Subject:
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Re: Memberships - so many people I don't know
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.people
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Date:
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Sun, 28 Nov 1999 18:49:40 GMT
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Viewed:
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1085 times
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In lugnet.people, Ed Jones writes:
> In lugnet.people, Todd Lehman writes:
> > Of course you can always step out of your "safe zone" periodically and
> > check out groups/boards that you don't normally read. That way, you will
> > have seized the opportunity to meet lots of people, rather than being
> > passive and missing it. Just a different way of looking at it. You have
> > to work a little (read more groups) if you want to meet lots and lots more
> > people.
>
> Of course I can, although I wouldn't call it a "safe zone".
I didn't mean that to sound insulting -- sorry.
> [major snip - none of which I disagree with]
I thought of one other reason -- it has to do with name frequencies...see
what you think about this theory:
When scanning articles in newsgroups, there are usually a whole bunch of
posts from a relatively small bunch of people, like this...
ACBABCACMACAEHABQCACBDFCKABCBGAICKDABCA...
...where A and B and C (for example) become very familiar. But now all of
a sudden there is a list of names where each person appears only once in
the list, like this...
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ...
and new names appear out of nowhere! :-)
In other words, in a pure list of people (like the members list), each person
occurs with equal frequency 1/n, where n is the number of people in the set.
In newsgroup postings, OTOH, each person occurs with a different frequency --
say, maybe 20% of the people do 80% of the posting, or something like that.
So certain names that you get familiar with stick out because you see them so
much -- and the names that you're not familiar with, you've probably actually
seen at some point, but they just never stood out among the crowd because you
only posted once or twice.
When I look in at the 50 most recent posts to lugnet.general, I see 50
messages from 31 different people (60%) -- and most of those are names that
I recognize almost instantly. If I increase the sample size to 100 messages,
I see 51 different people (51%). If I increase the sample size to 1000
messages, I see 206 people (21%), and now I'm seeing a lot of names that I
barely remember seeing. If I increase the sample size to the whole 10000
messages, I see 580 people (6%), and a lot of those names are pretty blurry.
The paradox is this -- and this happens in any random sampling of objects
where some objects occur more frequently than others: The more you read, the
more you look around, the more aware you are of names, the fewer names you
actually notice as a percentage of the total number of names you have seen.
:-) So when those are presented in a straight list, it's surprising how many
names come up blank.
How does that sound? :-)
--Todd
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: Memberships - so many people I don't know
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| Here's a data point for you: I scanned: (URL) as of right now (76 members), there are only 6 (1) names that I don't recognise. But then, I tend to remember a lot of stuff, no one likes to play Trivial Pursuit against me, and I haven't given up on (...) (25 years ago, 28-Nov-99, to lugnet.people)
| | | Re: Memberships - so many people I don't know
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| (...) No need to apologize. I didn't take it as an insult. I wouldn't call it a "safe zone", more a "selected reading zone". (...) [snip] (...) Ack, I've got Todd over analysing (Aquarius with Virgo rising?). My whole point was simply that I didn't (...) (25 years ago, 29-Nov-99, to lugnet.people)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Memberships - so many people I don't know
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| (...) Of course I can, although I wouldn't call it a "safe zone". (...) [I wrote]: (...) and (...) clique. (...) That's a definitive given. [major snip - none of which I disagree with] (...) a (...) "Clique" was a poor choice of words. I have not (...) (25 years ago, 28-Nov-99, to lugnet.people)
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