Hard to Please?

But the cards you send have nothing to do with what you personally like? I have bought/sent cards with themes I don’t care for because the receiver did care for them :wink:

Anyway, some good advice here already, don’t sweat it

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@SailingBy I am sorry you had this experience, but thank you for reviving the “picky Postcrosser” thread, it was one of my favorite topics to browse in the old forum! And I think your title for it is better.

As for send / received, I (for example) have no interest in Disney or royalty, but I send those cards because other people like them.

What I dislike is when people have a long wishlist of very expensive cards (Tausendschön, gotochi, etc.) but send the same view card (or even ad card) to everyone.

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Oops, not a her? I’m sorry!

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Thank you, life moves on, I’ve nearly forgotten about it. :white_check_mark:

I’ve never heard of them, sorry. :worried:

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I don’t :sweat_smile: I cannot bring myself to buy animal cards, I know people like them but I really don’t. If I was on holiday somewhere and some of the cards in souvenir shops had local animals then I would get a couple, but buying generic dogs and cats is not something I want to do - I can usually find something else that people like :sweat_smile:
Of course, not saying you shouldn’t do it if that’s okay with you :smiley:

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I only buy them because I know I only keep them for a short time.
Because I involve in many tags I should have many cards that I don’t like but other people like :smile:

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You know, I used to be irritated by people who had overly picky and specific profiles because I thought it would be almost impossible to fulfill their wishes, but these days, I just shrug and let it go and attempt to pick a postcard that I already have that might sort of come close to their wishes.

I think what really confuses me, though, are people with contradictory wishes. Like, “I like [insert long list of artists here] but I hate art cards!” or “I like [insert specific type of flower or animal] but I hate flower and animal cards!” I think the most recent confusing request that I had gotten was that they love Harry Potter but didn’t want any postcards with children on them. I had a Harry Potter postcard, but Harry Potter was definitely still a kid. I ended up just sending it. They can deal with their own cognitive dissonance.

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Royals, yes. I knew there are themes I send that I personally don’t care about, but couldn’t think about one yesterday. So royals is a perfect example for me (and sometimes I even add that I’m glad Austria has been a Republic for now more than 100 years)

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Ahah oh dear, royals. That is something I would literally refuse to send. I lived in the UK for most of my postcrossing life and of course the English royal family is a very well prized subject of postcards… But I would feel embarrassed to walk in a shop and buy a card with the royal family on it. It feels weird, partly because were I lived no one really cared about the royals at all (while people in other countries think all Brits love the royal family and follow their life daily), and partly because it is kind of strange to me to buy cards with the photo of people, who are currently (mostly) still alive and are not famous for doing something special (like singers or footballers - not that I routinely buy any of those, but I would understand that better… It also strikes me that for singers or footballers, the photos used are from their professional life, while the photos of royals used for postcards just look so awkward to me! :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing:)

Edit: I suppose I sent one or two cards with royals of the past - paintings, Henry VIII type things. But I see that as art, or history :thinking:

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I often buy and send cards I don’t particularly like myself. I try to have a variety of popular subjects even if my favourite cards are viewcards.

Once I drew a profile with a long (friendly) wishlist. I could fulfill several of the wishes, only the last sentence of the profile was: “Please only send cards you would like to receive yourself” and there wasn’t anything I really liked on the list…

In the end I took it to mean the quality not necessarily the picture and sent something from the list anyway.

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A long time ago I drew the address of a person who loved bridges. Metal bridges, stone bridges, rope bridges, wooden bridges. I sent her a very nice card of a wooden bridge. :smiley: Eventually she registered it with a snappy message ‘I only like covered wooden bridges’ and deleted my scanned image. :astonished:

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Picky Postcrossers are a pain in the neck! :nauseated_face:

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That bothers me too, and I’ve seen cases like that on the forum as well. Expensive, hard-to-find cards on their favourites wall and/or wishlist, yet only send inexpensive touristy cards, or cards from cheap postcard sets.
(To avoid confusion: I know most sets are not cheap. I’m speaking strictly of cheap ones).

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I send cards from sets all the time, and they’re not exactly ‘cheap’. :slightly_smiling_face:

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There are cheap postcard sets, and there are expensive ones, as we all know. I was referring to cheap ones.

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I too send cards that I would not collect because I know others like them (trains, lighthouses, maps, etc.), although I have my limits. There are certain people, for example, that I would not buy or send. I’ve just never been interested in the Postallove Greetings from cards and don’t put any effort into buying them.

As for requests for unwritten cards in envelopes, they are my least favorite. It always sounds like a ransom demand from kidnappers - put the unmarked bills in an envelope and leave it at a certain location. It’s very impersonal.

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I would occasionally buy some cheap postcard sets in the past, e.g. animals or Disney, but it’s taking me ages to send those cards because I draw mostly profiles who are fine with a normal view-card. I still have about 70 Disney cards in my 100-card set, after 3 years or more…
Like many of you, I do buy postcards I’m not interested in when I find them (I bought a few royal postcards in Amsterdam, and buy animal postcards whenever I find some - but they are quite rare here in Italy, a bit more common in Brittany :fr:). On the other hand, there are postcards I would never buy, even if some people would like to receive them.
After all, we should all send postcards we find it ok to send. And, again, I think we shouldn’t feel forced to buy expensive, or hard to find, postcards to please one picky recipient! :slight_smile:

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Wow, that’s rude!

I once had a very short but insightful conversation with a collector who explained to me that you can’t just collect everything, it becomes too much if you do that! You have to restrict yourself somehow, so you have to restrict the topic of your collection eventually.
So at first this person had collected every postcard ever, but it got too much. Too many postcards! And he restricted himself to collect only view cards, if I remember correctly, and also wrote that in his profile.

So my question now is… If you send and receive the same amount of postcards as before and tell everyone to only send view cards and everyone only sends view cards to you from then on – with a few exceptions – how exactly has your space problem been solved? It is only gone for a short while since you got rid of all former cards that don’t fit into the collection anymore. But if you now only receive postcards that fit into the collection…? Eventually, you will arrive at the same point again. :thinking: Is it then time to restrict the collection even more? Is this an evil cycle where the topic of the collection gets restricted more and more and more until your collection topic is so specific that only a few people are able fulfil your wish at all…?

Maybe that is why some of the worst profiles that I encountered in regards to wishlists, have been around on Postcrossing for many years already :thinking:

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Oh gosh, yes, I agree! I really love to fulfill wish list requests. It’s like my own treasure hunt and makes me happy to find the perfect card. But I’ve come across several profiles in which they were very specific about the cards they wished to receive, yet all their sent cards were pages of hundreds of the same 1 or 2 cards. Very demanding without regard for what they sent everyone else. As much as I love finding the perfect card, I don’t extend these folks that same courtesy. Perhaps it’s petty, but I don’t understand the folks who only send the same few cards over and over (and over…). :thinking:

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OK so I’ve like totally just got an address of a like teenager and I’m like duh! :puzzled:

I sat there stumped. I couldn’t think of a single thing to write. My mind went blank. In the end I tired of sitting there with precious seconds ticking away and just wrote like something duh and left it at that. :upside_down_face:

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