Sunday, November 26, 2006
JSH: Minority view
A few days ago I asked that readers who use Google Groups use the ratings system that is provided through it where you can rate posts from 1 to 5 stars.
I have looked over threads that I created to talk about my research and found that along with my ratings, as I've started now routinely rating posts, I usually see 3 or 4 others and at times maybe 10 who have bothered to vote.
Giving the benefit of the doubt to opposition, let's say there are about 10 people out there then who disagree with me and are vocal in that disagreement.
Well I just checked Google Groups to see how many people it says subscribe to sci.math and it said 5,506, which is the number through Google Groups, so it's a lower number than the readership.
For instance, I don't subscribe to sci.math so I'm not part of that count. But, of course, I post on sci.math a lot.
But let's go with the low number to be fair and now go with the high number for the opposition based on ratings to get 10/5506 or about 0.18% of the sci.math readership clearly disagrees with me.
So I have one point of view and about 10 or so other people who don't seem to have any other support based on the ratings, argue with me, and that generates a lot of posts.
I like the ratings system as gives an overview of how many people on sci.math care to vote in one direction or another on these topics where if you just look at the volume of postings you might wrongly assume that the majority of sci.math is wrapped up in these discussions, when from the ratings, most don't care.
Actually, only about 0.18% clearly show that they do care.
I suggest you use the ratings if you use Google Groups. There is just no denying that much of the newsgroup doesn't care one way or the other when there is no voting for your point of view.
I have looked over threads that I created to talk about my research and found that along with my ratings, as I've started now routinely rating posts, I usually see 3 or 4 others and at times maybe 10 who have bothered to vote.
Giving the benefit of the doubt to opposition, let's say there are about 10 people out there then who disagree with me and are vocal in that disagreement.
Well I just checked Google Groups to see how many people it says subscribe to sci.math and it said 5,506, which is the number through Google Groups, so it's a lower number than the readership.
For instance, I don't subscribe to sci.math so I'm not part of that count. But, of course, I post on sci.math a lot.
But let's go with the low number to be fair and now go with the high number for the opposition based on ratings to get 10/5506 or about 0.18% of the sci.math readership clearly disagrees with me.
So I have one point of view and about 10 or so other people who don't seem to have any other support based on the ratings, argue with me, and that generates a lot of posts.
I like the ratings system as gives an overview of how many people on sci.math care to vote in one direction or another on these topics where if you just look at the volume of postings you might wrongly assume that the majority of sci.math is wrapped up in these discussions, when from the ratings, most don't care.
Actually, only about 0.18% clearly show that they do care.
I suggest you use the ratings if you use Google Groups. There is just no denying that much of the newsgroup doesn't care one way or the other when there is no voting for your point of view.
# posted by James Harris @ 16:18 
