That sort of touched my funny bone, because it was my friend's classical guitar that scared me into playing the ukulele instead.
I started on classical in my late teens, never learned much beyond a few etudes, arpeggio patterns, and how to read a treble clef. I tried picking it back up a few times in my late 20s.
In 2008 I discovered ukulele and was in love with the entirety of the instrument. However I was living in a situation where I took a lot of grief for being happy about playing my ukes (and actually any little thing that made me happy got me stomped on). My mom let me play her Martin bari, but back then there wasn't much in the way of tabs that I was interested in for baritone, and she said I couldn't put GCEA tuning strings on because then
she couldn't play it, but she never played it and seldom played her violins. I got so much grief for buying a soprano, a concert and a tenor because I wanted a shorter scale in standard tuning. She was also angry that I put her bari in a really nice hard case instead of the old original chipboard case, because it was valuable, and also earthquakes. Crazy people are so difficult.
When I moved the stress to pay rent put me in a job that had me at a keyboard 10 hours a day, so as much as I wanted to play more, it hurt! so I couldn't get up much momentum, but at least I enjoyed the forum. Then all the cool kids started leaving, and it wasn't as warm and fuzzy feeling. I lost a lot of my joy with ukulele for a lot of reasons, and went to Facebook to play stupid games and eventually took up guitar instead, since I realized I really wanted to play steel string acoustic, and I had switched to a better job and also made more money.
Then my mom died and everything I wanted to do took a back seat to cleaning up all the fallout from executing an estate for over a year, plus massive grief. Ukuleles still held little interest for me, even my guitars didn't sway the grief much and I'm studying acoustic blues, go figure.
I think life just keeps happening, not always so much in a good way for people, and they have to prioritize, and forum use is eliminated. Or people lurk for some distraction, but don't have the inclination to post.
I just renewed my UUU subscription, mostly to help the guys, and I have a couple of good ukes to try to get back to playing when my hands need a break from long scales and steel strings. I'll be selling off the rest on Craigslist this summer.
I really enjoy all the guitar forums, people are nice there, and I have yet to run into anyone making fun of ukulele, and I recognize a lot of old UU forum names in AGF, UMGF, etc., lol. But I use them for research or reference instead of social connection, like right now I'm looking for an OM cedar over rosewood Bedell with a cutaway. But I figure my time is better spent actually studying theory and technique and playing my instruments, instead of talking about playing them.
Sano and Tony and Booli and Kurt and Nickie and Marielle, great to see you posting!