If I can be serious for a moment, an idea that has been coming up a lot lately (in varied situations) is that of quantity vs. quality. In this day and age, certain people/groups/websites/etc seem to put a premium on claiming that they have "over 10,000 visitors every 10 seconds" or something similarly outlandish. The thing that comes to my mind almost immediately upon reading that is, "Sure, there were 10,000 visitors, but how long did they stay?"
I've been a so-called "visitor" to several really bizarre and esoteric websites over the years, but often times I would only be there long enough to look at the front page, realize that there was nothing there that I was interested in, or I had been linked to said page for a story, I left once I "got what I came for." The point is that I visited the front page long enough for their great big clicker-tracker-thingamabob to catalog that I had visited the site, even though I would never return to said site in the future.
The last time I looked at RS.com's front page about a week or so ago, at least half the content was an advertisement of some sort for a site sponsor, a link to an article at TFN or another offsite source (usually Hasbro or SW.com), or some short, vague byline for a news story which more or less consisted of unsubstantiated speculation (OMG EARLY BIRD LOLZ). There was very little of substance on the front page that could not be gotten (and in more depth, I might add) from JD.com, GH.com, or so on and so forth. JD's front page has (and this is an unconfirmed empirical observation here) about 1/10th the daily postings that RS.com does, but at least 10 times the actual content that RS.com's updates do.
RS, going back to my original comparison, has increasingly put quantity over quality. It's easy to say "We post 10 updates every day at the least" when at least nine of them are "Pay 20 bucks for a figure you'll see everywhere for 5 in two months right now through our sponsors in Abu-Dhabi so we can get a kickback!" Whenever JD or GH or some others post an update on the news page, I can be reasonably sure it is something that will interest me and I don't have to wade through ads or C2 Ventures autograph scams to get to the information.
Same thing goes for the RS.com forums: I'd much rather be here, which is relatively smaller, for the intimacy that comes with the smaller size and visibility, as the conversation is more personal and everyone (my random posts about whimsical actions at C3 aside) usually maintains a level of maturity. JD might not get 15000 posts a day, but if JD got that, I can be more or less guaranteed that the majority would be worth reading. At RS, people post just to (metaphorically) hear the sounds of their own voices. For us (at least for the ones who don't work on the site itself), JD is something we come to in order to escape from reality for a moment; a lot of the people on the RS forums (GNT) seem like they live there.
So, I guess what I'm saying is that I'd rather be here than there, for the reasons I (and many others before me) have outlined above. And even though it's not the thread to say it, thank you to Chris and the staff for making this site available to us.
