Thursday, February 16, 2006

Square Law of s.h.w-i

A nice collary to Sturgeon's Law and how crap is encouraged.

From a post from Sidney Webb in a thread about a Bay of Pigs WI.

The Inverse-Square Law of s.h.w-i, Karl. It's the reason that Firebug's "[OT] Millions for Defense" is the most popular thread on the NG at the moment. In general, the shorter and more worthless the post, the better the response. Your post was short but not worthless, so it didn't get as good a response as Bug, but still got a better response than your longer stuff. The opposite extreme is, say, an episode from an Anthony Meyer TL where s.h.w-i sits collectively slack-jawed in amazemen and we don't post anything. The corollary to the Inverse-Square Law is that if someone really _wants_ a response, they need to post something short and worthless. Which explains 90% of all Usenet posts.

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