At 14:46 10/09/09 -0400, Les Schaffer wrote: > > >i challenge Jeff or any of the forwarding junkies to go to the archives >and do a survey of forwarded articles and see how many turn into >discussion. i've put this challenge out before and no one has bit.
Well I just did some quick statistics that you can chew on. However please do not call me a "forwarding junky" as I forward very little. It's just that I often like reading OTHER forwarded material, and it is for people like me that those articles are forwarded, not just to start discussions. I think forwarding useful articles is good whether or NOT they lead to discussions. Just using the sorting capabilities of my text editor, I examined the approximately 19150 posts to this list over the last year. The following results are rather approximate as they were just based on the subject lines of the posts, and there were some ambiguities. For instance, some email programs send a reply without a "Re:" so these have the same subject line as the original post but were actually replies. However in a few cases the same subject line was used more than once (such as "Moderator's note") so these are indistinguishable. About 726 were either duplicate subjects or actually replies: I'll just assume the latter. There were about 8270 original posts, and about 10850 replies. Of those replies, there were about 2420 subjects replied to. Therefore each original post that was replied to had an average of about 4.5 replies. So about 29% of the original posts generated replies. However there is no way that the computer could be taught to determine (even if I had been running a more sophisticated program) whether an original post is an "article" or just someone's thoughts. As I pointed out, there is no clear distinction anyway. Given the 29% figure, it is impossible to say whether the reply rate to ARTICLES is less than or greater than 29%. Sorry. But what I can say for sure, is that out of 19150 posts, about 5850 were original posts which no one replied to. Therefore I can say with certainty that no more than 30% of the list traffic (numbers of posts, not kilobytes) could have been articles that generated no discussion at all. That was what Les thought was so awful and should be moved to a separate list. Do you really think 30% is too much?? - Jeff ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
