Although I've only been a member here for a year or so, I've been frequenting the Escapist since around 2007. Since then, I've gained a real appreciation and admiration for so much of the Escapist forum community and decided to take the plunge and join for the same reasons you did, whilst feeling like nobody will take me seriously. That feeling still persists even after a whole year and nearly 50 posts have passed.
Part of the problem I have is that I'm generally quite introverted and not the most social creature when it comes to talking to people I've never met or interacted with, it doesn't help that I'm generally pretty new to forum environments in general which work differently to a regular conversation. For instance, in writing this message I'm not just talking to you, I'm talking to anybody who cares to lay eyes on my message as that's the nature of forums. As I explained earlier, I'm not exactly a social powerhouse, and so whenever I'm typing up a message to post on a thread, the thought that potentially hundreds of eyes will see the message, or that any strange person may respond to it, is actually quite unnerving and niggles away at me. More than once, that feeling has gotten the better of me, meaning I've typed up what I want to say and then deleted it and chickened out.
Throughout my time in school, I've had teachers tell me that my English is one of my strengths, especially in spoken conversation. However, forum posting isn't quite the same thing and it the concept still feels weird and alien to me in ways I didn't expect when I signed up. There are rules that you must abide by in some way (low content post, things like that) which, obviously, don't exist in real life. There are also the moderators, the people who enforce these rules of the forum which, again, don't exist in real life, and that also feels pretty alien, knowing that there's an unseen person scanning what I'm saying to judge whether it's worth keeping around or whether it's worth punishing the poster for. So the concept is something I'm still tackling, but can only get more used to as time goes on and I hopefully post every now and again without incurring moderator justice.
I said in the beginning that I had gained an appreciation and respect for the general Escapist community and that's something I still maintain, almost to an extreme. I like to regard myself as being fairly intelligent, but I'll often read through threads and posts and feel really kind of dim. A lot of the users here seem incredibly experienced and highly knowledgeable on a variety of topics that I have a very limited understanding of meaning that both this ignorance on my part, and wanting to save face can trip up any thoughts I may have of posting.
I could understand being dubious of people with low post counts, since it implies that the people with higher post counts are going to be of a higher position of standing within the community and generally have more that's worthwhile saying, mostly, but I feel that lumping every low poster in the same group is a little unfair. If they only joined to troll or spout things over a recent controversy, then that'll show in the content of their posts and you can easily just ignore them.
Okay. So that turned out to be a lot longer than I thought it would be.
EDIT: Woops, realised I strayed from the topic a little there. I guess what I'm trying to say is that whether someone has a low amount of posts or not isn't any reflection of who they are or what they may have to say. Someone with a low amount of posts may not post for similar reasons as my own, or for their own reasons, but maybe the reason they're here in the first place is that they wanted to sign up to an awesome community that share a love of their own; a love of games.
