Not a drive-by posting! And cougars and jaguars and sabre-teeth, oh my!

[dakhun]

You know, if people are going to come back to LJ after an absence of several months, and make their "OMG I love LJ but it's too bad the volume of activity has fallen off" posts before hastily returning to Facebook, the least they can do is to REPLY to whatever comments they get on that post

Comments

[plonq]

I bit the bullet a few weeks ago and came back to LJ after my unplanned hiatus. I had been meaning to for a while because I got tired of having to water things down for my family on Facebook, or fit my rambling thoughts into 140-character bursts for Twitter.

[dakhun]

Eee, you are back, and post regularly!
I thought your LJ was a goner for sure, and I'm pleased to see I was wrong.
I didn't understand what you were up to on Twitter, quite frankly...

[porsupah]

*flutteryay*

(Ah, seriously: I've seen you around here for a long while. I hope you remain!)

[mondhasen]

The message that it sends when you don't reply is that you're really not there and there is no reason for anyone to bother replying next time.

Thank you for posting that... I've been thinking pretty much the same for a while now, myself. Looking over my journal, I'd estimate maybe 10% of my FL does any posting on a regular basis as it is, and though I don't post too regularly now I do try to respond to those who took the time to read and comment.

And the only reason they would not have been under food stress despite having less food available was because humans were killing them all.

Humans seem to have a nasty habit of killing everything they perceive as a threat, real or imagined, to their survival: politicians term it preemptive strikes.

[dakhun]

That's the European/Western attitude toward wildlife, to be sure. Native North Americans and native South Americans had different attitudes toward different species. There were generally positive attitudes toward cougars in eastern North America and in all of South America, but extremely negative attitudes (evil omens, witchcraft) in western North America. That's not to say the ones who had positive attitudes towards cougars wouldn't kill cougars, but they wouldn't want to exterminate them.

Smilodons would have been a completely different thing, however. With their huge fangs and freakishly wide gape, they must have seemed very scarey, even alien. Also, with their very large size, I can't imagine having a positive experience with a smilodon in the wild anymore than you could with a tiger.

[whitetail]

A few suggestions that might help you get more replies

[dakhun]

Rabs, these are very good points. And thanks, I like your posts too - yours have always been among the ones I'd rate as the high quality journals. Interestingly, I take a slightly different route to commenting: I'll decide within 30 seconds whether I want to reply to a post (or comment) but I will let that sit for a few minutes to think of what I want to say. Sometimes it takes longer. Often, the best ideas come when I am thinking about something else later.

BUT... I actually wasn't soliciting for comments on this post. In fact, I can't recall ever demanding replies to a post on LJ, except for asking who wants to join a group filter. I was specifically referring to ONE type of situation: one in which people do a drive-by posting to LJ after a protracted absence, and then drive off abandoning the post to the four winds. It would be far better if they would circle back and reply to at least some of the comments. Because someone abandoning their only post in a year is going to make people wonder if they should bother replying the next

[dakhun]

Mind you, I can definitely see how the original title "Would it hurt to reply once in a while? And cougars and jaguars and sabre-teeth, oh my!" could seem like a solicitation for replies.
So I will change it.

[whitetail]

BTW, I agree that the sabre-teeth were done to death by humans, as well as the rest of the Pleistocene megafauna. And actually, I believe the Holocene Mass Extinction is still underway, after a brief pause of a hundred or so centuries. Now, though, instead of killing off individual species, we're destroying entire habitats, and driving uncountable numbers of creatures to extinction. Unfortunately, this current mass extinction event probably won't end until its primary agent is itself extinct: Us. We're really long overdue for a mass die-off of our own. We may be the most numerous large animal on the planet right now, but that is simply not sustainable. Ultimately, I believe our species will bring about its own doom, and probably sooner in geologic time rather than later.

[porsupah]

I can't offer much advice on the food front, as my kind never has any shortage thereof.

Seriously, it's been an absolute delight, over the last few weeks - one spot that had been quite a marginal location suddenly became the hot spot for local buns. I've sometimes found myself with a dozen buns in front, to the side, and behind. ^_^ Such a happy evening, seeing old timers and tinybuns out together. ^_^

[dakhun]

I'd love to have an area like that where I could go to regularly and see that much wildlife, of any species. I'd spend a lot of time there, if I could.
My wildlife photography has been of the plush variety lately. Here are a couple of examples I've posted to Tweetsylvania earlier today:
https://twitter.com/catameep/status/462663466600263680
https://twitter.com/catameep/status/462664192743313408

[furahi]

To Facebook? If I only it were that easy, people scattered to Facebook, twitter, G+... Even FA

[dakhun]

Well, it doesn't really matter where ever else they go off to, because the effect is the same.

I know what you are saying though, that it is really tough to keep up with everyone with them leaving one site and moving to other sites (and not all the same site). I've felt that frustration, and am still feeling it now. :-/ All I can suggest is that you get used to the idea of having to uproot and move to another site every so often, and having to make new friends every time that happens. Most surely what happened to LJ will happen eventually to every other site too. Everything has only a finite lifespan and there's no monopoly on blogging.