"Parking" -- growing a room on Paltalk

The Concept of Parking

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.

Why would chatters choose not to park? Why would their behavior be like fruit flies, alighting in the room for a few seconds—or at best, a few minutes—and then leaving? 

Instant Gratification

The simple answer is—their need for instant gratification.  It's as if they need a candy bar, or a hit of cocaine, and they go flitting from room to room trying to score something to appease their addiction. In this case the candy bar or the cocaine is lots of room activity, and apparently, it doesn't matter whether the activity is high or low quality.  So when they enter a room and they see what they consider to be no activity going on at the moment, they need to leave desperately in search of their candy bar or their hit of cocaine to assuage their craving.

However, it cannot just be due to a room's temporary low activity. I've seen countless times, probably hundreds of times in the past six years of owning a room, where chatters will come in while there's somebody on mic—and even a couple of hands up waiting to engage—clearly a sign of ongoing activity, and yet still they leave within 15 seconds or maybe a few minutes of entering. So what would be motivating these people to leave?  

This is the six billion $$$ question (adjusting for globalist inflation).  It may well be simply a continuation of the instant gratification motivation.  They may be such severe junkies for that candy bar or that hit of cocaine, that they can't tolerate anything less than hectic feces-flinging insult-room-culture-type activity immediately upon entering, dazzling their vapid eyes with the feverish pulsations of nightclub neon strobe lighting, and pounding their ears with hypno-pop music.  

Someone might object and say, "Well no, the reason they're leaving is because they don't like the conversation they're hearing upon entering."  But I would respond that a) how can you know within a few seconds of arriving (or even a minute or two) whether the topic is something you'd be interested in listening to and maybe participating in?  And b), why would they be so small-minded as to think that if a room is not talking about what they want to talk about at the moment they arrive, it will never talk about something they're interested in if they choose to linger longer?  Not to mention, they're adults and not new to Paltalk, so they should know that they can join in, roll up their shirtsleeves, and try to steer the conversation towards a topic more to their liking.

The Upshot

The upshot of all of this is articulated in the other essay, It's Not Rocket Science.  Put simply, all those chatters I listed in that other essay:

1) know about my room and its goal to foster a high quality room that will be reliably active on an ongoing basis

2) desire such a room (even if in varying degrees, they don't like me, the room owner) and would like the room to exist as a room of ongoing, reliable activity whenever they choose to engage it

but

3) apparently, they allow their reptilian brain to overpower their higher desire for more substantial conversation.

The 3rd point above is the crux of that other essay (It's Not Rocket Science)—since the only way for those chatters to satisfy their higher desire, is to defer instant gratification and park in the room even during the lean times.  This kind of mature behavior—which ultimately will satisfy them later far more deeply than the random candy bars & cocaine they spend their Paltalk days flitting about trying desperately to score—is a necessary first step to growing the room into the room that would best satisfy their higher desire.

One Final Word

The thing is, all these chatters I'm talking about (listed in It's Not Rocket Science) already know all this, deep in their heart of hearts.  I'm not sure how to get them to realize it such that they actually change their behavior.  Psychologically, this problem is probably quite similar to the problem of friends and/or family members trying to get their loved one off of whatever addiction—whether alcohol, drugs, or gambling—is impacting his life (and theirs).