Measurement of community: references to 'happy mutants'

meta
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G’day all, an ex-bb reader here.

I left three or four months ago. At the time, I argued that you could tell that the change in comment systems threw a monkey wrench in the community–and that a fairly simple metric was that no one referred to themselves as ‘happy mutants’ any more.

Four months on, what are the results?

Doctorow still refers to us as happy mutants:

Pesco still refers to us as happy mutants:

but, from what I can tell, not one user refers to themselves as a ‘happy mutant’.

I might be wrong, though: has anyone thought of themselves as a happy mutant or even considered the words together in the last four months?

I’m just saying that–if bb’s editors consider its users just more internet blathering–bb’s users are likely to believe the same of their editors. This isn’t a newspaper, it’s a zine fercrissakes.

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I dunno, searching for “happy mutant” (with the quotes) produces a number of results here on BBS, via the search icon in the upper right. Click “show more” to see fuller results. And we can ask the Googles:

https://www.google.com/#q=site:bbs.boingboing.net+"happy+mutant"

Results are quite similar.

Still it strikes me as an odd metric to rely on. How about something like number of posts, or number of logged in user sessions, or I dunno, number of references to unicycling darth vader mask wearing flaming bagpipe players?

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A metric to measure community? Boy, you’re the optimist.

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