How fast are you forgotten if you stop posting on Sanctioned Suicide?

[NormallyNeurotic]

When I rejoined this forum, once after abandoning my old account, and once coming back recently, seeking solace, I immediately recognized a few names. Some that affected us greatly without realizing it. I have memory issues, but some people leave their mark.

 

[noname223]

@noname223, your post about your experience meeting a quantum physicist in a psych ward, and your intimate recollection on "ambiguity tolerance", will always personally have a place in my mind <3

Edit: It's here, actually.

New insights analyzing my mind - ambiguity intolerance

I wrote a 9 pages analysis of my mind to my therapist to persuade her into extending my therapy sessions. Many years ago I met a quantumphysics professor as a patient in a clinic who told me I struggle with ambiguity intolerance and making predictions all the time. I certainly analyze the...

www.sanctioned-suicide.net

Such a beautiful, poignant, and—to me—frankly unforgettable story, from your life, that you have shared with, and given to us.

<3 I promise you that you have made beautiful and unique contributions to this forum, certainly in your own right, and I thank you for the gift of your presence, your time, your words, your knowledge, your emotions, compassion, and desire to figure out life, too. Much love, much appreciation, and much gratitude, for the gift that you and all your words here are.

Sincerely,
Webb.

Thank you so much for this lovely and kind message. It means a lot to me. And I had to smile big time when I read.

Your answer was a great gift to me. People like you make this community so special.

 

[webb&flow]

Your answer was a great gift to me. People like you make this community so special.

Et tu, noname ^u^

 

[R. A.]

As always, @-Link- nails it; this question could be answered in a hundred ways, but my read is you're pondering "how fast are you forgotten by the amorphous mass that 'is' this website?", and I honestly think that is fairly quick for anyone - because the turnover rate is so high among users.

We know from that creepy paper that scraped posts here that most accounts are only active for a few weeks on activation. I don't know if there was a percentage in the paper, but on a hyperconservative estimate of 51% of users at any given time will be gone in 30 days from any given point, a (near) half-life model dictates that in under a year, no one will remain from the original pool of users who "knew" any given one.

Of course this is an imperfect model for many reasons but still, the percentage of users active on this date in 2019 who'd registered in that same year was surely waaayy higher than it is today. From my own experience, I was away at a point for over a year and a half and aside from a few DMs from near the beginning of that period, only a single person had publicly noted my absence.

The only enduring institutional memory this place has is posts detailing suicide methods. Everyone remembers Stan, because that is the primary draw of the site. Even if many people end up finding solace in the simple act of having a place to talk about why they're here to begin with. Hardly anyone uses the search function, and when they do, it's usually not to find people.