Yo, Tech Answer Guy,
I used to be a big fan of the I Heart Star Blap: Several Generations Removed discussion board. And, of course, if you’re on that discussion board, you’re inevitably going to have to take a position on The Two Captains, Plush and Pompous. Personally, I prefer Captain Jamison T. Pompous; Captain Juan Bolduc Plush always seemed to me to be better suited to being a waiter at a four star restaurant. Honestly, he could never hope to fill Captain Pompous’ phaser holster. On this subject, reasonable people can disagree; fortunately, I’m unreasonable, so people with other opinions are wrong.
After a while, I noticed that the subject of the discussion drifted. After four days, it focused on the viability of sushi in space. A few days later, somebody wondered if First Mate Number One on SB:SGR was really just the equivalent of a native sidekick in a western. Several days after that, somebody wondered if Captain Plush was bald from cancer radiation therapy.
That’s right: the discussion went from a wannabe to wasabe to kemo sabe to chemo sobby.
I stayed with it long after I lost interest in the discussion in the hope that it would return to what we were supposed to be talking about; I gave up when somebody brought up the Asian actor who was in Batman Begins and Inception. Is there a way of knowing when a discussion thread is fatally off course? Because, frankly, life is too short to be concerned with the Asian actor who was in Batman Begins and Inception!
Sincerely,
Polly Morphous from Pamplona
Yo, Polly,
Not unsubscribing to a discussion forum when it has stopped being interesting to you? That’s just perverse!
I wracked my brains trying to come up with an answer to your question. Okay, I had an intern do a Google search (say hi to the people, Charunder – Hi, peo – okay, now where’s that coffee I sent you to get 20 minutes ago?), but I thought long and hard about it. For five seconds. Did I mention somebody forgot to bring me the coffee I had asked for? Look: the important thing is that, like the vast, roiling ocean, the Internet provides: in this case, a formula for determining the likelihood of a discussion thread still beingworth reading.
WHERE:
a equals the number of people who have posted to the discussion thread
b equals the number of posts to the discussion thread
a still equals the number of people who have posted to the discussion thread
c equals the number of people who have subscribed to the discussion thread
N0 equals zero if somebody has mentioned Nazis, one if nobody has yet mentioned Nazis
x equals the percentage likelihood that you will want to continue reading the discussion thread
This formula was first proposed by Sir Cuitous, who was revealed to be Bertrand Bigglesworth, who lives down the street from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is very smart for a seven year-old (he almost made the cover of Scientific American Teen Beat!). No matter. This is just one part of the very exciting research on this subject (and, when I say very exciting, I mean mildly interesting when boiled down to one or two sentences and mocked with gentle irony).
The first part of the equation, a/b, shows how many people are posting relative to the number of posts. On the one hand, you don’t want this to be a low number, since this inevitably involves a lot of rambling and can quickly degenerate into non-Carrollian nonsense. On the other hand, the more people who contribute to a discussion, the more likely it is to run off the rails relatively quickly. On the third hand, we’re not Strelgian barckalowngers, so we’ll have to be happy with the two hands we’ve got.
The second part of the equation, a/c, shows the number of people who are posting relative to the number of people who are paying attention. As Spengler pointed out in a recent article in The Journal of Online Yentaness, a large lurker population relative to the number of posters could be an indication that the discussion is highly entertaining, or it could mean that most people have stopped paying attention. If only we were Strelgian barckalowngers, we could entertain a third option; unfortunately, biology holds back the march of science!
According to Bigglesworth, N0 was inspired by some guy named Godwin. My intern couldn’t confirm this – he was running an errand at the time – so feel free to ignore this part of the equation.
The higher the number, the more likely the discussion thread is worth reading. Or, the Estonian judge has been paid off. Or, the stock market is about to crash. Or, you’re about to hit a plateau in your weight loss efforts. The best equations multi-task like that.
Of course, if you’re really that concerned about not wasting your time, you could just stop following a thread when somebody posts something irrelevant to the discussion. But, that would require personal judgment, which is notoriously untrustworthy. Better to put your faith in mathematics.
The Tech Answer Guy
If you are a dude with a question about the latest technology, ask The Tech Answer Guy by sending it to questions@lespagesauxfolles.ca. Just remember: Ken Watanabe may be no Chow Yun-Fat, but, who among us is, really?