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]

Heh! So... I'm guessing lots of people have you on your flist?

[ratcreature]

231 people have me friended on LJ. But I set my LJ to be indexed by google and such, so there may be plenty landing on my LJ page for some reason or another because they searched for something, clicked and then saw the most recent entries page that contained the talk about eraser eating rats. I mean, my most google indexed entry which is the one talking about Wizards tutorials for drawing women back from 2006 still gets about 20000-25000 page visits every month since that statistic started.