January 25

[Zeke]

Threads go off-topic here, Ved -- better get used to it if you're gonna keep writing fivers. (And can the politics.)

Originally Posted by evay

*shrug* the last time this happened, there were also three or four ewwws in a row. Does that not qualify as "community reaction"? That's not a rhetorical question.

Then quite simply, no. Online communities don't work anything like offline ones. Members will come or go, post or not post, with no regularity whatsoever. Some of my best fivers have gotten some of the least feedback. I've had to train myself not to read too much into who does and doesn't reply to something. (If TH had a forum, I'm sure you would have developed the same survival skill by now.)

You can make a joke on day Y and get a completely different set of replies from when you made the same joke on day X. If you had made your post in Misc, some people would have read it who didn't read it here, and vice versa. Other factors are context, people's moods, time of day, Zodiac sign... I'm not saying you can't generalize about anything in an online community, but it's much less reliable than in face-to-face chatting.

To make my point with an example....

I'm just observing out loud that I have to remember that the people who bother to post in reaction are the ones who don't care for the joke.

You're really selling us short here. Many times I've made an update I was really proud of, only to get a news thread full of "this line break is wrong" and no feedback at all. That's a rotten feeling, but am I supposed to just give up?

You've made plenty of funny posts here, of which two didn't go over as well as you hoped. The lesson is -- nothing. Come to me with ten or twenty data points and maybe we'll talk about patterns. In the meantime, give us enough credit not to assume the worst.

I don't know how I can make it any clearer than I have that I'm delighted to have you in this community. That lies behind everything I post, so don't forget it's there. That goes for all of you.

And I'm glad somebody got "5MViagra"...

This is the fallacy of "nobody commented on it -> nobody got it." I too have been guilty of this before. It ain't so.

(And not to be rude, but what's not to get? It's "5MViagra." Funny, yep; subtle, no.)

danieldoof: We've had four Easter eggs so far. One was in the Election '04 event, two were in the VW conclusion, and one was in the CW conclusion. (Actually, that was one of the two I linked, so I was wrong in my post above.) The history of "dsokdpach" may be had for the low, low price of this thread.

e of pi: Very well put.

Valium: You'd think.