I just received a very nice /msg from
jrn in regards to my homenode and its message regarding nuking my own nodes. I wrote him back a bunch of /msgs, but I have a tendency to ramble so I thuoght I'd
toss together a daylog and point him at it.
I wrote the note about nuking my nodes my homenode during one of my more petulant phases, but I don't think of nuking as killing them off, I just moved them to my own private area. I was just a bit irritated with what I saw as the direction of E2 at that time. So, I wanted to protect them, to hold them in my own private area.
I've got no idea what E2 is like anymore, I spend less than half an hour here every week. So, my observations are about an E2 which may not exist anymore.
I found that as I wrote more and more very specific nodes, I felt happier about what I was writing. I could node factual things about a subject that wasn't covered by someone else, I could do research about a subject I enjoyed, and often it was rewarded well with voting. My mistake was that, despite all the warnings, I did not ignore the node's reputation.
It's hard to entirely ignore the reputation of a node. The difference between writing an essay for fun and writing one for E2, or a similar site, is the fact that you're expecting recognition for what you've written. The reputation is a measurement of that recognition, so it's difficult for many people to completely ignore it, due to your motivation in the first place.
I became very frustrated because I would write something I felt that was well researched, relatively free of grammatical and spelling errors, and in general a decent treatment of the subject. Then I would write a piece of fluff or I would dash out a poor treatment of another subject, but a subject that was more popular, and I would see the popular subject node or the fluff node thrive while the one I actually cared about would not.
I spent time thinking about why it bothered me and I came to the conclusion: it really doesn't matter. If I wanted to make a webpage about a subject I cared about, I could just make a webpage about the subject. So, I resigned myself to become a consumer of E2 rather than a writer.
I also went through and nuked my precious little nodes, the ones that I felt that people should just leave alone. You see, nuking isn't the equivalent of killing the nodes. No, nuking a node is just a way of making it private. Now, they're no longer part of the nodegel... they're my private nodes, hanging out in node heaven.
The one thing that I have learned. I have a LiveJournal now, I put a lot of the stuff that would normally go into a daylog. I noticed that as I stayed away from E2, I wrote a lot less of the things that I specialized in writing while I was in E2. I moderately regret that. I also am quite happy to have C! powers back, since I had nuked enough nodes to drop two levels. I had plenty of XP, I just never had the number of nodes.