Because it reflects on you as a person.
If you spend time writing messages each day, and some of them are horrible "Troll" types, really low and nasty,
you define yourself as a person who sits in front of a keyboard each day,
every day, whether it's for minutes or seconds, and takes an interest in these things.
Interested enough to reply. Logging on every single day. Day in, day out.
Always here. Always. Every day. Every day. Tomorrow included.
Yeah but that doesn't mean you should let something like negative rep comments make you feel lousy about yourself, which was the point I was making to Davie.
You can't "define yourself" by something like posting on a forum. Very little in life "defines" you because that's an ego signifier, and -Sartre and Watts talk about this a lot (or they did before they croaked)- the ego is an ephemeral concept, not a tangible hard and fixed reality.
Your actions are reality, but actions can be stopped and changed. Your
self, such as it is, is in flux, constantly. You are not defined by anything but the very finite, transitory Now. Yesterday's Vietnam soldier may be today's homeless bum. Today's Sunday morning pulpit preacher may be indicted tomorrow for child molestation. A petty thief may spend some time in prison and come out hungering for a college education and a family and steady job. These are very black and white examples but I think you get my point.
The forum is a theoretical collective, not a literal one. Software allows for the illusion that we are actually having a conversation together, and in a sense we are but only when we tell our brains to see it that way; in reality we are all total strangers in totally different parts of the world adding arbitrary puzzle pieces to a whole at different times, independently of each other that will never really be intrinsically cohesive.
So yes I have an interest in posting here which is manifested when I sit down to type, but that doesn't mean that I define myself by my posts, or that I would let what anyone here says make me thing better or worse about myself as a whole. People can see and comment on posts, but at my rate of less than five average per day (according to my profile stats) I'd like to think there's a lot more in my life that defines me than what I post here.
I'm not Sylarker. Skylarker is technically part of me in as much as I participate here and use that word, "Skylarker," as my username which then becomes fixed in people's minds as "me," but I'm not Skylarker.
Just as long as it never gets to the point where he comes here and tries to kill me and a bunch of sparrows fly into the room to attack him, I think I am OK.