Gardening

The other day, a guy posted on DailyDiapers complaining about the lack of active participation in the diaper community. He had recently started a new website, and it wasn't doing so well- people were going there, checking out the pictures and videos, and leaving. No one was using the forum, and no one was willing to contribute content for the site. Some others suggested that those who couldn't put any content of their own out there should make donations to the free sites they have been enjoying, instead of just being "freeloaders."

I could certainly empathize with the guy; I've actually be having a lot of similar thoughts lately. However, I couldn't really get behind the way everybody seemed to be approaching the issue. I had to disagree with the way the thread seemed to be aimed at coercing people into either giving money or uploading content. To me, this seemed more counterproductive than anything.

A bigger contribution to the community than money would be if people would just fill out their profiles, type with good spelling and punctuation, and learn to communicate with each other like a community of normal people instead of regarding diaper sites in as a place to gratify their little fetish. When people swarm female members with perverted messages, make posts about revealing their diapers to innocent bystanders in public, and generally create any kind of antisocial atmosphere, it makes things more difficult for a community that, let's be honest, already has it pretty rough. It's incredibly ego centric (or perhaps id centric?) to gratify oneself at the expense of the source of that gratification, and terrible karma to boot. When sites shut down or fail to come together at all because of behavior like this, the individuals who are behaving in this manner are poisoning the well they drink from. ABDL people get a disproportionate amount of bad press, perhaps more than any other fetish group, and not everyone on these sites is even a fetishist. I think the community would benefit most by being represented to the world by reasonable, level headed people who are open with each other and good at expressing themselves. The best way to make sure this happens is to encourage the proliferation of a larger, more involved support network which encourages growth and creative input, one where people will be excited to contribute rather than having to be guilted into it by being labeled as freeloaders.

Think of gardening. A bad gardener only thinks about the fruit they are going to grow. They know what they want but they put little thought into how they are going to get there. A good gardener doesn't even consider the fruit. They don't get frustrated by an apparent lack of results and they don't try to harvest the fruit before it is ripe. The best gardeners think about the soil the plant is growing in. They consider the best way to create the best conditions for growth. Better soil grows a better plant, and a better plant bears better fruit. That's when you should start thinking of what to do with the fruit- but at this point the answer should be obvious:

Share it.