#76 The fruit of prison sincerity (retro)

The Fruit of Prison Sincerity

Or lack thereof….

Today is a pretty warm day here, for a February, as I watch my sports channels and listen to how the sports media is putting Alex Rodriguez on the hangman’s noose. If you are not familiar with the story, they recently found out he took some performance enhancing drugs back in 2001-03. Now at the time he was tested, there was no punishment for it by Major League Baseball…in other words, no sin. But in light of recent steroid episodes, now everybody wants to hang every person that has taken it.

There is much to be said on this, and how humanity looks first to condemn and punish rather than to help, but that is another time.

Today I wanted to test myself and see something, while hopefully proving a point. You have heard me talk about how many prison support sites have little sincerity, and how many of them use other members to create a false image of themselves. I want to prove that in the next week.

The test is to see how many posts some of these members actually put up in a week, to have amassed such a huge (and bogus) count of posts on these sites. My argument with this, as you have read, is that a person with 10,000 posts cannot possibly care about the people, because it is highly unlikely that such people are sincerely writing posts to help people.

You will remember that I wrote a post about some person who had 28,000 posts on Prison Talk Online, and how I believed that that person could not possibly care about those people, but rather trying to create superiority by numbers. A person with 28,000 posts would look like an expert to one with only 300, right?

(as an idiot would say)

I got several emails on that, and many people do agree with me. Now, you may not fully understand why this is important. Remember, you don’t go to these sites to mingle like you’re at the club or the bar. You are there because you have a loved one that is in prison, and you need support to get through this. You don’t need sympathy, you need strength, which is supposed to be the definition of “support” anyway.

But a person with such an abnormal count of posts cannot possibly be taking sincere time to help you, but rather is just “rubber stamping” some one or two liner on your post just to get the count up. You will find that many of these people end up being moderators, which to me is foolish….they don’t know any more than when they first got started.

So to test this theory, what I have done is created a watch. What I am going to do is look at two pre-selected members of Prison Talk Online, and see how often they post in the course of a week. I already have the two names, but will not release those names.

What I am attempting to prove is that when it comes to even prison support sites, there are people that really don’t care about your problem, but use your posts to rack up numbers so they can be seen as something they are not. These are the people that sadly disrupt any faith or help that can be obtained from a true prison support site.

So, today being Monday, February 9th, I have picked two members, pretty much at random, but I looked for those with abnormal numbers for posts. One is a moderator, the other is a member.

Now get this, the moderator I selected has 23,284 posts, and the member has 29,145 posts at the moment I recorded these numbers. I said in an older blog, and I say again to ANYBODY who challenges me: anybody with over 5000 posts is bogus because I bet you most of those posts are one liners like, “hi and welcome to PTO”.

This gives a false face of expertise and fools other members to think that if somebody with 20,000 posts says something, it must be true, when they may know less than most others.

I also looked at the join date of each of these two members and found something very disturbing. The member with over 29,000 posts joined in June of 2003. Now let that sink in for a sec folks.

This person has posted over 29,000 times in 5 and a half years. That’s like 5200 per year, or 430 a month, or 14 posts a DAY! Do you see what I am getting at folks? Can you make 14 posts a DAY, every day, every week, every month, for 5 and a half years?

Heck, I LOVE to write, but even I can’t do that. It’s not a problem for me to write 20-30 pages a week, or maybe 4-10 blogs a week…but not a day!

So how can you write that much…unless what you write has little to no value.

I say this to anyone who wants to hear it, there is no way a person can write that much on any site, especially in that short period of time, and be sincere about it. It is very clear that this person does not care about the members of PTO, they care only about their numbers, because they want to be seen as better than others…and by doing that, they poison the entire site.

Now the moderator I mentioned has over 23,000 posts, but get this, their join date was September, 2005. Are you kidding me? This person has only been in PTO for about 3 and a half years and has 23,000 posts? That averages to almost 20 posts a day, every day!

Ask yourself this when you read posts by people with that many posts…are they really caring about you, or about themselves? I was a member for about 2 years, and I have a total of about 1500 posts as masonik4 and Nolaw97. How on earth did these people rack up so many posts?

The answer is simple, the responses are kept simple and with no heart. You type out, “hi and welcome to PTO” and then rubber stamp it on every intro post you can find. You look through other people’s posts and instead of trying to help, you give some two cent comment that took no effort to write.

Now understand, I am trying to make a point in that if you are going to take the time to write, at least make it worthwhile. I know there are a few people on these sites that make honest attempts to help others with their posts. But I suggest to you that those people would not have 20,000 posts, or 10,000 posts, or even 5000 posts. These are the people that will write as if they are sitting down in front of you, talking to you like a person. That is sincerity.

So I’ll check up on those two throughout the week, and let you know one week from now how it turns up. At the rates those people are going, they should make about 90-140 posts this week alone each. That a lot of “hi and welcome to PTO” stamps…