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