your hit counter is lying

[zing_och]

Since I'm a lurking lurker who lurks most of the time, I don't really feel qualified to say this, but whatever.

Ok. You want to know who's making you sad by giving you a bad hit-count / comment ratio?

It's me.



I open the story in a new tab. 1 This new tab is now the right-most tab in a row of a-lot-more-than-I-will-read-right-now tabs. I surf on for a while, then I have to go to bed / work / shopping / whatever. I close my browser.

Next time I'm on the computer my browser restores my tabs. 2 I surf the web, starting with my circle, opening yet more tabs, then moving on to all those other tabs.

These steps might be repeated a lot (sometimes I'm dragging around open tabs for weeks). But we'll say -

Ok. I'm getting to the story tab now! It's on an LJ with a layout I can't (or don't want to) read. I click my handy Readability applet. It reloads the page. 3

I read the story. I love it! I want to leave a comment! But Readability doesn't give me a comment link, so I have to reload the original page. 4 I post a comment!

And finally I bookmark your story on delicious because I love it so much. Because I'm an obsessive re-reader (is that a word?) you'll get lots more hits from me if I love the story - but probably no more comments.

So if I liked your story and left a comment, but don't come back to it, the ratio is still not all that great. With every re-read it gets worse. Plus I tend to open links from recs without really checking if I already know the story. Even more hits!

Lots of hits / not many comments doesn't have to mean "people read the story but don't like it".

(Of course that doesn't get into all the comments I don't leave because [list deleted; this is a topic for another post - which I probably won't make. This one's easier! *g*])

Comments

[zing_och]

Yes, very true. Sometimes I suspect that the "most popular" tags on our company intranet are all because of me. *g*

If you don't mind me asking: how does this to-do-list work?

[cadenzamuse]

Umm...I use multiple inboxes in Gmail, so that I can attempt to do Inbox Zero (in a nutshell: deal with all my incoming mail immediately) while still keeping stuff that I need to deal with later visible. So, when I open Gmail, I see my main inbox, and then to the right: grad school things to do later, lab things to do later, other things to do later, and reference (for things I don't need to really deal with but want to keep around for later--a knitting pattern I want to eventually knit, for example, or a particularly insightful comment that I want to be able to quote in appropriate discussions).

So when a comment notification that I want to reply to comes in, I either reply to it immediately or move it to "other things to do later" or "reference." And every time I go through those inbox categories, I'll probably read it, go reread the post, think about commenting, and either leave it some more, comment and delete the notification, or delete the notification without commenting.

Hmm. Or. Rereading what I originally wrote: my Dreamwidth is about 50/50 personal journal and recs journal, so I bookmark things I may want to rec with "Read It Later" Firefox add-on I also keep a mental list of "fantastic things I've read that I want to comment on eventually." If I decide to comment, I can look up the page on Read It Later and do so. If it falls off my mental list, it wasn't awesome enough to deserve the effort, or I'll rediscover it when I look through the Read It Later list for things to rec.

...and that was waaaaaaaaaaaay more than you wanted to know, sorry.

[zing_och]

Definitely not more than I wanted to know! I'd really like for my fannish life to be a bit more organised, and this sounds like a good way to get there. Thank you very much!