Subject: Longer conversations.
Author:
Posted on: 2013-09-01 19:09:00 UTC

I think the primary reason for longer conversations is two reasons. ;) Okay:

1/ The speed of new thread formation. In 2003 we got through the front page in 21 hours. That means there was no chance of a long thread forming. Nowadays we tend to keep threads active until they're about halfway down the front page - in 2003, those same threads would have been five pages back already! Note that the frequency of posts is down by a factor of 4 from 2003 - we said a lot more then, we just had less time to say it in!

2/ We aggregate threads a lot more these days. 2002 shows this very clearly - they had 8 badfic threads, almost half the front page! Nowadays we clump those together.

3/ Did I say two?

4/ Newbies. The early years had one newbie per front page, more or less. This year, we had 5. Newbie threads often garner a lot of replies. This isn't, obviously, a bad thing - but it does skew the figures a bit.

That said, it is an interesting phenomenon. I wonder to what extent it would drop out if we applied some sort of standardisation to the dataset - perhaps classing all badfic posts under one 'thread', and removing all newbie posts from consideration. I might take a look at that - purely for giggles.

hS

(Also - you probably were around in '09. Bear in mind, this is just the people who posted on one particular page - Kaitlyn doesn't appear in two of the three-ish years she was active, for example, because she simply didn't post at the right time)

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