It is can be hugs tiem now, yes.

[alexr_rwx]

Not long ago, Esther eponis brought to my attention the notion of "ticky", which is apparently a cultural trope in the fandom world, maybe particularly on LJ. It's a tendency to use check-boxes in your web surveys. It's interesting how there are little social norms in different communities -- check-boxes, at least on the surface, don't immediately have anything to do with fandom or fanfic or anything else, right? And I was struck by how much social sciences work could be done on online communities, and how little of it is actually getting done -- or if it is, it's well under my radar.

But. Xeni, on BoingBoing, has pointed out David McRaney's social-sciences-style overview of the LOLcats/image-macros community thing.

Anil Dash, internet culture maven and Six Apart VP, has writted u an articles about LOLcats grammah. (but I eated it)

And. Mr. Gordon McNaughton of Chelmsford, Essex, has produced a LOLcat builder that lets you LOL nearly effortlessly. This sort of tool, it would seem, encourages the continuation of the status quo in LOLcats... innovations in the field may still have to come through some more general image-manipulation program.

Speaking of online communities, though -- what really really baffles me is the comments on the xkcd syndication. xkcd is this beautiful, erudite, subtle thing ("A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language") with jokes about Fourier transforms, self-reference, and the subversion of language... and the comments on the feed seem inane: "FIRST POST!" or "I don't get it" or "I laughed!". Is there something about xkcd particularly, or is it more a culture of webcomics feeds on LJ? Value judgements aside, I think we should try to make sense of this phenomenon...

Comments

[ridingsloth.livejournal.com]

I too had noticed the XKCD phenomenon, and have been baffled by it. On the other hand, reading the News/Blag from the site (which is updated only rarely but always with amazing things) I see the commentators are of a much higher caliber (see how I implicitly value-judged there?) than the LJ comment-makers. Thus, I restrain myself to only reading comments on the one.

Explanation? Random friending. Shotgun style friending with no regard for content. It's madness I tell you.

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

*thinking thinking*

... what would motivate someone to such indiscriminate friending, though? There's a clear penalty for putting things you don't like or understand on your friends page -- it takes attention and time to skip over it; it's like getting spam.

Worse -- if there's something confusing, esoteric, and concerning on your friends page, why would you bother to post "I don't get it!" on the feed? ... somebody clever enough to work LJ and friend a syndicated feed should surely understand the twin glories of google and wikipedia, if they want to have some reference for the offendingly unfamiliar words? ... (although I suppose the topic of a comic isn't necessarily named in the comic itself...) ... ...

... maybe some people's parents never suggested "why don't you go look it up?" as an answer to questions.

[lindseykuper]

Here's my unproven theory about the xkcd feed phenomenon.

"Intelligent" and "good at the Internet"* correlate, but they're not the same group. GATI folks sometimes comment well and sometimes they comment poorly, but I think they tend not to comment on LJ feeds, because they know that the comments are ephemeral: they drop off the feed's journal forever after a certain number of posts, so what's the point? And intelligent people tend to write good comments wherever.

Of the intelligent people who read xkcd, I'm betting almost all of them are GATI. So what you see in the comments on the xkcd syndicated account is really the bottom of the barrel: neither intelligent nor GATI.

By contrast, the Dinosaur Comics audience is still intelligent, but less proportionately GATI. So a culture of good commenting develops on the DC syndicated account's journal, until even the GATI types join in, and then it just keeps feeding on itself.

Heh. "feeding."

* I'm assuming that this collection of traits includes "observant of how LiveJournal syndication works".

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

*nods*

You may very well be right, I think I can see your interpretation being true -- we need to start interviewing people to verify, though! Or maybe we'll uncover some other trend that we hadn't thought of in the xkcd readership.

What it doesn't account for, though -- why are so many clearly non-GATI people taking it upon themselves to read xkcd? Perhaps it has a much broader appeal than I'm imagining it has? ...

[lindseykuper]

It's really, really popular these days, it seems. There are plenty of individual xkcds that are funny or interesting to a general audience, or maybe to a specific audience that differs from the specific audience that the comic as a whole is geared toward. Those spread around pretty fast.

[scottique.livejournal.com]

Fir-- oh, third. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciG-Xs7mBwU)

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

Lovely, thank you :)

See -- what I want to know -- when is it a sense of irony that drives people to say "first!" or even "first?" ... and in which communities? How can we find out who sincerely views the frist p0st as an accomplishment or sign of awesomeness... and who's doing it to mock the idea that it might be?

(and who's trying to pose as the sort of person who thinks FIRST POST is childish, but secretly wishes they could be first?)

[schizobovine.livejournal.com]

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

Maybe perhaps true! But I think it's a bit of an oversimplification...

In a lot of cases, though, there's a community getting built, and even if your real-life identity isn't associated with your online one, there's still some sort of persona that people can identify and think about...

As a tiny tiny example, some people occasionally comment on the BBC news feed, and I recognize them by username at least -- they build up a reputation, and one gets an idea of their political leanings and relative cleverness...

[schizobovine.livejournal.com]

I was going for the "someone else said my idea better than I could" but since it IS a comic strip, it's going to be an oversimplification.

And you're quite right that some people DO care about their online reputations, even if there is no conncetion to meat-space. Still, the capability that some random heckler can post stupid shit ("first post", trolling, etc.) means that without some kind of filtering mechanism, you're still going to get this behavior in any population of a large enough size.

Perhaps the social stigma from posting crap on LJ for big feeds is less, because, a) people don't expect insightful commentery without moderation anyway, and b) because the connection between the smaller cliques of which the individual LJ first poster is part and the larger pool of people that view the feed are almost disjoint. Argument a is mostly due to the feed coming well after the comic, so it's original distribution point for many people was not the feed so a culture of commentary couldn't be built up.