Longtime ILXors - how has this board changed over time?

Clearly we can see that there was one 600 character post in December 2011 - someone must finally have been definitely OTM about something.

myth: busted

ah, the wordy autumn of 2011

stet, it's been said time and again, but you rule.

i assume the downward spikes in frequency are outages, what's with the upward spike in length in dec '11?

zp lol u guys

zp?

zing post, as distinct from the more common xing post

Posts do look like they were noticeably longer in the first year of our existence. Which feels like it was yesterday so that is probably warping my memory.

stet, it's been said time and again, but you rule.

seriously dude. you should link a wishlist or something, you are the business imo

Dec 11 was our last outage and I posted some jumbo debugging logs to my board, which I think accounts for the average going way up. I think April/May 06 was when we were deciding what to do post-Andrew, so I suppose lots of long posts going on then.

In the first year, there were also vastly fewer posts, so fewer very short posts to bring the average down as there were in later years. Interesting that even then the average is below 600. Always been (relatively) terse, ILX.

xps blush

link a wishlist or something

even i remember that this way lies madness...

the most interesting decline is from 300 to 200 from 02 to 04. ppl tightening their style maybe?

i started using ilx (on doctor's advice) in 2005 or so, and i wouldn't say that things have changed much since then wr2 post length. there was open hostility toward tl;dr posting at the time, as though it reflected arrogance and/or uncoolness. it's only the oldest threads that contain a lot long-form back and forth posting.

^ i think that's what people are referring to when they talk about longer posts in the past.

I think it's a legitimate misremembering of average post length biased by engagement on more long-winded threads

same old same old:

On average, posts seem a lot shorter.
― Michael Daddino (epicharmus), Friday, July 30, 2004 3:25 PM (8 years ago)

contenderizer def picked up the slack in nabisco's absence. he might not be on our money but he made sure that we didn't lose a step.

I would be okay with a character limit on posts.

oh, scott

I'd be ok with a limit on the number of characters posting here!

heyooo

this thread made me look up "fuck-want" and I've been lost in about 20 minutes of lols

lol
xp
lol

As WCC notes, for the first year of ILX's existence posts averaged about twice the length of the stable-state average AND (to my memory at least) the average-raising habit of reposting the same phrase a bazillion times hadn't developed at that stage. Given that those longer posts don't go away, but just sit there being old, a perception that posts were longer in the old days isn't surprising. (And it's accurate too, if you consider the old days to be before the end of 2001, as I do.)

xxp the past comes in waves

as do mermaids iirc

nice

(Also I have an unsubstantiable feeling that post-Balkanisation some of the wordier posts come in some of the 'safer' island areas of the little specialist boards, meaning the mainland feels shorter still. Just a thought.)

xp obv

might another explanation for the decreasing wordiness be the expansion fo the rest of the internet? back in 2001-02 or whatever, people had the time to think through and structure and just write long posts. wordy posts don't just magically happen, you need to put a bit of work into them. but what else was there to even do on the internet in those days? how many online things were people checking daily?

now - in addition to our Actual Jobs - our attention span is divided so many ways - being on the internet generally feels more hectic and more rushed. even people who are prone to writing long posts probably wouldn't have the inclination to do so any more even if the general atmosphere of ilx was the same.

lex otm: ilx predates 'the social internet'

Is Friendster terrifying?

remember when we flooded Friendster with fake celebrity profiles

good times

i don't actually!

Tim is of a similar vintage to me and his description chimes with my experience.

I do have to wonder, though, if another phenomenon is also at work. I think most people, when they first come to ILX, they have finally found ~intelligent discourse on the interweb~ or whatever, and they still have a lot of new ideas to explore. So people in general will make longer pats themselves during their first year of posting. The difference is that in 2001, we were *all* new and experiencing that at the same time. (and also talking about dogs licking peanut butter off balls or whatevs.)

So you had loads of ppl in the first year all making 600 word Momus-posts. While in later years, it's mostly only new people making long posts (so their experience of "when they joined ILX" = long posts) but the rest of us are going "peanut butter balls, LOL!"

xp: I think it was mostly Ally and Otis who spearheaded that one; I just remember becoming friends with Robert Smith, Adam Ant and The Hulk and having them all give me celebrity shout-outs

oh it was here: Friendster - Its the new thing

ilx is conversational, wordier rants migrated to blogs

nabisco posts in ny mag now ;_;

Biggest changes over the years imo are that the average age of ilxors has gradually risen and the number of random googlers who post remarks seems to have dipped (as typified by drop off in revivals of the all-time random googler thread: Joan Fontaine vs. Olivia DeHaviland).

we haven't had a good googler-baiting thread for a while

1) There are no mentions of the chickenbear anymore.

2) We no longer have the ILE Awards.

3) ILE is no longer used to arrange FAPs.

4) A large number of people I actually know IRL have buggered off elsewhere (which probably accounts for 1-3 at least in part)

Thank Christ for 1) and 2) - I think 3) isn't so accurate but they happen in the regional threads, when they were happening in the clear there was a much heavier LDN presence on ILX.

I've been to two FAPs coordinated on ILE this year!

Just wanted to join the chorus thanking stet for the graphs - those are awesome!

I'm not making any speculations for why things may have changed, I was just trying to read Stet's stats such that they sustained my strong sense of shortening. It's possible that shortening was a myth, of course, and that the idea "posts are getting shorter" is standing in for another, less quantifiable, idea:maybe of a lessening of care per post, or somesuch. Or maybe a bit of both, I dunno. It's certainly true that the internet around ILx has changed a lot over the past decade, and that's sure to have had an effect on the who and how and why of ilx.

I don't take any position on whether this is all a good or bad thing, for what that's worth. We've gained something and lost something. I kinda miss the old days, but I've been advocating the closure of ILx for at least a decade.

Thank Christ for 1) and 2)

boo, couldn't agree with you less.

hahaha this thread has now demystified the totally baffling reason that "the hulk" insisted on befriending me on friendster

i was but a twinkle in ilxs eye at that point

hulk ws

omg stet

Someone should do a study on how the global financial collapse and subsequently job insecurity has resulted in shorter ilxor posts from within the workplace.

doesn't it sortof make sense that because people were online less there was less back and forth, conversation happens more and more in real time, less and less a need to outline an entire argument in one or two posts, more intercut dialogue than soliloquies

individuals used to have ideas worth discussing, now it's all this socialist groupthink