Hidden or Invisible status, is it becoming a fad?

I seem to notice alot of the regular members going hidden or in invisible status. What is up with that? Is it becoming a fad?

Just curious guys ???

 

Privacy Paranoia?

I was a little disappointed to find out that the "hide email" preference was not a default setting. That it defaulted to showing your email address.

But I wouldn't go as far as set myself to hidden.

 

I understand hiding your e-mail address for privacy reasons, but hiding your online status I don't get.

It's really hard to tell if you're logged on now or not because as you post, your status on your personal info says "offline" but you might not.

And what's kinda silly is, you hide your status, but if you look at the bottom of the main index page & someone is hidden, he is being singled out because it says there how many are logged on & how many are hidden. You are hidden but your status gives you away, kinda like playing hide & seek with your butt sticking out from a poor choice of hiding places.

 

People like Reider used to do it to stop getting pestered (since his username pops out). But yeah.

 

Reider's name stands out? Look at mine, it's FLORESCENT YELLOW (in the listing of recent users at the bottom of the main forum page). Blindingly so. The only good thing about it is that you can't read for five minutes after looking at it.

But anyways - it's just an extra step so as to not be contacted. People on other IM services do that all the time, either becoming invisible so as to appear offline or marking themselves as "Busy" or "Away" all the time so that people don't bother them, but they can bother others. It's really quite annoying, but most of the time they do it to avoid people contacting them or just don't have the time to actually respond fully to someone.

But on a site like this, appearing offline seems... almost fruitless, especially to a typical, run-of-the-mill user. Mods and other beacons of the community I could understand, but, for normal users, it seems almost entirely useless.