I'd like to take this opportunity to be perfectly honest. There was an ask reddit thread that asked why lurkers lurked and I really wanted to say it then, but, given my lurkeryness, didn't. For me it takes quite a lot to build up the courage to comment. I'm just too paranoid of saying the wrong thing and having the excitement of someone replying snatched away with hate mail. I'll usually try to be as neutral as possible. I usually only ask for help on audio engineering and edm subreddits and gearslutz, only when I'm in a real fix. Expressing any part of my personality freaks me out, so i try to stick with the raw data. Even saying "lurkeryness" as a relaxed form of slang is a little unnerving. But I quite like hubski. For some reason I feel more relaxed around you guys. Although, it has been a while since I last posted here, life just got in the way. I also get distracted very easily, and find it difficult to properly finish a train of thought. I think of tonnes of things all at once then try to connect everything then and there and it gets overwhelming. I've tried keeping a blog several times. Maybe one day it will work. Finally, I mostly use aggregators for news, so I'm happy just scrolling through. Anyway, I'm going to try and come out of my shell a bit more :)
I'm kind of in the same boat. A lot of the time, I really just don't have anything worthwhile to add. This is especially true on Reddit, where I always get to the good discussions late and anything I write will be buried. The few times I do actually have something to say, I spend ages editing my post before pressing save for some of the same paranoid reasons as you. I'm doing it right now. I'm not just paranoid about what other people might say, but I'm also a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to writing. These two things don't mix well. About half the time I just end up hitting cancel.
Hey nimbus, I am relatively new here and have been an asshole a few times and I did not get any hate mail! Mostly everyone has something to contribute and I have seen a few threads here about audio engineering issues so I am sure you do too even just in that niche. Probably others too. Go for it!