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".
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.
"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".
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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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