^^ One person piping in does mean that people lose out on a plethora of various opinions. People should never just take the word of one person for granted. On the Full-Sized thread, it's great - people of all sizes and shapes come in to offer their knowledge and you usually get longer discussions in regards to advice. Here that's basically non-existent.
And I hardly see any people being left out, bar a few exceptions, and they would just bump their unread post anyways so people still see to it in the end. Here if I happen to leave for a few days/a month like last time, people do pick up the slack (and quite admirably!) but the sheer amount of unanswered questions was startling. I'm still in shock against the 4x 60-reply posts that I had to do after a month (well the ones I didn't post yet due to...technical problems).
It's a shame because I've always felt the portable forums to be a much more close-knit association of odd-balls, just a much closer community in general. So we don't get as much traffic as we would on the full-sized forums, but I find the new threads and discoveries (even the FOTMs) to be much more exciting and intensive. Whenever I go on the subforums, I find it genuinely hard to find the stuff I really want to read, the new products I really want to check out, because people keep on adding new threads asking for suggestions without looking at the stickies, without using the proper references, and without using this thread.
Heck, sometimes I even find that the number of people responding is far greater than one would expect, and yet none of them will even take a second to glance at this thread, or even a second to help out. I'm willing to bet that a significant majority of people on the forums are simply not aware of this thread's existence.
Now, we don't expect altruism all the time on a public forum. That would be imprudent and presumptuous. People lead lives outside of the Internet, and sometimes they just want to indulge. But I do know for a fact that many will want to return the favour for all the information and discussion blossoming on the forum. The fact that a lack of awareness, and a lack of a proper, systematic system of handling with help, greatly hinders the usefulness of this thread.
Perhaps I'm being too pragmatic. Perhaps I've been stuck on those dusty bug-reports, mailing lists, and help forums for way too long. Perhaps this just isn't the proper place to do this sort of thing. But I know that one thing I've retained from my experiences outside of Head-Fi is the the rewarding experience of being able to help people everyday, through a properly designed and effective support system. Is that simply too much to ask? Should it be such a hard thing to simply help your community out?
I have to stress that I'm not telling everyone to drop what they're doing and feel guilty about something they shouldn't. There's plenty of people on this forum. No one person should be forced to do something they feel is not rewarding or compensates their time. A collective effort that changes from time to time, with different people chiming in around the clock, is much simpler than it seems. People just have to be AWARE. And this is one thread that people have not been very much aware of.
I help because I dislike clutter. Because I dislike unanswered questions. Because I dislike the thought of a community that doesn't give back (well on this front). The Multi-IEM review (both ljokerl and ClieOSs), the Multi-CIEM comparison, the 50 Headphones thread, MLE's Guide to Headphone Gaming, the various Amp/DAC comparison thread, etc, etc, are hallmarks, far and beyond most of what you might encounter on a typical forum. And those are individuals going out of their way to do it, doing it quite well, to say the least. And the collective that gathers within those threads do just as well to help out those in need. There is an mind-boggling amount of help offered, so I don't see why we can't improve the situation over here.
Some might call it wasted time, wasted effort, as the other multi-IEM threads do just the same job. But those are only limited to the items reviewed there. It would count out the various IEMs and headphones new to the scene, worth every bit of a look as the other options. On here, we can easily get enough people with differing experiences and expertise.
It can't be perfect. Not all answers will be answered. People might even lose interest after a day or two. But as long as there's an ongoing movement, an ongoing push for contribution, for advice, I don't see why we can't make this work better.
