lurking woes

I never had any experience with managing groups until Vox started allowing them. I have a paid LJ account and could start a community there if I wanted, but I've never been so inclined. I used to roll my eyes at people who complained about lurkers, but now I totally get it.

I've started 3 groups so far: No One Cares What You Had For Lunch, Phoetry, and Jaiku. Jaiku has 18 members so far and only a couple of people have posted, but that group is less than a week old. Phoetry has 13 members; less than half have ever contributed. No One Cares What You Had For Lunch (the first group I created) is the most frustrating: there are 22 members, but the only person who contributes to it with anything like regularity is yours truly. It makes me feel like a complete tool to look in the group and see 20 posts by me, and maybe 1 or 2 by other people--most of whom never go on to make another one.

I understand lurkers in individual blogs. I mean, I read literally dozens of blog posts a day and will make maybe 3 or 4 comments, sometimes less. And these days a lot of people read them through RSS feeds, which makes commenting kind of difficult. Sometimes I will ask for opinions on things and when no one answers the posts, I get a little frustrated. (Like last week's Don Imus post--a grand total of one person answered that one.) But bloggers who whine for comments and attention as a matter of rote kind of annoy me.

But I just don't understand why you would join a group and never post anything in it. And these are pretty fluffy groups, it's not like the topics are anything controversial that's going to get people dogpiling on you.