"Parking" -- growing a room on Paltalk

 
Introduction

This essay is for Paltalk chatters, and it concerns the problems of growing a new room.

(The room I own is called "Charitable Debates in Good Faith" -- formerly "Comedians in Chat Getting Coffee") located in the Christianity sub-section of the Religion & Spirituality section.)

Growing it into what?  That depends on the room owner's vision. My vision for my room includes the basic factor of room size: how many chatters it has on a daily basis.  My desire is for a room that stabilizes at a number somewhere between 15 and 30 chatters at any given time throughout the day. This means that even during those periods of the day or night when the room is slowing down (as most rooms do), the lowest it will have is approximately 15.

And, conversely, it means that most of the time, the room will be in the upper 20s in terms of number of chatters.  But just because it might have 20-some chatters for hours on end, one ought not expect that every minute of those hours will be scintillating discussion, or even anything resembling a room that is not "dead" per se.  Just look at hatter's room ("The Other Debate Room"); its norm is to have 40+ chatters, yet often for hours on end a visitor there will encounter only inane nonsense in text on a level of junior high school girl tweets and stultifyingly braincell-killing vaporings on mic.

Having that base of 20-some chatters provides a comfortable atmosphere for the sparking of any reasonably intelligent discussion that might come up at any time, making that a more likely occurrence than if the room is hanging on by its fingernails with only 4 or 5 chatters perched on a lonely ledge way up high in the whipping winds.

Of course, there are aspects to a room vision other than room numbers -- a place for relatively intelligent and free discussions about stuff like philosophy, religion, politics, culture, etc., inter-mixed now and again with convivial digressions and even occasional excursions into silliness.

But this essay here is about more the nuts-and-bolts of how to get to such a room.  And that involves growing the room into a comfortably secure size over time, day after day (= "stabilization").  To do that, I argue, necessarily involves parking.

The Concept of Parking

Again, the goal is stabilization -- which means, the room grows into a place of comfortably secure size over time, day after day, where for hours on end each day, it will have 20-30 chatters, and only on rare occasions will dip down to about 15.

One crucial way to get to stabilization is for visiting chatters to park.

What is parking...?  Parking doesn't just mean you stay there for 5 minutes while you go get a cup of coffee.  Parking means you plant your butt in the room and stay there for hours, day after day consistently, even when nothing much is going on in the room.

Without parking, a new room that is still small will likely never grow into a mid-size room -- will never achieve stabilization.

Now, some argue that to achieve parking, you need to have someone yacking on the mic all the time (like Faith or marge simpson); but I disagree.  This may be true of visiting chatters who have never been in the room before, who are new to the Christianity section dynamics (i.e., visitors from Neptune who don't know who hatter and Andrew are). It's conceivable that some of them visit a room and if they don't see anyone on mic, they flit away like fruit flies.  I personally have not seen any evidence for this supposed causation.  What I have seen are numerous times when there is in fact someone on mic -- and even 2 or 3 with their hands up -- keeping the flame of mic chat going in the room, and yet still visitors are entering the room and leaving the room while the mic chat is going on.  This indicates that -- at best -- there's no causal connection between mic chat and whether visitors stay or leave.

The Upshot

I don't dispute that it's a good thing to have people on mic as much as possible.  But I don't think it's the foundational reason for the beginning of a new, small room to grow.  I therefore maintain that -- prior to anything else -- a new, small room to achieve stabilization needs to undergo two things:

1) it has to cohere

and

2) it has to snowball.

To cohere means it has to have a core of chatters who reliably support the room with their presence.

To snowball means that this coherence has to get bigger and bigger over time.

There is an indefinable "moment" between coherence and snowballing that leads from coherence to snowballing; and it is precisely at that "moment" when parking is vital and necessary.

This "moment" isn't literally a few seconds or minutes; it's a period of time which can't be quantified (it could be days or weeks even).  During this "moment", parking is absolutely necessary to get from a relatively static situation of a core of loyal room followers (= coherence), to a dynamic growth that promises the room will expand to its desired size (= snowballing).

And what does parking mean?  Let us repeat what we said above:

Parking means you plant your butt in the room and stay there for hours, day after day consistently, even when nothing much is going on in the room.

This simple concept implies that the visitor to the room is not solely motivated by his or her primal need for instant gratification, but is willing to be patient and help the room grow -- even when nothing much is going on at the time.

You Know Who You Are: Hall of Shame

There are several chatters who know my room and appreciate it to some extent, and yet don't take the trouble to park (see above for what "parking" means) in it in order to help it grow so it can become a viable room for ongoing conversation they clearly agree is lacking in the only other rooms in the Christianity section (hatters' room and Andrew's room).  And these several chatters include:

ace, alexx, Ryze, beneyah, Sam Huntington, IBH, Happy Atheist.

(I know there are other chatters as well who fit this description, but they don't come to mind at the moment; I will update this paragraph when they do.)

Another chatter who comes to mind in this regard is Servetus.  

However, this isn't a static situation carved in stone. I notice that Stoic/Astro and ace have been better lately in parking in the room for several hours -- not every day and not all day, but hey, baby steps, am I right or am I right...?  Servetus too has been better, though not quite as good as the above-mentioned.

* * * * * 

Consider this a friendly appeal to you all to modify your chat behavior and start parking in my room. Thanks.