Most popular article types on TheDailyWTF..



  • Just done a quick survey of the last 10 articles of each type (not including yesterday's) and the number of comments they have received.

    There are the averages:

    Tales From The Interview 191.8
    Feature Articles 124.2
    CodeSOD 106.5
    Error'd 64.2

    I don't know if it's because people are not around so much on Friday, less so Saturday and Sunday to post on Error'd or if we just don't them particularly funny or have much to say on the matter.

    It doesn't actually surprise me that it swings this way.

    In this particular survey, the most commented on article was actually a "Feature Article" with 331. The highest scoring "Tales From The Interview" got 315. The top CodeSOD 180 and the top Error'd only 90, lower than the lowest score for a Tales From The Interview post. (In fact looking back in history I couldn't find a Tales From The Interview article with fewer than 100 comments).

    The lowest in each category: 37 for an Error'd, 54 for a CodeSOD, 62 for a Feature Article (the most recent one but is a week old now) and 129 for a Tales From The Interview. The most recent TFTI was more recent than the low-scoring feature article (and was on 170).

    The Feature Article that got 331 comments so far, "The Budget Is Through The Roof" is here: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Budget-is-Through-the-Roof.aspx

     



  • I'm not a big fan of Error'd, I tend to just skim through and see if there are any featured comments. I do tend to like the Tales From The Interview stories best, I guess they make me feel better about myself since I do have to interview job candidates a few times a year.



  • CodeSOD is my least favorite, simply because programming is not what I do every day, and certainly not in C, C++, Java, etc.  I do some Perl scripting maybe once a week or so.  So some of the nuances about how C++ or Java react to certain situations is either unknown to me or that knowledge is rusty.  I immediately caught what was going on with today's recursive whitespace elimination though.

    I get a chuckle out of the Friday Error'd, but I prefer the Feature Articles and Tales From the Interview.



  • Forgot the Snoofle posts, which should be a main page category unto themselves.  Because they come from a "you-can't-make-this-shit-up" environment, they need no re-telling or embellishment.



  • Did you need to do the data gathering yourself or is there an API or something that you could plug into?  As this seems like it could be an interesting tracker to automate and stick on the page.



  • Error'd is probably the least commented on because they're simple pictures, as-is and there's not much to say about them.

    Interviews are personal experiences though, and people won't shut up about them.



  • i don't think the comments are an appropriate measure for the popularity of an article.

    that being said, errord are becoming increasingly lame



  • @Nelle said:

    i don't think the comments are an appropriate measure for the popularity of an article
     

    They're not.

    The number of comments are a measure of how popular the comment thread is, rather than the article that initiated some comments for discussion.

    Similar tastes to those already mentioned:

    • interview stuff = nice and wordy, a collection of brief stories.
    • SOD tends to be single-article and requires some contextual knowledge, so some are lost on me (I get the gist, and the general structure/format of the code points to the WTF, but probably have not experienced such WTFs myself). 
    • Erro'd = good for a chuckle, but many are similar to failblog/lamebook/etc
    • Soapbox/Articles = I've quite enjoyed some of Alex's blog stuff and other articles (the Turnover Crisis one springs out). A "featured articles" about Netscape's new popup blocker that bought me here in the first place.

  • 🚽 Regular

    In the very beginning I liked Error'd, but they've just become more and more of the same crap images of weather widgets that have NaN, Infinity, or MAX_INT temperatures or wind speeds or progress bars that show "53,352 years remaining" with a "clever" comment by the submitter referencing Doc Brown or Picard.

    I agree that Tales from the Interview is the best type of article. The stories told from either side of the table are often very funny and usually don't appear to be embellished. Every time I see that rare purple bar on the page, a smile comes on my face.

    Featured Articles are hit or miss for me. Sometimes they're fantastic, while other times it's either a minor WTF or it's something that's so seemingly embellished that I've lost any sympathy I had for the submitter, because the story was too outlandish to believe.

    Which leaves me with the CodeSOD. This is also very hit or miss. I tend to avoid reading these simply because I often can't help but try to wrap my head around what the code was supposed to do, and what the original programmer was thinking when he/she wrote that code, and it leaves me either dizzy, nauseous, or with a bad headache. Plus, like Error'd it often is really the same kind of WTF written a different way, where some n00b reinvented the wheel and implemented their own convoluted version of a common library function or class because they didn't RTFM.


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