thefourthvine | Poll: Compare Amongst Yourselves

makesmewannadie is visiting me, and we got to talking, as we often do. (Okay. Full disclosure: the actual challenge would be making us shut the fuck up.) And one thing we talked about reminded me of a poll I'd considered posting lo these many moons ago, to test a hypothesis that I can't very well tell you beforehand. (Bias is death to informal and statistically skewed LJ polls, my friends.)

So, first, let me just say: hey, it'd be cool if you'd take this poll. I would love you and stuff.

Second - when I say "your friends list," I mean the portion of your friends list that you read regularly - your default reading filter, if you have one, or the whole list if that's how you read. (If you don't read your friends list at all, this poll is not going to be a good fit for you.) My point is, I want you to consider the people you know the best. (Which is not to say you necessarily know them well, of course.) And when I say "the average," I mean your own personally assessed average of this trait over your friends list.

And, seriously, there are no bad answers here. I'm only wondering where you fit into your own mental picture of your friends list for these particular variables. I know you may not have great data for all these questions; just give me your first reaction, and I will of course love you forever.

ETA: Please don't go back to change your answers after you've finished the poll and seen the results! (Unless you think of something you want to add to the text box, or you've decided shoes are more important than almost-cock. Those questions are weighty and take long consideration; I understand that.)

[Poll #931955]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I don't consider myself to have a stats fetish, but I find myself wondering deeply whether you'd see substantially different trends if you divide the answerers into "lurkers" and "not lurkers." I mean, aside from things you could expect like lurkers considering themselves "less open" or "less creative", I wonder if the composition of the flist of a lurker and a non-lurker are substantially different.

What I mean is, as a lurker, my flist is just people who regularly produce content I want to read. That's it, c'est tout. I grimly tolerate people who want to rant about their medical conditions and life tragedies to an audience of strangers because they're turning out decent fic every couple posts.

While I'm sure non-lurkers have a lot of that too, it seems like they must, by definition, have some other categories in the mix. Like, "lurker who friended me and I friended back to be polite." Or "people who sometimes beta read for me" or "people who give me feedback that I groove on" or even just "people I met at a Con who seem cool."

So, for example, I've seen a bunch of comments suggesting an inverse correlation between heavy involvement in fandom and financial or career success (ie "she's writing a fic a week? She's gotta be jobless!") So, would lurkers largely consider themselves richer and more successful than a flist composed almost entirely of prolific authors?

Anyway, fun poll! Looking forward to the followup post with the hypotheses and number crunching.

Oh, and one more. I've also seen a lot of comments in this thread from people saying "I just couldn't bear to tick a checkbox saying I'm smarter/richer/more attractive/etc than my flist."

That seems like another thing that might(?) be different for lurkers who don't have a relationship with anyone on their friends list, ie, their flist doesn't particularly know they exist. But maybe not. Neuroses everywhere, yo.

I find myself wondering deeply whether you'd see substantially different trends if you divide the answerers into "lurkers" and "not lurkers."

Ooo, interesting. I try not to make that distinction usually, between lurkers and not, but you're right that it would be an interesting variable in this case. Because - well, one aspect of fandom that lurkers presumably get less of is the community. Which means, you're right, possibly many more creative-output-only journals and fewer mixed or mostly personal ones.

What I mean is, as a lurker, my flist is just people who regularly produce content I want to read. That's it, c'est tout.

This makes sense to me.

While I'm sure non-lurkers have a lot of that too, it seems like they must, by definition, have some other categories in the mix. Like, "lurker who friended me and I friended back to be polite." Or "people who sometimes beta read for me" or "people who give me feedback that I groove on" or even just "people I met at a Con who seem cool."

Or - and this is maybe the biggest category for me these days - "People I've made a personal connection with, for whatever reason, through fandom, and now our relationship is partly fannish and partly personal, and maybe we don't even share a fandom anymore." Like, in some cases, I may be scrolling through their fannish content looking for details of those same medical conditions.

So, would lurkers largely consider themselves richer and more successful than a flist composed almost entirely of prolific authors?

Huh. Interesting, and another point I'm really curious about. (Also ironic, in that the very best FF writers I know are, to the best of my knowledge, very very successful in their real lives, too. Although I do tend to suspect that someone who churns out 3000 words a day, every day, in a never-ending epic (part 99/???!) called "True Love and Real Life and Important Stuff" is - well, generally I assume she's in high school, actually. In high school I had enough free time to do that. (And, given what I actually chose to do with that free time - let's just say I applaud all the girls devoting their high school careers to writing the Incredibly True Story of Severus Snape and Mary Sue in Love.))

Of course, all of this rests on the ability of people to self-identify as lurkers. I tend to think of lurking as a Kinsey scale deal, with 0 being Pure Lurker and 6 being - I don't know. Whatever the opposite of Pure Lurker is. Like, I think I skew lurker-wards, but obviously I'm not the Pure Lurker I once was. So maybe I'm a 4? Whereas you're a self-identified lurker, but you're commenting to me, so you're not purely lurky - so a 1? A 2?

And, of course, would a true Pure Lurker even fill in a poll? Hmmm.

But, yeah, complexities of lurker-identification ("...The Spotted Lurker can readily be identified by her sylph-like movements and polka-dot plumage...") aside, it would be very interesting to see how this varied for lurkers.

Looking forward to the followup post with the hypotheses and number crunching.

Sadly, the number crunching will be extremely primitive. I long to put this into a proper database and actually get some stats, but I seriously cannot face the data entry. I value my hands.

Hmmm, I suppose kinsey scale is right. I tend to think of myself as a total lurker because I produce no content, (literally have one placeholder post in the entire history of my LJ), have no personal relationship with anyone in LJ-land, don't go to cons or chat in forums, etc. However, I DO give feedback - it's why I have an LJ. (And clearly I take polls once in a while too). So I guess that puts me at least one step along the spectrum from the truly silent and mysterious lurker.

as a real lurker without even an lj-account I´am not able to fill in your poll. but it is so tempting... as nearly everyone else I would have considered my sex-live as less then average but I would have answered the creativity question as more then average even if I never have anything contributed to fandom above lurking. most of the people seem to measure the creative output. for me it has been a question of creative potential. I would have linked the question of output (creative or otherwise) mentally with the question about success.

and concerning the f-list of a lurker: I would define my (potential) f-list by three components (I´m reading ljs since 3 years):
1. the journals I read because of their contributions to fannish and other (AND ist the important word) discussions and Metadiscussions. There are some I frequent regularly and there are some (like yours) that I stumble across always again, drawn by the themes in links and recs. These are the ljs which contribute to some discussions I have in RL and which I cite to friends and which are intellectual stimulating for me and give me the feeling: there are some people out there whom I would like to know and discuss things with them.
2. the journals I read because of the fic - these are in most cases - not the same people as in 1. Sometimes I´m curious and spy a bit on the author, sometimes not. These people seem "more far away" for me but I can be emotionally very attached to the fic.
3. the journals I started to read when I first discovered fandom and lj. these are like "former schoolmates", once in a while I have to look at them, to know how people are doing.
For all 3 types of ljs I construct a strong concept about the personality of the person. I remember the comments, these people leave wherever. I seldom feel as a lurker mostly I feel as a part of fandom and forget about the "non-contributing-aspect".

Poll: Compare Amongst Yourselves

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lurker and other things