Interesting that you mention this. Actually, I only registered to this forum to write my opinion on the fork, in 2017.
....guess who was the guy posting right after me..
you 
Before that I was just reading the WO, for years.
But in 2017 the times were crazy, and for the first time I felt the urge to share my opinion fwiw.
Well that's a pretty decent first post, even though I might not have had completely agreed with your tone of "let the best fork win," "no BIG deal tone," even though ultimately it is not really incorrect... and there surely were BTC HODLers who were panicking way more then either you or me at the time... .. and some BTC HODLers were betting quite BIG on the other horse.. and some were just nervous... which surely, I am not going to proclaim that I was not nervous, even though I largely did not change too much in what I was doing in terms of my strategy to attempt to continue to prepare myself financially and psychologically for either price direction.
By the way, it can take a while for any of the somewhat potential histories of the various members to kind of form a picture in terms of what was their personal journey, which surely causes me to consider that I am going to have some better ideas regarding who's Island that I might want to request visiting, when my 0.21 BTC is able to buy me a yacht.. hahahaha..
And, by the way, my picture of you in my head is still kind of formulated by some of the seeming panicking that you had been doing from time to time, and even seeming bearish and pessimistic outlook that stuck in my head in regards to "why is that guy whining so much about the BTC price?.. it is what it is.. and why he does he keep 'overly assigning visions' of down that might or might not happen?" I remember those kind of interactions with you... during some portions of the 2018 correction and maybe even during the corrections that were happening in late 2019, too... just caused me to consider that you might have weak hands, whether you were directly saying otherwise or not.
I just corrected my 1st post to avoid dreams of islands...
Not every early one became a Croesus. Just ask philipma1957 (if we can take his word for granted)
Why should I have panicked about forks? They are an essential part of the functionality of BTC and a kind of democratic safety mechanism.
Yes, my 1st post comes off very laid back, because I think the community heavily lacked some ease back then, and I felt the need to share some of my relaxed view.
Regarding your "picture of me in your head" and "my" negativity in 2018 or 2019, you are surely confusing me with somebody else, because I wasn't active in the forum in the three years between 2017 and 2021 (apart from one single post about Karpeles)
The small negativity I might have in bear markets, is due to the fact that I'm weak to paper losses. But I clearly don't have weak hands: the last time I sold BTC was in 2015.
After that I merely sold free forks and airdrops.
... I can only hope that dumb people pump forks and airdrops again like back in 2017/18... nothing more yummy than free money

It's a common journey for a lot of newbies to get caught up in that kind of a reasoning. I remember in early 2021, I was talking to this girl/young lady who had a decent job (not really paid the greatest, but what else is new?, she had some decent education and smarts about the world and seemed to be interested in the kinds of bitcoin-related things that I was talking about with her) in her mid-to-late 20s about bitcoin over several months and she seemed to be getting what is bitcoin and understanding the investment thesis and how bitcoin was different from other projects/coins, and then I had not seen her or talked with her for several months.. except maybe superficially sharing some texts.. but nothing too deeply involved or related to bitcoin... and then at some point, maybe something like mid 2021.. she was all of a sudden deeply down the path of Chia mining or something like that... I mean holy shit.. she just went off the deep end fairly quickly, and I kind of lost touch with her somewhere in that process in which she was not hearing/listening to anything that I said because she seemed to have had developed her own decently strong point of view that was not making a lot of sense to me and seemed like she might had gotten involved in somethings related to that.. I am not really sure.. I lost touch.. and sometimes, I cannot bring myself to reach out and check.. and she is not reaching out to me.. so it is hard to know how things play out sometimes with some people that we might meet or talk with within a certain kind of context.. .
maybe just contact her... from what I read she's much younger than you.
And right after a bear markets carnage it seems to be an appropriate time to check and ask everyone if they are doing ok, no?
I am sure that I have influences over people too.. but surely there is variance in terms of what kind of influences, and sometimes where any of us might be in our lives in terms of our situation and if our audience might be able to relate their situation to our situation. I have a lot of folks telling me how great I am in regards to bitcoin, and they should have listened to me at various points in history... and then I tell them, well get the fuck started now, bitcoin's investment thesis is not weaker now as compared to when we spoke earlier (several years ago or whatever), and so many people are just talk...in terms of saying "I should have listened to you," and there have been several times that I cannot even remember the conversation, so we spend a decent amount of time to pinpoint memories as to when I would have said the thing about bitcoin to them that they remember... so yeah, I had an influence upon them remembering that they should have listened to me, but whatever I had said did not cause them to act in the direction that I had suggested which largely has not changed over the years.. which largely can be summarized as: "get the fuck started, sooner rather than later."... of course, some nuances, but that's the general punchline.. also "The choice and the way you go about it is ultimately yours and don't come crying to me if you lose money...". hahahahahaha
Most people interested into Bitcoin I dealt with already had the feeling of needing BTC in one way or the other. I think that helps big time.
Also when talking to peeps I learned not to tell them "you can (still) buy", or something similar. It's seems to be very important not to give many hints or even ideas on what they should do with their money. Such ideas have to come entirely from them.
Much on the contrary, it is sometimes even accelerates the conversion, if you try to talk them out of investing in BTC
Let's just face it. The punchline is that either you are just more successful in converting peeps than this here cat, or you have different perspective of the world and the receptivities of the normies (including your supposed success rate) as compared to my perspective...
I am not suggesting that I am giving up merely because I hardly seem to have any success rate, and a bunch of folks diverge off into shitcoins or do dumb shit that is no where even close to what I had been suggesting that they do or how they approach lillie fiends... and ultimately I know that there are some folks in the real world who are more receptive than others in terms of sometimes they might already be inclined towards bitcoin when I meet them or find out about their interests in bitcoin, so I am not going to necessarily rule out the fact that some folks might end up tipping into bitcoin because of some interactions that they had with me in the real world.
That reminds me that I bumped into this guy in the street a couple of days ago, and I did not know him prior to that, but he surely was talkative. He was probably in his late 60s and did not seem to be very rich or anything (so maybe a kind of early pensioner? or living off of social security? I did not ask).. and he was saying somethings that I did not completely agree with, but I was not finding him offensive or anything, and mostly I listened to a variety of his gripes, and I probably ended up talking with the guy for an hour or so. The topic of bitcoin did not come up, and I was thinking that there could have been various places in our back and forth about living, family relations, politics, how expensive things were, government bureaucrats... blah blah blah.. that I might have mentioned bitcoin to him and then took the conversation in that direction to at least find out if he had ever heard of bitcoin and how it relates (or fixes) some of his concerns... but then I did not raise the topic.. and so in that sense, I was not influential in the bitcoin sense.. except for the fact that the guy started asking me a whole lot of somewhat personal questions, which caused me to believe that he liked me and he was being influenced by the way that I was responding to some of his ways of presenting topics... Towards the end of our conversation when I said I better get going because the sun is going down, he even asked me what kind of car he should buy (as a replacement to his current car).. hahahahaha?.. so we had a bit of back and forth about that topic, as a kind of bonus conversation topper part of our seemingly influential-potential discussion.
Maybe you are just not so vocal about you owning BTC ....which is not the worst idea security-wise, depending on where you live and who is around you.
I only talk to people I feel secure around to talk to. Principally I don't interact much with people with whom I sense the need for being cautious, as that's very exhausting energy-wise.