[clug] An alternate place for longer, meandering threads?

Jacinta Richardson jarich at perltraining.com.au
Sun Sep 13 00:00:41 MDT 2009


steve jenkin wrote:

> Other lists I've been on have had to deal with handling threads that
> vitally engage only a small section of the community. They tend to
> become long and sometimes heated with only a very few posters.

I wondered about this, so I did some very basic stats gathering.  I took a 
scrape of the subjects and senders from 
http://lists.samba.org/archive/linux/2009-September/ and found the following:

Total number of posts: 224
Total number of apparently distinct posters: 90
Total number of distinct subject lines: 32

Total number of posters apparently interested in discussing sexism: 37
Total number of posters not obviously interested in discussing sexism: 53
Total number of posts discussing sexism: 81

Ten most popular threads (and number of posts):
------------------------------------------------
Open Source Software's Dirty Little Secret (55)
Re CO2 footprint of Searches: Storm in A Tea Cup or Deep Green Issue? (19)
How to connect two Linux boxes? [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED] (18)
Travel to LCA2010 (18)
Green/Energy Efficient Linux Computer (14)
Reading a diff (9)
Announcing: Canberra Google Girl Geek Dinner #3 (9)
attempt to access beyond end of device (8)
Equality (was Announcing: Canberra Google Girl Geek Dinner #3) (7)
SATA fanout (7)
------------------------------------------------

Number of threads with 3 or less posts: 17/32

END

I defined "apparently interested in discussing sexism" as someone who responded 
to a thread whose subject line matched:

	/Dirty Little|alternate place|Canberra Google Girl/

even though some of these posts were complaining about those threads.  I defined 
"not obviously interested in discussing sexism" as someone who had posted on 
another topic but not this one.


So, as we can see:

* the noisiest topic for the last 13 days has been "Open Source's Dirty Little 
Secret" with 55 posts.

* the second noisiest topic has been "Re CO2 footprint of Searches: Storm in A 
Tea Cup or Deep Green Issue?"

* 37 out of 90 distinct speakers have posted in one of the threads that are 
somewhat related to discussing sexism

* 81/224 (about a third) of the posts in the last 13 days have been related to 
discussing sexism or the girl geek dinner.


> To some list members, these contentious issues are significant and
> interesting. But the lack of response/engagement by 'the silent
> majority' seems to say it's of peripheral interest, at best, to most
> listers.

I don't draw from these statistics that this is a topic being held forth on by 
only a few people.  More than a third of the posters in the last 2 weeks have 
participated in this topic.  The second most popular topic in the last two weeks 
has had at most 19 distinct posters, but as that is the number of posts with 
that subject line, it's probably much less than 19.

The "silent majority" will be silent on most topics, regardless of how on-topic, 
deeply technical, super-cool or otherwise interesting they might be.  I get that 
lots of people aren't interested in this topic, and I think it certainly has 
gone on a lot longer than it need to have, but I suspect that basing whether a 
topic has been engaging based on personal opinion is often going to be wrong.

All the best,

	Jacinta


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