But looking at the statistics of thread starters, what about the forums personal youtube "AI" Homer J Simpson? He has a far worse ratio of starting threads (934 started on a total of 1230 posts). Most of his topics are showing youtube videos. Hardly ever looked at his postings since the thread names did not lure me in.
I don’t look at his threads, since by the time he posts it, YouTube will have already shown me the video hours or days earlier.
As I alluded to above, threads started is a poor proxy for actual helpfulness. It’s merely the least-bad option we have, short of examining every thread by hand and determining its intent.
Homer J’s threads are rarely helpful
to me, but others find value in the videos he posts, but above all, they aren’t asking effort of others. It’s very different from someone asking for help over and over and over, but contributing nothing outside of his own threads. (And to be clear, I am not saying that only experienced pros contribute value, by being able to answer complex questions. Even newbies can contribute, whether by answering even simpler questions for others, or by engaging meaningfully in the process of answering their own questions. Or their questions themselves might be truly interesting. Or they have amusing anecdotes. There are many ways to enrich a community, and technical expertise is just one of them.)
Heck, in terms of vampirism and frustration, I don’t even think Faringdon was the worst; we have had a few extraordinary examples of people who suffer from
severe Dunning-Kruger who thought they had come up with super-clever solutions (which couldn’t work), and steadfastly refused to accept the people who paaaaaatiently laid out in excruciating detail why it wouldn’t work, only for the OP to restate their beliefs as if nothing had happened. Some of those members eventually got banned.
Then we have the folks who do know a lot, but not nearly as much as they think they know, and who think they know
better than the entire world. They argue disingenuously by using their own private definitions of otherwise established terminology, move goalposts as their arguments are carefully disproven by others, and insist others are wrong despite incontrovertible proof to the contrary. These members remain and continue to reply to, and often derail, threads.
(I will mention that I sometimes end up overconfident, but I am always willing to review what I wrote and learn from others. If I’m wrong, explain it to me, and I will amend my knowledge/beliefs.)
Closely related to the aforementioned are the members who reply frequently, attempting to be helpful, but who have a remarkable amount of irrelevant, erroneous or wildly outdated “knowledge” which they disseminate with confidence. So then entire discussions have to be held simply to correct the false statements, often prolonged by these members’ doubling down on their mistakes. This is particularly nefarious in replies to beginners who simply don’t have the knowledge and experience to identify bad responses. So other experienced members have to step in and make sure the beginner understands that a particular response is wrong, hazardous, or merely inadvisable.