It is certainly possible to use complex and sophisticated language to say stupid and meaningless things. Luckily a human brain is still needed to measure all the true factors of post quality, like originality, clarity, precision, and logical coherence.

I knew this was probably a one-shot deal - results are always suspect once the subjects know they're being watched. Next time, maybe I'll have to get the unskewed polls guy to help me analyze the results.

Thanks Duker, interesting stuff. Glad I scored reasonably well, boosts my already inflated ego.

And lolikes with the crazy post-to-words ratio.

man i'm not even top 5 in that gotta step my game up

This.

What's in the ****ing box?

It's is a pretty rough way to do this, since it lacks all context, but among the top 50 posters in each forum, these are the top 20 for using "racism" or "racist".

I admire LetsGambool's anti-racist tenacity almost as much as I lol bahbahmickey.

I wonder rhetorically how much of that was actual racism rather than commentary of one of the isolated incidents referred to as racism? The internet memory remembers and tells.

Anything past 8th grade has a negative ROI IMO.

Also, how well does this thing measure it's vs its usage? Doesn't matter how many big words you know if you can't get that right.

I like to keep my posts short and to the point LDO.

1. Awesome
2. How did you do the scraping?
3. I'd love to see a scatter plot of post # and words/post
4. Are you open to constructive criticism on graphs

Nice work. Not surprised to find myself high up in grade level. I don't see it as a compliment, though I think it's pretty hard to be a good poster if you're scoring really low on that measure.

You should do DrModern and Phone Booth. I once tested a typical DrModern post and got a score over 14.

It's hard to be a good poster if you're scoring high on that measure too.

11th grade is not "high", unless perhaps you're in 10th grade.

Or unless you're an average American.

This is sort of how I feel about it. If you're trying to make a substantive political argument, there's going to be some higher degree of complexity.

I'm sympathetic to the view that this metric is sort of inappropriate for a forum/social media context, but it's not useless either.

I originally considered calling the thread "Which Politics regs write at the lowest grade level?" in order to shame low-scorers into stepping up their game, but then I realized this approach would make me less of a scientist and more of a dick.

Thanks, let me reply with some detail later this evening. I'm off to work now.

I don't think this is surprising at all. Some of the worst posters are the ones who use a lot of big words and do so in grammatically correct ways but can't actually make a coherent thought out of them.

Great OP btw.

Grammar ain't got nothing to do with it. The test measures big words and run-on sentences, nothing more. Someone who posts nothing but "lolololololololololololololololololololololololol ololol" is writing at a 300th grade level.

(This probably explains goofy's high score).

You'd think steelhouse would top the charts with his long ass posts.

a) He's not in the top 50 by post count, which is what this exercise is limited to.
b) Long posts can still score low in grade levels, if they have lots of short words and short sentences. I think that is the case for steelhouse.

While I found the results very interesting and appreciate the effort behind them I think this is a very poor measure of post quality.

At this time I would like to associate myself with the comments of the periodically disparaged and often laconic but sporadically loquacious colleague in interlocution known by the appellation AlexM. Usually I would just post a quote with the word "this' but I am trying to get my score up for the next possible iteration of this unsophisticated evaluation.

It's mostly just mocking bahbah and Silverman, particularly bahbahs "I'm not racist" martyr act which dominates the numbers.

So apparently you got yourself banned, but I'll answer briefly anyway.

The scraper, written in java, is really just a series of tedious brute force extractions from the html pages based on based on deterministic triggers for each piece of data. Although on first glance the html source code for this web page looks like a monstrous pile of random ****, the forum software actually produces content that's highly structured and predictable.

Ultimately, it's just a matter of automatically walking through menu pages, extracting thread URLs, and then walking through the pages of each thread extracting content. The post data is inserted into a very simple database table via a very simple DAO.

Although I doubt my operations would have any impact on a web-based ecosystem as gigantic as twoplustwo, I still throttled my requests to one every 2 seconds.

As for the presentation, I know the charts are not stellar, but for personal project work, I'm basically stuck with an old version of Apple Numbers (part of iWork '08). It gets the job done, but apparently more recent versions have a richer set of chart features (including bubble charts, which I would have liked to apply here also).

I played around with the scatter plot, but I couldn't figure out how to label the individual points, so what we're left with is more of a holistic view of the distribution. Here's one where I added a few labels for some notable outliers. These are the same top 50 posters from earlier charts.



The Politics plot looks compressed compared to Unchained, but that seems to be due to ikestoys putting a leftward squeeze on everybody else (visually at least).

Pretty good - this scores a 17.52.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

That should do it.

Lol. I used that word in Q1, probably why I scored so good.