted MCory1 for the Way Above Top Secret award. You have two more votes this month.

[edit on 4-6-2006 by Beelzebubba]

Mc1, Just how do you know the folks here are "doing nothing"
You might be surprised at the political activism by the members.
I personally am involved in local politics, and have been asked by my state reps. to quit calling and just email. I also am involved in charitable organizations.

I kind of find your assumptions a little insulting, and arrogant in lumping the members of Ats in one big "Slacker" bag.

Just WTF are you doing to improve things?

Thanks Beelzebubba, I appreciate it.

Originally posted by Beelzebubba
Are we to blame for this condition though?

One could easily argue that, by taking no action in preventing it, we are taking action to ensure it's continuation. That's the argument used by a lot of religions to back up their attempts at converting those who do not wish to convert at least.

whaaa, I appreciate your position, and that's why I included this at the beginning of my post:

I know it doesn't apply to all the members, probably not even most of the members. It's probably a case of a few bad apples spoiling the bunch, but it's just easier to generalize than to constantly write "most of ..." or "quite frequently..." I hope that's understandable.

What am I doing to improve things? For starters, trying not to rehash the same arguments of the same subjects. Quite a bit of the posts I come across when I take a gander at the threads on here are just rewordings of old debates, very rarely with actual new information.

Aside from that, when I first started at ATS, I made an effort to try and get a disclosure organization; you can check out that thread here. If you take a look at that thread, you'll see the response was rather underwhelming. (For the record, that thread is over a year old, so don't think this is because no one wants to play with me or anything.) Am I a very charismatic individual, able to rally the public into a frenzy behind a cause? Hardly. I'm probably not the best example to use for this, but if you step back for a minute and take a look at all the threads around, you'll see a pattern. People just want to argue. They want to feel like they're right, and the other person is wrong. They have their party line--whatever the argument may be--and they're behind it, full steam ahead, damn the torpedoes, we may not make a difference but we need to make sure no one else does either.

Maybe there is a lot more going on behind the scenes, maybe via U2U or other private communications. Hell, maybe that's the majority of what's going on at ATS and I'm just left out. But why wouldn't people want everyone else to know "Hey, we're tired of this crap and we're trying to make a change. Not necessarily succeeding, but doing something about it."

About maybe once in every couple of hundred threads I'll come across someone who says they wrote their congressman. I even wrote Brian Baird, congressman for my district, when the Eminent Domain rulings were passed a year or so ago, because of this site (surprisingly I even got an actual response, a bit too customized to be a standard form letter too.) So I know that if I can be convinced to do something about a situation, others can too, and (like myself) they probably won't advertise it on here.

But I would think that with some of the crap that's going around, people would be able to back off of the "I'm right and you're not" and just try and help to fix some of the stuff that's they want to whine about.