Anons (posted this in the last bread, but the Q drops made the bread run away, so I'm re-posting. Last time, not trying to slide. Also, fixing annoying spelling errors)
I posted a graph on here this morning, but I'm circling back to it now that I've had time to process it. So I have been thinking about quick and dirty way to trend our research meta here on the boards. Like, is Anon participation with the breads changing through time? Do we have more users now than we did 6 months ago? Can't trust Google, but then I realized the rate at which breads (or posts) are created may provide insight into how many of us there are interacting here.
So…I went back to the Archives and just grabbed the first bread of each archive cohort (e.g., March 11-20). I entered the post number, date, and post number for the first bread in each Archive cohort. This was through October, when the Archive stops (as of this writing). I grabbed a few other breads at random from the catalog to fill in November and December. Then I plotted "breads" per "date" to see there were any trends. There indeed was a trend:
Almost exactly linear. By almost exactly, the r-squared value of this regression is 0.9966. This doesn't happen in nature when a bunch of living, thinking, beings are interacting over time. What? No new fags arrriving all the time? What, no one leaving en masse due to a LARP? For this trend to be linear (almost exactly) the newbies must be arriving and posting at the same rate as the bailers! Same thing with individual posts (not shared here, but obvious if each bread is 751 posts).
So….
I think that there are at least four possibilities:
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Something in the 8chan architecture/design limits posting speed to a certain rate. This doesn't seem to be the case, because we see breads ebb in flow in terms of posting rate (like "off to the races" upon a Q post (lb))
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There are very few of us (including the possibility that it's just you and me (or just me, or just you))
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We are infinite (the leaves exactly cancel the arrivals)
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This board is, itself, a show. Posts arrive in a prescribed order at a fixed rate (like a "movie" if you think of each post or bread as a frame). It's a program.