Hearing person (cringes and hides) asking an honest and sensitive question

naisho said:
It appears that our appealing visitor has departed or is perhaps taking a break.

Beam me up Botti! (Or Spocky? both rhyme)

PS. Congratulations on breaking 10k.
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Thanks. I will now be known as "Super Poster Spock.":wave:
 
Hearing people have short attention spans? That's an interesting bias, I've never heard it expressed before. I had to laugh a little at that one.
Why register here in the first place? To meet and interact with new people, to find out more about the "culture" of the deaf people you already know, to learn new things and share information.
I would assume that some hearing people here can't relate to many of the posts or receive what they feel is a hostile reception and so they don't return.
Some probably just feel out of place. They registered, checked it out, and just didn't feel like they fit in. You must admit, that would be an understandable feeling.
 
Daredevel7 said:
From my ASL class and their need to incorporate Deaf Culture ways into the class, it's pretty obvious to me that my ASL teacher want to teach the potential 'terps (which accounts for 90% of my class) all the possible "offenses" that you can do to a Deaf person. This gives the illusion that Deaf people get offended a LOT.

In my ASL book alone, I have about 8 pages basically saying what is rude to a Deaf person. Which is kinda understandable, but you don't see that in other "learning languages" books.
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and i would agree...i have been signing for many many years and have many deaf friends. however, this semester is my first asl class. It is interesting to see the things the books warn against. generally these are unspoken. spoken english even has things that are rude. we know this when we travel to other countries and when we see foreigners. it may not be in a book but we are still aware. but the ignorance of hearing ppl towards deafness is astounding. so in some cases it should be spelled out. hearing and deaf ppl think differently and there is a lot of history between us, and not all ppl are quite as accepting of others. this is on both sides. yes i have had people who are deaf refuse to talk to me becuase i am hearing, but i have had hearing ppl refuse to talk to my friends becuase they were deaf (and me as well when i refused to interpret everything because they werent even trying to understand.) it is not on one side to assimilate to the other, but both need to have the patience and motivation to learn.
 
Nah Chef, you seem to have me confused. I was speaking on the context of internet and forum activity, not reality. I will explain once again.

This [the forum] is a great way for the deaf to communicate to another. The hearing can communicate in just every method available outside of the internet. Some of us are out of the loop on telephones, cellphones, vocal communication. Since we post on an internet forum, it makes it much easier for us to "pay attention" to their posts compared to your average hearing person posting over at bulletinboard.myspace.com.

We give a lot of feedback for them, but the person then runs off. I stated previously that I realize there is something that may be influencing them to "post and run", but I don't know what.
 
naisho said:
Usually that's what happens for most of the bigger online forums..

If you care to read my thoughts of the logic behind it all:

A new dude/dudette appears from a search engine on something or stumbled on a link, then when they arrive and stand in front of the alldeaf directory it splits into the type of person they are before they post.

A true lurker doesn't post but reads as much as they need to know: Sometimes they'll register and never make a post, just to be able to search the forums to bypass the headache of the captcha image.

A curious one looks around a little, has a really interesting question or wants to know more about the forum/basis of it and their questions provoke or gather a lot of interest of the mainstreamed forumers. A lot of this "Breed" disappear after asking something.

A "gossipy one" or I dunno how to give a terminology for it; is what I consider registers, reads stuff and posts a ton within the hour they have registered.

There are also subdivisions of the three above to me, and the individual are then varied by type (examples like troller/flamer, lurker variations, stuff like that just like in society having KKK members, NRA group, etc)

The dedication of these individuals is then another story. But honestly I think from my own opinion the ratio of those who "post and run" versus the ratio of those who make their new+introductory post is higher as if something is influencing people to go.

The following is just a wild shot hypothesis:
I would suppose the average hearing person has less attention span versus a deaf person. On the forum we expect timely replies much due to the fact that we recognize that this is a form of communication that is in our favor. The average hearing probably does not care much for "keeping in contact", as they have their means and reasons not to do so.
Thus we are more prone to recognize "post and run" than they care to give two cents about it.

Other random stats if you care to enjoy my math as I did:
25,150 total members.

Guesswork:
~30 unique active members posting per day: random figure.
~100 unique posting members per week: a little high, but being optimistic.
~400 unique members posting per month (this includes the two above)
~500 unique visitors per day. (Based on Last 24 Hours data, includes guests, bots, clones, banned, etc)
~1000 uniques per week: random figure)
~1500 registrants (including spam, clones, everything) every six months = 250 per month.

Following numbers a bit off, but probably not too far from the real one:
• 60-70 "Hi" threads from the month of march '09: mean = 65
• 184-200 "Hi" threads from month of jan '09 to end of march'09: mean = 192 • 64/month
= averaging this out per month from above two data: 64.5 average new posters per month.

Guesswork statistics for jan09-mar09:
• 00.4% of all registered members post frequently/weekly.
• 00.2% of all registered members post daily.
• 01.6% of all registered members post monthly.

• 06.0% of daily visitors post. (~94% are doing other stuff, but a good chunk of this is crawling bots, like I'd say anywhere from 40-60%)
• 10.0% of weekly visitors post.
• Not sure of monthly data, but I would randomly guess this is around ~15% of monthly visitors post.

• +06.0% to population every half year, safe to guess around ~ +1.0% /year at this rate.

• 25% of all new registrants make one post.
I assume 3 out of 4 people disappear after posting:
• 6.5% of all new registrants participate after making their first post.

I don't have data from '08 and years before, never bothered doing simple statistics but it would be nice to compare it now.
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i love your reasoning! and the math:)

a friend and i took our ask club to gallaudet uni a few weekends ago. it was quite interesting. while we loved it, the new students were quite overwhelmed and unsure of what to do. all the sudden they were no longer talkign about deaf culture and talking about signing, but being in the middle of it all. and i refused to interpret. they would ask me all these quesitons instead of just asking the deaf students. i really cant explain it becuase i am more social in the deaf world then the hearing. but i feel that many hearing students are scared that they are going to offend someone or truly only want enought to do what they need to do. many ask why i am so interested in deaf culture..and i ask why not? i have been reading these posts and definitely find them quite interesting. i really wish more hearing people would try to understand more about deaf culture...then maybe it would not be a one way assimilation of deaf people into the hearing world. but i see this from looking in, how do you feel about people asking you questions about being deaf?
 
Ah, I see. Since they don't know anyone here I would assume that they stick around long enough to post and then return to whatever social networking site they normally frequent where posting takes place at a different pace or they have friends to chat with. Probably forget the website and couldn't find it again two days later if they wanted to.
Is this troublesome?
 
this is awesome. i am hearing and would still give same advice. but should we really lie? i would feel fake i dont know. but i still try to not speak or respond to noise when with my deaf friends. unless they ask for help i also wont interpret. she has a ci and can understand most speech, but still we sign when together becuase we both prefer sign. it is interesting though because toehrs generally think we are both deaf, which actually makes it easier. when people know i am hearing, they tend to get upset that i wont interpret or just answer for anyone, that is rude.
 
Chef said:
Ah, I see. Since they don't know anyone here I would assume that they stick around long enough to post and then return to whatever social networking site they normally frequent where posting takes place at a different pace or they have friends to chat with. Probably forget the website and couldn't find it again two days later if they wanted to.
Is this troublesome?
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I don't think most of the guys here minded that they were disappearing at first; but when you start seeing the same thing every few days by different people:
Hi my name is ____ and I have a ____ for ____ school. I would like to ask you some questions?

Can you do ______ (something that is related to deafness)?
Why do you hate hearing people? What do they do that annoys you the most?
If you could do one thing, what would you do?
*Fill in the rest with whatever's on your mind*
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It gets tiring to some people after awhile, because they've repeated it over and over. And we've responded over and over, with no replies back from them!

I've been thinking of a sticky to help relocate these individuals for some time, actually.


Reasn4Evrythin9 said:
this is awesome. i am hearing and would still give same advice. but should we really lie? i would feel fake i dont know. but i still try to not speak or respond to noise when with my deaf friends. unless they ask for help i also wont interpret. she has a ci and can understand most speech, but still we sign when together becuase we both prefer sign. it is interesting though because toehrs generally think we are both deaf, which actually makes it easier. when people know i am hearing, they tend to get upset that i wont interpret or just answer for anyone, that is rude.
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Welcome aboard, mate.
 
They don't know they're asking a question that has already been answered a thousand times.
I think that hearing ASL teachers put so much emphasis on Deaf culture and what can be offending to deaf people that ASL students often want to get a feeling for how true that realy is. For example, I live in Rochester and work at RIT/NTID so I am around deaf people everyday. My mother on the other hand just took an ASL class for her job, she is a nurse in the Rochester area, and took her class at a different school. She has almost no interaction with deaf people at all. When her teacher tells her something about deaf culture she has no idea how true it is or to what degree. She is deathly afraid of using the sign for hard of hearing because she was told it is highly offensive. I could definately understand someone in a situation like that wanting to find out if something that they learned in class is true and I think once they find out that deaf people are just regular people they feel a bit sheepish for asking silly questions in the first place.
 
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