In a previous age, the WWW had not been invented yet and I had to barter with the local university to get access to Internet email (there was no such thing as an ISP yet), I belonged to a "newsgroup"-like discussion group on CompuServe. It was mainly populated by fellow writers and developers, and the discussions were very philosophical and deep. In it's heyday, it was quite a group.

Anyway, it was noted one time that the lurkers outnumbered the active participants by about 80:1 ! We would chat about the wisdom of the ages or the wimsey of the moment, and out there was this hidden audience totally unknown to us except for traces in the system logs. Occasionally someone would get up the courage to post something and thus join the group; most always newcomers graduated from being lurkers, so like long-period comets we knew there was some vauge population "out there" but never really thought about it much.

One day that itself became the subject of conversation. Why are all these people watching us, and what are they getting out of it? Some cross between PBS (this was before Discovery Channel) and a geek soap opera? We pondered but could not truely comprehend.

—John