What's Keeping You From Posting?

[Psychlonic]

Change is coming. Change not only for the site itself as a community hub but change in how you can become empowered with personal security and post once more with the same boldness of yesteryear. Change in how you can rapidly learn as needed and become motivated to operate in the shadows again.

It is far past time we dust the cobwebs off, shake the complacency and truly be what night ops should be in the 2020s.

As this change looms on the horizon, I would like to know what has kept our lurking userbase from posting more often. Believe it or not, most of the site-related issues can be overcome. More on that later.

This poll ends in 45 days.

[V-S]

For me it's mostly just not always having time and energy. I have stated somewhere before that I find the more other people post (especially with images or video), the more I feel motivated to do so myself.

PERSEC is definitely something I consider from time to time, and that's why I'll only post about low-profile adventures.

[Mr. Edgyman]

I want to focus on my training program thing before focusing on other things like gear or ops. Might end up going on some ops by the end of the year regardless if it's something time sensitive like a construction site that will probably be finished before the end of next year however, then I'll post it here.

[spartan_ninja45]

A mix of things for me. Most of the ops I do aren't very interesting and I feel they just aren't worth sharing. I'm also honestly a bit lazy and don't like writing much. I do have goals and aspirations to get better and go on more high risk ops. Once I'm at that level I think I'd feel more inclined to share with you guys. But for now I'm just kind of an amateur and I have fun doing simple, low risk sneaking around while I develop my skills for the future. That being said, I'd love to be a part of helping the forum pick up steam again.

[Intruder]

I'd post ops if anything I was doing was beyond a few construction sites and builds. Mostly it's the rural living vs time. Jobs and all that. Nothing keeping me from posting though and I always try to throw in my .02 cents. I think there's nothing inherantly wrong it's just that so much of the internet is funneled away via google.
People don't search to search anymore, they use tiktok to find locations more than google. And with reddit, youtube, adblock oriented platforms becomming anti crawler and unable to be easily searched ( see reddit aPIs for example) it's not that this place is unattractive. I think most people are simply not equipped to find it as easily as it was when you'd use a search to actually search and not have to find platform communities. Even 4chan is getting censored by volunteerist janitors now. It makes information very unreliable to put out. Plus AI search is only going to make it worse

So really the problem is reach, not formate. This place is an awesome relic that deserves to be kept safe but at the same time there's a generation gap and a whole lot of distance between this habit and other people even knowing this was a subculture. It's absolutely a getting the message out more than anything issue. I think anyway.

[Psychlonic]

Well, it was a smaller result than even I was expecting but I appreciate the votes we got and replies added. Thank you.

This topic was less about wondering why the community is low on activity and more about seeing what we can do to improve what's here.

It was interesting to read that many just considered their night out insignificant. I know there's the NSEFIOT post but I think there's a bit of misconception about what a story needs to have in order to be post-worthy. I started out barely able to do any yard hopping. There's actually a great deal of value in the mundane or in mistakes, and even if you're not interested in posting them publicly I think writing them out personally even if it's just on paper to dispose of later is a great way to analyze the night with a calmer mind and see what went wrong. If nothing else, the experience is an AAR.

Spending all this time thinking about the hobby lately, I got to thinking about what my most difficult operation might have been. I settled on one from my very first years that really just checked all the boxes, man it was rough. The biggest reason when I think about it was simply that back then I had no way to come up with a superior infiltration route that would have made the whole affair dramatically easier. I was also pretty wet behind the ears and chalk the success of that one up to pure boldness and being in good shape rather than actual skill. To tell you all the truth, I'm not positive I could repeat that one successfully today.

Happy New Year to everyone, hope 2023 was good and that 2024 is even better!