Yep. Leeching is mostly used in the context of torrents. Generally, while you're downloading, you're "leeching." But also, if you don't seed a file after you download it, you can call that leeching.

Lurking is when you frequent a forum but never post.

To leech, leeching and to be a leecher has been around since people used to download warez. It far predates torrents.

I remember a local sysop in the 80s who ran an Apple II ASCII Express download site with two 5.25” floppy drives. You’d write him a text message and save it as a file. He was a cab driver and he’d come back home once in awhile and check the messages. If you were lucky he’d put your requested software in the second drive and maybe you’d check back in time before he fulfilled someone else’s request.

That sounds like such an awesome experience. As inconvenient as it sounds sometimes I wish I grew up in the beginnings of computers.

My uncle told me a story of when he was at his first programming job carrying a box of at least 500 punch cards across a factory floor on his 2nd or 3rd day. Someone opened a garage door somewhere and a gust of wind came and blew every single punch card across the factory. They were everywhere he said. My uncle was terrified of losing his first job meanwhile these factory guys are pissing themselves laughing and almost literally rofl.

Turns out it's a prank they pull on everyone. There's only been a few that held onto the box and the cards are complete trash.

It sounds fun.

I've saw a prank like that on a small scale when I was a kid who liked to go play some old Trek game on a line-paper-printer-terminal — in a computer lab in a state college — that was dialed into a machine in a bigger city. Around me, meanwhile, were college students typing their programs into punch cards. I remember someone pretending to trip, spilling a stack, but then confessing that they were garbage.

Well, the terms are used based on the side effects. Leechers take something: download bandwidth/slots, processing power, etc. Lurkers are passive.

The former has negative connotations, the latter is neutral.

To lurk, to be in the state of lurking, and to be a lurker — has been around since the BBS days. Thanks for calling it out!

I learned some English vocabulary with videogames. The first time I saw the word lurker was the lurker above in Nethack (or did rogue and hack already had it?) https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Trapper

I am a lurker. I have zero followers, and as such writing the nth comment on a Tweet with often n>100 is pointless, even before Musk took over.

I also don't have the time or the energy to put out quality content. It is draining to put out good content and have a handful of moaners criticise it in a toxic manner.

It is even worse if they criticise your content, because 3 years ago you said something about Musk/Tesla that wasn't 100% positive.

The joys of lurking or being a low-volume is when you follow some people and they do something interesting that you may have done, or you might have the little interesting data point. It sometimes happens you have published a paper on the exact topic but in another field, or you're wondering whether there's a connection to something you know.

It's an amazing way to reach very interesting people doing very interesting things and to be amazed almost every day (if you like to learn, or just like human ingenuity). It needs curating, and liberal use of blocking, muting... but having (or watching) a short conversation with a security expert, programming language warrior, database benchmarker, or HPC researcher is something I feel I couldn't do elsewhere.

Blocking / muting to get rid of replies by unwanted people? I myself never use that feature as a "lurker".

I blocked Musk and Tesla, and that filters out a lot of the note toxic tweets.

You can block people replying to other people. You can have an account and be a lurker (which mostly can be reduced to 'read-only'). You're not participating in any conversation, just filtering the content that is presented to you.