(crossposted from here and here)
(Edited Feb 2, 2016 to add eight figures)
Since 2005, Uncommon Descent (UD) – founded by William Dembski – has been the place to discuss intelligent design. Unfortunately, the moderation policy has always been one-sided (and quite arbitrary at the same time!) Since 2011, the statement “You don’t have to participate in UD” is not longer answered with gritted teeth only, but with a real alternative: Elizabeth Liddle’s The Skeptical Zone (TSZ). So, how were these two sites doing in 2015?
Number of Comments 2005 – 2015
| year | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| UD | 8,400 | 23,000 | 22,400 | 23,100 | 41,100 | 24,800 | 41,400 | 28,400 | 42,500 | 53,700 | 53,100 |
| TSZ | – | – | – | – | – | – | 2,200 | 15,100 | 16,900 | 20,400 | 45,200 |
In 2015, there were still 17% more comments at UD than at TSZ – 53,100 to 45,200.
Though UD is still going strong, there is a slight downwards trend (yellow line) in the daily number of comments.
The upside trend at TSZ is much stronger, but is fuelled by the very weak participation in the first couple of months of 2015. This can be seen when comparing the number of comments on a monthly base, too:
There are many ways how both sites interact with each other: the editors on both blogs may react to the same event, rising the number of comments on both sites. Or an editor, disgruntled with one site, may take his energy to the other one. Overall there is a slightly negative correlation (adj. R²=.256) between the number of comments per week:
There is one big difference between both sites: the number of posts. On TSZ, there have been 265 threads with comments, while this number was 1741 at UD (there were another 200 without any comments). Therefore, the number of comments per thread is smaller at UD than at TSZ:
At UD, most of the posts (16% or 271 out of 1741) gathered between five and eight comments (or 1,700 – 3.2% – of the 53,100 total comments in 2015), while at TSZ, most of the threads (20% or 56 out of 265) have between 65 and 128 comments (or 5000 – 11% – of the 45,200 comments)
This difference is shown in this stream of comments. With the notable exception of the thread Mystery at the Heart of Life, even the busiest posts aren’t active for longer than a month at UD:
In fact, an average an article at UD will get comments over an period of 5.3 days. This average is 23.7 days for TSZ. Certainly eternal threads like Moderation Rules and Noyau play a role here, but other mainly philosophical topics are discussed over great periods of time, too.
My personal favourites of 2015 unfortunately got very few comments: Winson Ewert’s offer to Ask Dr. Ewert at UD, Tom English’s excellent reply A Question for Winston Ewert at TSZ, and then Dr. Ewert Answers, again at UD – which were commented less than eighty times in total. I had hoped for a discussion about the mathematical aspects of Intelligent Design (see my posts). Unfortunately, the design-side didn’t show any interest in anything other but an token interaction. Another chance missed.
Note: UD and TSZ both use WordPress, so they should have numerous ways to get statistics for their sites. I could look only from the outside, crawling the threads and comments. Though I’m fairly sure to got the all the visible data, I cannot guarantee to paint the real picture absolutely accurately.
Some Additional Figures
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| In 2015, there some 45,000 comments were made at The Skeptical Zone. Here are the top ten of the commentators (just a quantitative, not a qualitative judgement.) I’ll stick to the color scheme for all of figures in this post… | “The Skeptical Zone” has a handy “reply to”-feature, which allows you to address a previous comments (with or without inline quotation.) It is used to various degree – and though some don’t use it at all, nearly 50% of all comments were replies. |
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| While the previous figure showed who made replies, this one shows who receives them. | Editors at “The Skeptical Zone” are also allowed to make postings and create new threads. |
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| How popular are these threads? Here the number of comments editors gathered with there threads. | Quite another question: A comment can be a short remark, a well-thought argument, or just a orgy of copying-and-pasting. How much text did the commentators write? Here is the length of the plain texts given in the comments – again, just a quantitative, not a qualitative deliberation. |
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| A boxplot of the byte-length of comments made by the top 10 contributors. |
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| This figure gives an impression of how many comments were attracted over time by threads sorted by the editors who had created them. |
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| And here is the network of those who created – or received – at least 50 replies. |
Neil Rickert,
Because Lizzie likes shits, and has moderators who encourage shit?
To you, calling someone a garbage spewing asshole furthers conversation, so of course you admire shit.
Flint,
So when you said Coynes blog doesn’t ban opposing views, you were just making shit up, right?
I’m not sure why Phoodoo is fixated on Jerry Coyne’s blog. It is neither us, notrUD – his font of knowledge.
Rich,
It’s because Jerry, like us, is a member of the Global Atheist Conspiracy.
keiths,
Also, educated.
That activity pushes other threads off the blog’s opening page, with the attendant foreseeable consequences w.r.t. blog-participants’ ability to follow and/or contribute to those other threads.
If one is the sort of person whose actual goal (as opposed to any ostensible goal one may or may not wish to portray oneself as having) is to obstruct others’ ability to engage in substantive dialogue, starting a subinfinite number of threads which nobody looks at is a tactic by which one might accomplish said actual goal.
And of course there may well be other reasons for starting threads which nobody looks at.
Practically speaking, multiple redundant threads can serve as the functional equivalent of a DOS attack. Whether or not the people who create multiple redundant threads perceive their actions to serve as the functional equivalent of a DOS attack, is another matter entirely.
I can’t understand why Richardhughes is so fixated on UD and Barry Arrington.
Is it because he thinks Barry is part of the Global Not-Atheist Conspiracy?
phoodoo,
No, it’s their rank dishonesty and drive to replace good science with bad religion.
Please don’t hide your understanding under a bushel. Given the declared intentions of the Discovery Institute, and given that conspiracies are not necessarily secret, then I venture that the answer is “Yes, and for good and obvious reasons”.
Richardthughes,
I agree: Fisher-Pry isn’t realistic in this context.
“WP statistics” isn’t visible to non-admins, so thank you for this interesting piece of information: I don’t think the UD will give us its numbers….
Tom English,
Tom, thank you for your warm welcome!
Richardthughes,
https://giphy.com/gifs/internet-commenting-i-can-typing-Jb9J6KVpKb0hW
Very nice!
He didn’t even join a discussion (which he had started!) of ID math at UD , where utmost politeness to him would have been enforced…
Patrick,
It’s always a safe bet to shout “Zipf” for this kind of data 😉
http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/TSZ-2015-06.png
Taking a quick glance at the manual, I don’t see an option to make the stats visible to other members.
Question for all readers: would there be sufficient interest in something like Site Meter being available?
DiEb,
Are you going to concede that counting the number of comments between two sites with totally different purposes, and policies is meaningless? TSZ dosn’t provide content, they just provide a platform where people can say butthurt as many times as they like. .
Edit to add: And they still fall behind UD!
DiEb,
Thanks for that chart DiEb. How did you manage to amass those data?
Phoodoo writes:
From the chart DiEb has provided, you’ll note our most prolific commenter for 2015 was ( *drum roll* )…
Mung!
I concede that equating both site would be meaningless. Comparing these site can be quite interesting: as both sites share a number of commentators – and probably most readers, there is at least some interaction.
In my experience, TSZ does provide content – though not in all threads. On the other site, how much content is in KairosFocus n-th “FYI/FTR” thread? And don’t get me started on UD’s journalist-in-residence, the aforementioned Denyse O’Leary!
Alan Fox,
At UD, I looked up the threads per month via the archive, then for each thread, I crawled along the comments.
It is easier here at TSZ, as I’m allowed to get the list of comments without further ado. The drawback: I see only where a comment was originally placed, not whether it was moved to “guano” or “moderation”…
That’s awesome!
It also ruins my weekend — a new (to me) source of free data.
Congratulations on being our most prolific commentator, Mung!
That’s one way to beat the censors ;P
DiEb:
Cool!
So we have a Zipf-line.
I’m not surprised to be in the top five, but I am surprised that Elizabeth is near the top.
Sometimes the offshoot becomes more popular than the original. If only the topic were worth it.
Dembski has retired ID as a field of… whatever. No scientist ever touched his theory, except to criticize it and show that it’s pseudoscience. I have only seen favourable mentions of ID from an occasional pastor in a sermon. A few otherwise bright guys were tricked into viewing it as a scientific theory.
Besides this site, are there other sites keeping track of the ID agenda? it would be interesting to see their popularity figures too.
Ones I know about are Pandas Thumb (includes AtBC), Pharyngula, Sandwalk, Why Evolution Is True, Sensuous Curmudgeon, NCSE.
As for not getting enough attention:
bigger version: http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/TSZ-2015-08.png
WHOA! Mung is the heart of TSZ!
I think that this says it all.
Somehow I manage to be both intriguing and irritating. 🙂
An international man of misery.
🙂
Actually i just watched a NOVA episode on Einsteins idea.
He said gravity doesn’t exist but instead there is a curve in space that creates acceration and so the THING we call gravity.
his big point was gravity and acceleration from a point are the same thing.
So gravity doesn’t exist as newton thought and people still do.
Unless i’m messing up physics conclusions here!!
I added eight new figures to the original post. Enjoy!
It is said that the way to get large numbers of people citing your scientific paper is to have it make a famous mistake.
DiEb,
Great job!
I’m so terse.
So, Mung originated the largest number of OPs, the largest number of comments, generated the largest number of replies to his OPs, and certainly has made among the most complaints about being censored at TSZ.
petrushka,
Not as terse as Richardthuges (I added a boxplot …)
🙂
Sometimes on online forums, traffic is just driven by annoyance.
Richardthughes,
Thanks!
Reciprocating Bill,
If only pearl-clutching left a digital trace.
I think you might be. Of course gravity exists. Newton didn’t propose a CAUSE of gravity, he described how it worked, as far as he could measure. Einstein proposed a cause, but gravity didn’t change.
A little late to the party, but I really like your charts, Dieb and appreciate the work you put in on creating them. I confess though…I’m a little bummed I didn’t make the spider web chart…
Actually, I don’t think Byers’ statement is that far off. Many people do think of gravity as a physical property, like light or an electromagnetic field, rather than as a wrinkle in space-time. It is a rather radical concept when you get right down to it.
thanks – and just for you, your own spider web…
DiEb,
Robin and I appear to studiously ignore each other!
I am weirdly inspired to comment much more often just so I can make next season’s charts
Gamification claims another victim.