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Jan 30, 2023
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Doctor Hammer's avatar

Yea, I thought about that. If I really needed more granular data I would have to do that, which is, a workaround, I guess. It is a workaround to a very unnecessary problem, however. It just seems super arbitrary all things considered. (Along with the very short answer length as GM suggests.) Why limit your tables to just 5 rows of information?

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Guttermouth's avatar

Not only do the 5 options drive me batty, the incredibly short text limit on the options does, too. Why the fuck couldn't there be a line feed?

My grandpa drove that tank.

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Doctor Hammer's avatar

Yea, I like Substack a lot, I really do, but some of their decisions...

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Guttermouth's avatar

Speaking as someone whose audience seems to have defined itself more or less organically but since became pretty cohesive, if you're trying to identify a "target" audience, maybe look at what you've already written that got you the most engagement.

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Doctor Hammer's avatar

That's a good point.

My highest views of all time was "Freddie de Boer and the Math Wars" which... I think that was a search engine accident.

The next highest was Ants and Anima, which I do have a follow up in the works... I don't know why I stopped working on it actively, come to think of it. Anyway, that is something I should dig into more, both in content and style.

Engagement wise, it is mostly the same 5-10 people commenting, so it is a little hard to take much from that. It reminds me a lot of teaching that way: there are 5-10 students out of a whole classroom that do the vast majority of interacting, and I tend to start teaching to them in particular if I don't remember to address everyone. That's one of the reasons I hated online teaching with any class larger than ~10 people, you can't see other people visual reactions so you can only work with those talking and the rest just get lost.

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Tereza Coraggio's avatar

My dad drove that tank. I'm going on 66 so don't you lecture me, young whippersnapper!

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John Carter's avatar

Now there's a normal distribution if I've ever seen one.

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Pope T-Bone XXL's avatar

Looks like you need to incorporate more Justin Bieber photos to attract the under 20 crowd. Justin Bieber is still way cool, right?

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Doctor Hammer's avatar

That's what scares me... I don't want to have to dig into pop culture to find references :)

First class I ever taught in like... 2016 I think, I referenced the Beverly Hillbillies. Exactly one person in 30 or so had any idea what the hell I was talking about.

I really lucked out that about that time Friends was put up on Netflix and was really popular, gave me a lot of material.

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Elle's avatar

The bin be are also unhelpful. 20-35 is such a huge range for life stages and personal life outlook

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Doctor Hammer's avatar

Aye. I think a future poll and post is going to split that up a little more. There's a lot of ink being spilled over the changes in life patterns (marriage, kids, etc.) in that 20-35 range I kind of want to look at more deeply. It seems to me that people born in the early to mid 80's are the last cohort that is more or less like their parents in the "get job, get married, have kids" vein where that is solidly the default. After that the demographic data seems to skew more towards marriage being unmarried and childless. I have a few guesses as to why, but very little solid. I'd like to know especially what the 20-35 cohort thinks of that sort of stuff. I have some former students who have told me they think people their age are crazy (18-23 or so now) but then they are a little more on the trad side perhaps.

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Rick Larson's avatar

I asked men with beards how long has it been since they've shaved. Most interesting varying responses, some with long explanations.

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Winston Smith's avatar

I've been thinking the same thing - how old are these people? Maybe next time put up a couple of polls to give you a spread of 10 options (if Substack will let you do that).

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