All about yourself! (user search)
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Author Topic: All about yourself!  (Read 986678 times)
Waterfall
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« on: January 18, 2017, 08:38:11 AM »

Interesting that y'all are posting your age/location/race/political affiliations/hobbies/etc. but nobody is posting whether you own your home, are married, and have kids.

The factors in bold above are important influences on people's political views, but this influence typically doesn't become obvious until after the fact.

BTW I'm a married homeowner with kids.
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Waterfall
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« Reply #1 on: January 18, 2017, 10:45:27 AM »
« Edited: January 18, 2017, 10:47:57 AM by Waterfall »

This isn't a thread for analyzing why people believe the things they do, it's to get to know members of the forum personally.

Didn't say it was. I was pointing out something interesting about the thread that tells me a lot about y'all.

Whether one is married, owns his home, and has kids is also a very good proxy for a lot of other things you might want to know about a person.
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Waterfall
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« Reply #2 on: January 18, 2017, 11:49:02 AM »
« Edited: January 18, 2017, 11:51:20 AM by Waterfall »

Handling a spouse, live-at-home children, and a single family home means that you are more likely to have given over much of your life over to a huge pile of responsibilities. I would guess the average forum poster is not a married,kids,home type. Single people are more likely to have the time to make psephology and/or racking up thousands of posts about politics on a message board a hobby. Heck, I bet some people leave this place after they get a significant other.
You're describing selection bias. That might explain some of it.

On the other hand, I've seen other online forums (for example a couple DIY forums I visit) where a lot of the posters are middle aged with houses, spouses, and kids. House/spouse/kids take up time, but not every waking moment.

So, selection bias for all forum-posting is probably too broad. I think it's probably a "seed culture" thing. Plus, as you get older you realize these ideological antler-rasslin' sessions are usually a waste of time, and what's an even bigger waste of time is saying inflammatory things online for the "naughty fun" of seeing people gasp and sputter. This means if you're going to talk politics online, you tend to either just seek out enclaves where people agree with you and can talk about "what to do" or else you seek out calm, polite, intellectual venues where you can quietly and slowly push around ideas. I don't know yet if this is one of those, still finding out.
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Waterfall
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Posts: 118
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« Reply #3 on: January 19, 2017, 11:25:10 PM »

Most of this has been some variation of the first post in this thread, which provided a template. Over time people added some other fields, but since many are indeed not married and may not own their own home, it was never incorporated. Even when I posted in this thread, I simply used the set of questions used by some poster before me and made a couple changes that I thought were relevant (or declined to answer certain questions). If that poster had included "Married" and/or "Own my own home," I'd probably have answered both. I'd like to say many other people would have behaved in a similar fashion.
OK, fair enough.
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