Find your way past the proselytizers to the calmer, more-mature non-evangelist obsessives.
If you write an excellent post about your obsession that gets 196 upvotes on LW, I’ll find it even if I don’t really share the obsession. That was kinda my point—people discover their own obsessions because they found something important / fascinating, not because someone shamed them into caring about it.
This is tangential, but I should point out that the linked post (while indeed excellent) does not have 196 upvotes—it does not even have 196 votes, of any kind! Hover your mouse pointer over the karma total, and you will see that it has 63 votes (we do not know how many are up vs. down).
This probably does not change your point, but it’s important to keep this in mind when, e.g., comparing one post to another—especially across the history of LW.
If you write an excellent post about your obsession that gets 196 upvotes on LW, I’ll find it even if I don’t really share the obsession. That was kinda my point—people discover their own obsessions because they found something important / fascinating, not because someone shamed them into caring about it.
This is tangential, but I should point out that the linked post (while indeed excellent) does not have 196 upvotes—it does not even have 196 votes, of any kind! Hover your mouse pointer over the karma total, and you will see that it has 63 votes (we do not know how many are up vs. down).
This probably does not change your point, but it’s important to keep this in mind when, e.g., comparing one post to another—especially across the history of LW.