I wish we had a WBW community in which we could make friends and share ideas. I’ve also gotten a large number of emails and comments that say something along the lines of what a reader named Rebecca wrote in a comment on last week’s post: And all of this keeps confirming 1, 2, and 3 above about the people who read this site. Our readers keep teaching us things, inspiring us, and making us laugh. We’re not just guessing about what our readers are like-there are rich and interesting community discussions every week in the blog’s comment sections and on our Facebook page, and we get lots of emails from people every day. So let’s look at where that leaves us-we have a group of smart, curious people who like to brain play, but they’re also kind of immature, and they come from a vastly varied group of worlds and life experiences. The post topics are all over the place, and one fun side-effect of that is that the fly paper doesn’t hone in on any one group of people, so the WBW community is incredibly diverse-there are readers of all ages and all kinds of backgrounds, and because of the good fortune that the language we speak happens to be widely spoken throughout the world, the community includes people from literally every country on Earth. Really serious people can’t stand the site.ģ) They can’t be put in a box beyond #1 and #2. Wait But Why posts-even the serious ones-are riddled with silly drawings, curse words, and jokes. 2 We consider WBW a brain playground, which collects the type of people who like to brain play.Ģ) They’re not that serious.
#Superluminal communication reddit full#
And the posts tend to include a lot of facts and science and math and psychology, and even the posts on silly topics tend to be full of graphs and stats-which scares away all of the people who used to say “Um we’re not in class anymore” in high school when people would talk after school about something they had learned in class.
WBW posts are longggg and often dive way into a not-that-concrete topic-which turns off anyone who doesn’t like to think hard and deeply about things. What kind of odd fucking group of people do you end up with on that fly paper?ġ) They’re smart, curious, and thinky. It’s pretty simple.Įxcept what if your blog sometimes talks about aliens, but sometimes it talks about relationships, but sometimes it talks about bunnies, but sometimes it talks about Iraq, but sometimes it talks about how much to tip the delivery guy when it’s raining? A Pakistani cricket site will collect a lot of Pakistani cricket fans. The fly paper of a cooking blog will collect people who like to cook. If you took a close look at the fly paper of any blog and who’s stuck to it, you’d see a group of people who are a reflection of what the site is putting out there, whether in their interests, needs, sense of humor, general wavelength, or any other way a person can connect to blog posts. Everyone else lands once, flies away, and never comes back. When someone ends up on a blog or another kind of content site for the first time, reads something, and likes it enough to remember to come back later, bookmark the page, subscribe by email or follow on social media, they stick to the paper. Internet fly paper is only sticky for certain types of people, depending on the type of content it puts out there and how useful or enjoyable that content is. But internet fly paper isn’t like normal fly paper, which catches every fly that touches it. The internet is swarming with billions of people, and when one of them ends up on a blog, it’s like a fly landing for a second on a piece of fly paper. A blog is like a piece of internet fly paper.