Techdirt 2014: The Numbers.

from the counting-it-up dept

Fri, Jan 2nd 2015 9:00am — Mike Masnick

2014 is over, and as we've done every year for the past few years, we'll try to round up some of "the numbers" about that year (and yes, this is our only post today -- we'll be back on Monday with regular posting). If you'd like to look back, we've got the posts from 2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010.

We had visitors from 240 countries this year, with (as per usual) the US holding steady at almost exactly two-thirds of all traffic (actually 66.95%). This was followed by the UK, Canada and Australia. Germany rounds out the top five with India, the Netherlands, France, Sweden and New Zealand making the top 10. The only major change here was India jumping up a few slots and Sweden dropping a few. After India, our top traffic from Asia comes from... the Philippines -- which is a bit of a surprise. Singapore, Turkey (and yes, I know some people debate whether Turkey is part of Asia) and Japan round out the top five Asian countries for traffic. China doesn't even make the top 10 (it's 11th), though we frequently hear that the site is blocked there.

The top five countries in Europe all made the top 10 list above, but in case you're wondering, the next five are Spain, Ireland, Finland, Italy and Norway -- all of which sent a healthy amount of traffic. If we combine all of the Americas after the US and Canada, the most traffic comes from Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. In Africa, again the top country is South Africa, but we still get a decent number of visitors from Nigeria, Kenya and Egypt as well.

Last year we noted that the only two countries on the map (leaving out tiny islands and such) that we could see where we got no traffic was Chad and Western Sahara. This year, however, we appear to have had 30 visits from Chad. Western Sahara, however, remains a dark zone. For years, we joked about no visits from North Korea, so last year we were amazed that we got two whole visits from that country. This year... it doubled to four, but I'm assuming at least two of those were the supposed Sony Hackers, right? And, in what's become an annual tradition, we have a single visit from Christmas Island.

Also, a yearly tradition: visitors from Gibraltar stick around the longest -- something that PaulT takes credit for each year (rightfully so). If we limit it to countries where we have a significant number of visitors, folks from Australia, Switzerland and New Zealand seemed to stick around the longest, so thanks for that! In terms of the number of pages per visit, Gibraltar, Bangladesh and... Congo top the list, but based on fairly small numbers of visits. If we look at countries with significant visits, India, the Philippines and Switzerland top that list.

I always enjoy digging down into the city numbers as well. The top spots remain pretty much unchanged: New York City, London, LA and Chicago. Toronto fell out of the fourth slot down to sixth, with San Francisco moving up. Seattle, Sydney, Houston and Melbourne rounded out the top 10 with Washington DC coming in 11th. As always, it's interesting to see this data, but given the differences in population size, perhaps it's not always that meaningful.

As always, it's interesting to see how some of you are visiting the site. Remember when Microsoft was going to dominate the world with Internet Explorer? Almost half of all visits these days come from Chrome. Firefox is second and Safari is third. Internet Explorer is fourth, though still with a fair bit of usage (who are you people?). Approximately 36% of our traffic is mobile these days -- jumping up from 29% last year. Most of that is from phones, but plenty of tablet users as well. As per usual, the iPhone and the iPad absolutely dominate the device side, but if we just look at browser OS, Android is almost neck and neck with iOS. Android represented 44% of mobile visits, with iOS at 51%. Windows was a little under 4%, Blackberry about half a percent, and you Nokia loyalists with a combination of Series40, SymbianOS and others make up the remaining tiny percentages. Outside of Apple, mobile visitors came most on Samsung devices and then LG, but coming from a wide variety of devices from those companies.

Given how many of you are from the US, and how the US broadband market works here, it's no surprise that the biggest ISPs for traffic are Comcast, followed by Time Warner (if they merge the numbers from the two would be massive). Verizon and AT&T make up the next two.

As for how people come here, it seems like we have a pretty balanced split. We've never focused on doing things like "gaming" search with search engine optimization, or going for social with clickbait, and so we don't end up relying too much on anything.

In terms of where people came from -- once again Reddit was a major source of traffic. On the "social media" side, this was followed by Facebook and Twitter, with Stumbleupon far behind them. Google+ sent a few (but not very many). From the non-"social" side, we got our most traffic from Instapundit, Boing Boing, Daily Rotation, Popehat and Slashdot. On the search side, the only really noticeable search term that drove significant traffic (outside of people searching for "techdirt" "tech dirt" and variations of that) was... "Walter O'Brien." And yes, our Walter O'Brien stories continue to get a fair number of visits and comments as people discover that his public story is mostly made up.

Okay, onto some lists:

Top Ten Stories, by unique pageviews, on Techdirt for 2014:

So you'll notice there are two old stories in there. One from 2010 and another from 2011 -- though both about the same thing (a guy discovering an FBI tracking device on his car and then posting it on Reddit). For whatever reason, Reddit suddenly picked up on that story again and drove a tremendous amount of traffic to it (well, mainly to the one about him suing the FBI, and that resulted in people clicking through to the other one as well). In case you think those shouldn't count, the next two biggest stories were... the first Walter O'Brien story and one about Verizon basically admitting that it was its own fault that its network got clogged (while it attempted to blame Netflix).

2014's Top Ten Stories, by comment volume

Once again -- as we point out every year -- we see very little overlap between these two lists. Only one story (the Keurig DRM one) made both lists (in the second spot on both too). Also something that stood out to me -- while not a single one of the top 10 traffic getting posts were written by Tim Geigner, 4 of the top 10 commented posts were by him. That Dark Helmet sure knows how to get you to speak up (though, to be fair, none of the next ten posts in comments were written by him).

Okay, onto the community, and who did well on the commenting front. For the third year in a row, John Fenderson was our top commenter, though he seriously upped his game. In 2014, he posted an astounding 6105 comments -- nearly double of last year's 3604. Here's the top 10 list:

2014 Top Commenters, by comment volume

John Fenderson: 6105 comments
That One Guy: 3431 comments
Ninja: 1864 comments
nasch: 1695 comments
PaulT: 1031 comments
Mason Wheeler 840 comments
Whatever 777 comments
That Anonymous Coward: 707 comments
Mike Masnick 685 comments
art guerrilla 675 comments

Here's a little oddity: I seem to appear on the above list in even years (2010, 2012 and 2014), and don't make it on odd years (2011 and 2013). Guess I'll be commenting less in the new year... Also interesting to see how the list has changed over the years. Only nasch and PaulT were also on the list in 2010, with only PaulT making the list every single year (nasch missed just one year).

Top 10 Most Insightful Commenters, based on how many times they got the lightbulb icon:

John Fenderson: 456 comments
That One Guy: 316 comments
Mason Wheeler 128 comments
Karl: 101 comments
Ninja: 98 comments
PaulT: 89 comments
Gwiz: 88 comments
jupiterkansas 82 comments
That Anonymous Coward: 71 comments
Mike Masnick: 63 comments

Top 10 Funniest Commenters, based on how many times they got the LOL icon:

That One Guy: 32 comments
Ninja: 30 comments
John Fenderson: 26 comments
DannyB: 23 comments
ChurchHatesTucker: 22 comments
silverscarcat: 19 comments
Mason Wheeler 16 comments
That Anonymous Coward: 15 comments
Roger Strong: 15 comments
sorrykb: 15 comments

Kudos to John Fenderson and That One Guy for dominating the commenting lists this year! Also interesting to see the "funny" numbers are much lower than the insightfuls (and much lower than in the past). Either you guys just aren't as funny as you used to be, or people are getting pickier about the funny voting... Perhaps that's a challenge for someone in the new year...

That's it for last year. If you want to appear on this list next year, time to get cracking...

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Filed Under: numbers, techdirt, the numbers

46 Comments

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TheResidentSkeptic (profile), 2 Jan 2015 @ 9:46am

Missing Statistics
Where's the list of "most prolific trolls" ??
or "top trollbait" posts? (which writer provokes the most trolls - is it Mike or DH?)
Troll with most comments? (Anti-Dirt?)
Troll most frequently flagged? (ootb?)
Troll with highest count of flagged posts? (bob?)

How are we going to vote for our favorite troll without knowing their standings??? I think out-of-his-ass is winning, but it could be Anti-Dirt ...
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Dark Helmet (profile), 2 Jan 2015 @ 10:13am

Traffic is nothing
Getting people pissed off enough to comment is the food that nourishes me at night....
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Spaceman Spiff (profile), 2 Jan 2015 @ 10:18am

Rebranding of SOPA
"The Rebranding Of SOPA: Now Called 'Notice And Staydown'"

Actually, it should be called 'Shut up and roll over'!
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Yes, I know I'm commenting anonymously, 2 Jan 2015 @ 10:18am

On visits per city: the usual workaround is to go for a `visits per 1000 inhabitants' metric (if we can find a list of inhabitants per city worldwide).
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mattshow (profile), 2 Jan 2015 @ 10:55am

Internet Explorer is fourth, though still with a fair bit of usage (who are you people?).

To suggest a serious answer to what was not a serious question: we are people whose corporate IT departments still love Internet Explorer because all the internal web-based corporate applications were designed 10 years ago to work on IE and nobody wants to devote the resources needed to confirm whether they work on any other platform, or to update them if they don't.
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Anonymous Coward, 2 Jan 2015 @ 11:02am

Reddit
So presumably you're planning on suing reddit for using your good name to generate page hits right? Or just lobby the government to force them to pay you? I mean, without it's ability to link to other sites they'd be nothing more than askreddit sex questions or people asking for where the best porn is. /s
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Dark Helmet (profile), 2 Jan 2015 @ 11:03am

Re:
"we are people whose corporate IT departments still love Internet Explorer because all the internal web-based corporate applications were designed 10 years ago to work on IE and nobody wants to devote the resources needed to confirm whether they work on any other platform, or to update them if they don't."

Ugh, I can certainly sympathize w/this. I use Chrome 90% of the time, but then I have to do some module task in Autotask or Quotewerks or some other LoB app and find that it's only stable in IE because the world doesn't make any sense and is a horrible place....
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Anonymous Coward, 2 Jan 2015 @ 11:22am

Re: Missing Statistics
This is suppose to highlite thing about TechDirt that are good, not sad or enflaring.
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Mr. Oizo, 2 Jan 2015 @ 11:30am

Android haha... crash.. .haha...
Android has so many visits because the browsers are so unstable. You should remove the visits that come within half a minute of the last one, then you will see a totally different picture. Namely: that the OS sucks so hard a vacuum cleaner would be jealous.
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TheResidentSkeptic (profile), 2 Jan 2015 @ 11:39am

Re: Too True
I have a client that still has "jscript" and "javascript 1.1" defined in their web apps..
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Mike Masnick (profile), 2 Jan 2015 @ 11:47am

Re: Android haha... crash.. .haha...
Android has so many visits because the browsers are so unstable

Really? I have an android phone and use Chrome and Firefox on it (all the time) and can't remember ever having any problems.
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Matthew A. Sawtell, 2 Jan 2015 @ 11:57am

Why so many IE visits? Check the daily numbers...
Quote: "Internet Explorer is fourth, though still with a fair bit of usage (who are you people?)."

Why so many IE Visits? Check the daily numbers and/or I.P. Addresses - probably a good deal of folks look at this site at 'lunch time' who still work a job in 'good old Corporate America'. Either that or they are still plugging away with their 'obsolete Win XP' technology.
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Anonymous Coward, 2 Jan 2015 @ 2:08pm

Re: Android haha... crash.. .haha...
http://www.technologizer.com/2012/02/06/which-phone-os-crashes-more-its-not-android/

Thought this might be useful. Android does crash but not as much as Apple's iOS.
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timlash (profile), 2 Jan 2015 @ 2:19pm

Re: Re: Android haha... crash.. .haha...
I'll second Mr. Oizo's observation. I have a Toshiba android tablet running version 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) with five browser apps installed because none of them surf the entire web well. They all crash after visiting a handful of sites. Dolphin seems "best", but recent updates to Chrome have improved that experience greatly.
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That One Guy (profile), 2 Jan 2015 @ 2:41pm

Re: Re: Re: Android haha... crash.. .haha...
If all of them share the same instability, I can't help but think that the problem might not be the browswers.
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ChurchHatesTucker (profile), 2 Jan 2015 @ 3:05pm

Geez Mike
I moved up to fifth funniest this year, yay!

Also interesting to see the "funny" numbers are much lower than the insightfuls (and much lower than in the past).

*sad trombone*
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Hans, 2 Jan 2015 @ 3:09pm

Re: Re: Re: Android haha... crash.. .haha...
I've had this Android phone (Moto G) since last March, and as best as I can remember the (default) Chrome browser has crashed only once. I remember because I was surprised when it happened. Of course I had about 20 tabs open at the time...
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Dan, 2 Jan 2015 @ 3:10pm

I can't vouch for other Filipinos, but I like coming back here to read and comment. From patent trolls, to censorious busybodies, and Edward Snowden, this blog has depth of topics and informative writing that is second to none. Kudos to all the contributors and I hope to visit again and again.
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Anonymous Coward, 2 Jan 2015 @ 5:07pm

I suspect most of my visits come "from Toronto" but I am definitely not in Toronto... Most auto detectors are picking up my ISPs location but not mine!
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antidirt (profile), 2 Jan 2015 @ 6:46pm

Re: Missing Statistics
How are we going to vote for our favorite troll without knowing their standings??? I think out-of-his-ass is winning, but it could be Anti-Dirt ...

LMAO!
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Name, 2 Jan 2015 @ 7:53pm

Keurig Will Use DRM In New Coffee Maker To Lock Out Refill Market
Never heard of them until that article, however they now have commercials advertising the Keurig 2.0. Anyone know if they created that to foil people fron following the Gootube videos?
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This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it

antidirt (profile), 2 Jan 2015 @ 8:18pm

Re: Missing Statistics
In all seriousness, I'd like to see the numbers on who is being censored the most. Of course, we'll never get that kind of transparency. Heck, Mike cannot even admit to how desperately he tried to censor me the summer before last. Good times.
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That Anonymous Coward (profile), 2 Jan 2015 @ 8:37pm

*stares at the list*
So I need to try my hand at writing so I can dominate Mike in all the categories this year.
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techflaws (profile), 2 Jan 2015 @ 10:05pm

Re: Re: Missing Statistics
Simply because there is no censorship on this page no matter how often you whine about it.

*report*
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Anonymous Coward, 2 Jan 2015 @ 10:57pm

Re: Re: Missing Statistics
Censored? You mean vote-based blocking, I guess? Ahh, I get it -- you want the stats on who the community finds the least interesting and most disruptive. Don't worry, I'm sure you're in the running at least!
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Anonymous Coward, 3 Jan 2015 @ 3:35am

I read all the articles from the main page and only click through if I want to read the comments. Does clicking to "expand" the article count towards pageviews, or is it only when I click through to the article? Just curious. I love the fact that I don't have to click on each article.
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Anonymous Coward, 3 Jan 2015 @ 4:39am

Re: Re: Re: Android haha... crash.. .haha...
How much memory does it have?

Not only can cheapo tablets be unstable, but they also can have not enough memory. Modern web pages can use a lot of memory (and you don't have defenses like NoScript or ad blocking), so the browser runs out of memory and is killed (or the whole operating system runs out of memory and kills the largest app around).

You might be able to find the real cause with logcat (either enable debugging mode and watch it tethered to a computer, or install alogcat and use it to take a look at the logs soon after the browser crashed).
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Anonymous Coward, 3 Jan 2015 @ 4:53am

Re:
Thank you for your insight Mr Ford. I'm sure His Worship John Tory is glad to see you've left town.
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Mike Masnick (profile), 3 Jan 2015 @ 5:24am

Re:
Does clicking to "expand" the article count towards pageviews, or is it only when I click through to the article? Just curious. I love the fact that I don't have to click on each article.

No, these stats only look at those who clicked through on the full story. We could look at adding in those who just clicked "expand" but that would be a pretty big process...
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Mr. Oizo, 3 Jan 2015 @ 10:38am

Re: Re: Re: Re: Android haha... crash.. .haha...
The default for most apps is 16-32Mb. Which is too little. That chrome crashes fewer times has more to do with the fact that it can get more permissions from the OS than other browsers. A bit like internet explorer could also do things other browsers couldn't in the past. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18675557/what-is-the-maximum-amount-of-ram-an-app-can-use has some background on the memory issues on android. On more 'modern' devices, even if your device has 1G of memory, an app has at most 96M. Furthermore, if an app crashes it is mostly because android choose to crash it, not because the app actually had an error.
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Anonymous Coward, 3 Jan 2015 @ 7:05pm

Re: Re:
That's how i read everything too. I only really click through if the story means popcorn for the comments. (that and clicking through the older linked stories within the expanded article).
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Anonymous Coward, 4 Jan 2015 @ 11:05am

Re: Keurig Will Use DRM In New Coffee Maker To Lock Out Refill Market
Before the articles came up I've never heard of them either. After the DRM articles, I began to notice them. Never will buy one though.

I buy coffee by the pound, not by the smaller packets. I use a perk pot because the coffee doesn't get stale, and it doesn't burn.
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Anonymous Coward, 4 Jan 2015 @ 11:57am

Re: Re: Missing Statistics
Unfortunately you're still posting and I don't see your comments being deleted so apparently he wasn't trying that hard.
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Anonymous Coward, 4 Jan 2015 @ 2:27pm

Using IE
If work would let me use something else I would.
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Anonymous Coward, 4 Jan 2015 @ 2:48pm

Re: Re: Missing Statistics
From antidirt's dictionary:

free speech - forcing everyone to read his vitriol and blather.

censorship - people choosing as a community to save other members of the community from having to read his vitriol and blather unless they really want to.
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Anonymous Coward, 4 Jan 2015 @ 8:43pm

Re: Re: Missing Statistics
You are so boring.
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Ninja (profile), 5 Jan 2015 @ 1:37am

Re: Android haha... crash.. .haha...
Really? One of my phones did get slow over time but then again I have more than 200 apps installed. But the browsers do not crash at all. Apple fanboi with no real knowledge on Android devices or owner of a really low end Android phone?
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Ninja (profile), 5 Jan 2015 @ 1:45am

Re:
That. I had this problem for years in the company up to the time I managed to sneak in a copy of Firefox and Chrome. Last year (2014) they saw their error and now Chrome is the official browser and we can have Firefox as well. Chrome can replace IE most of the time pretty well even for older systems.
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Ninja (profile), 5 Jan 2015 @ 2:02am

Re: Reddit
Nah, Masnick hates copyright so much he puts his articles in the public domain. He'll be out of business in no time you'll see.

Signed: that skeleton over the corner that insists post-morten that the VCR killed the movie industry.
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Ninja (profile), 5 Jan 2015 @ 2:26am

Re: Traffic is nothing
I challenge you to bring Marcus back to his 2011 glory! I kinda miss the troll that had a problem with his musical career. Nowadays it's only "Are you fond of sniffing empty Pringles cans or not? Answer me Masnick! Why u not debate me ARRRRR!" it got boring.
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Josh in CharlotteNC (profile), 5 Jan 2015 @ 6:45am

Re:
Yep, this.

The only reason I have Firefox on my work system is because we have another department that has an internal site that needs Firefox.
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Anonymous Coward, 5 Jan 2015 @ 7:00am

What happened to some of the numbers?
In the past, the yearly roundup has talked about the total number of visitors, and how the number has gone up from the previous year. Indeed, the yearly roundup previously talked a fair amount about the actual numbers (number of discrete visitors, total visits, etc.). Where's the beef!!!
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John Fenderson (profile), 5 Jan 2015 @ 8:32am

Wow
I had no idea I'd doubled the number of comments I made. I think this happened because I moved to a new team at work and the build times for that product are much longer, affording me more time to spout off here.

I am ashamed, though that only 7% of my comments got a light bulb. I'll have to work on that.
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Anonymous Coward, 5 Jan 2015 @ 9:38am

Tor/proxies
Do Tor nodes count as their own "country", or do you just get the node's location? It would be interesting to see those numbers, and whether they've changed after the Snowden disclosures.

How reliable is the city data? Geolocation always shows me as coming from my ISP's main office but I'm nowhere near it.
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John Fenderson (profile), 5 Jan 2015 @ 9:48am

Re: Tor/proxies
"Do Tor nodes count as their own "country", or do you just get the node's location?"

You get the country of the exit node's location.

"How reliable is the city data?"

Not very, as your personal experience has noted. In my personal experience, this data point is correct about half the time.
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ltlw0lf (profile), 5 Jan 2015 @ 10:11am

Re: Wow
I had no idea I'd doubled the number of comments I made.

You do comment a lot, but I always love the discussions. I wonder where I placed, but sadly, we only see the best of the best on the list. No grade-sheet for the rest of us.

I am ashamed, though that only 7% of my comments got a light bulb. I'll have to work on that.

It isn't easy. I thought I'd made really insightful comments a lot more than I really did. We aren't all Dark Helmet when it comes to funny though... (Not even Dark Helmet is Dark Helmet any more...he's not even on the list.)
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