SDN's relationship with SB and SFJ

[Jedi Master Spock]

Darth Wong: 2.3% / Admiral Kanos: 0.09%

This thing that I posted a while back got me thinking.

The Darth Wong account has been active for 2,562 days. It has been used to post 65,400 times. The Admiral Kanos admin account has been used to post 2,530 times in the same period.

In addition, Mike Wong seems to have been a member of this community where he posted 2300 times. And his profile in the Total War forums tells us that he posted there 4,000 times in a little over eighteen months of activity.

In other words, in the last seven years he has posted about 74,000 times in these three forums. Supposing that each of these took him a minute in average (something I would only believe if he happens to be Wally West in disguise), he has devoted over fifty complete days of his life to this activity. If it takes him five minutes in average (more realistic assumption, although probably still conservative), this figure jumps to the best part of a year or roughly 10% of his time for the last seven years. About two and a half hours a day.

Frankly, that's a lot of free time spent in front of a screen for someone who has a full time job and an active family life to deal with. Particularly because this doesn't include time spent doing private messages, writing e-mails, playing games...

Personally, I'm pretty sure I spend more than 15 minutes on these forums, on average, per post that I make here.

Of course, there's reading carefully what I'm replying to, and my posts are probably on average a little longer, but the thing to remember with posts is that it's a distribution with a tail. I might spend no more than five minutes on the median post, but every once in a while, I write something major that requires a lot of time. There are posts that take two hours to write, and if you have one of those, it takes up as much time as 24 five-minute normal posts.

I can believe that he spends several hours a day online posting on forums. Not a major surprise there.

[Mike DiCenso]

The Darth Wong account has been active for 2,562 days. It has been used to post 65,400 times. The Admiral Kanos admin account has been used to post 2,530 times in the same period.

Holy shit! That guy is averaging over 26.5 posts a day in seven years on on SDN! That's over 10 times what Mr. Oragahn and I are each posting as the top posters here on SFJN in 2.9 years. And those SOBs have the balls to claim that we're obsessed with all of this?

Can you say "hypocrisy"? Good, I knew you could.
-Mike

[Praeothmin]

That's why I try to stay away from "heavy" discussions, where you have to read for hours upon hours of facts, and rebuttals, and do calculations, etc...

I just don't want to spend that much of my time on the net, and I have much better activities to spend my time on, like sports, play-acting, training, social events with friends, etc...
When you add my job, and the fact that it's where I post from the most (so I try to not take too much of my Boss's time), you'll understand that in the last 3 years here I posted less then 2000 times, and that I probably posted around 4000 times total in the last 7 years on all the forums I've been to...

:)

[ILikeDeathNote]

In addition, Mike Wong seems to have been a member of this community where he posted 2300 times. And his profile in the Total War forums tells us that he posted there 4,000 times in a little over eighteen months of activity.

The phpBB community appears to really be just that - a phpBB community, or, in plainer terms, a message board for people who themselves have message boards specifically using phpBB software, so this is not surprising. What I'd really like to know is how the rest of the community regards him, though that's not really my business to know.

And of course the Total War forum is the official forum for the Total War series of video games.

Frankly, that's a lot of free time spent in front of a screen for someone who has a full time job and an active family life to deal with. Particularly because this doesn't include time spent doing private messages, writing e-mails, playing games...

It's quite possible that much of his time spent doing his "job" is in fact spent as personal time on the internet. When I had worked for a local city government, this is pretty much what most people did.

Eh, it's government work after ah :p

[Jedi Master Spock]

Holy shit! That guy is averaging over 26.5 posts a day in seven years on on SDN! That's over 10 times what Mr. Oragahn and I are each posting as the top posters here on SFJN in 2.9 years. And those SOBs have the balls to claim that we're obsessed with all of this?

Actually, perhaps a better point of comparison, if you want to push in that direction, is that the entire SFJ board averages 16.6 posts per day.

The fact that he has much more invested in SDN - financially, emotionally, and in terms of time spent - than I do in SFJ, or G2K does in ST-v-SW.net, is not exactly news. Plenty of indicators of that have been noted before.

It's like the claims he and others on SDN make about education. There's materially nothing to back up the hypothesis that those who agree with him are more educated than those who disagree with him, and the polls even go as far as to suggest the opposite. Similarly, claims that those endorsing opposed views are "obsessed" hinge solely upon saying so loudly and repeatedly.

I don't think it's all about ST and SW though (which makes up a minority of SDN posting activity); it's more about having a community of like-minded people who mostly agree with him and affirm his sense of self-worth by doing so. Being the popular leader of a community is a real rush.

[Mike DiCenso]

Holy shit! That guy is averaging over 26.5 posts a day in seven years on on SDN! That's over 10 times what Mr. Oragahn and I are each posting as the top posters here on SFJN in 2.9 years. And those SOBs have the balls to claim that we're obsessed with all of this?

Actually, perhaps a better point of comparison, if you want to push in that direction, is that the entire SFJ board averages 16.6 posts per day.

The fact that he has much more invested in SDN - financially, emotionally, and in terms of time spent - than I do in SFJ, or G2K does in ST-v-SW.net, is not exactly news. Plenty of indicators of that have been noted before.

That only makes things even worse in so far as his hypocrisy is concerned. Yeah, our whole entire board, regardless of subject is only 16 posts a day average compared to his 26.5 posts a day for his whole time on SDN regardless.

It's like the claims he and others on SDN make about education. There's materially nothing to back up the hypothesis that those who agree with him are more educated than those who disagree with him, and the polls even go as far as to suggest the opposite. Similarly, claims that those endorsing opposed views are "obsessed" hinge solely upon saying so loudly and repeatedly.

I don't think it's all about ST and SW though (which makes up a minority of SDN posting activity); it's more about having a community of like-minded people who mostly agree with him and affirm his sense of self-worth by doing so. Being the popular leader of a community is a real rush.

It's not even the subject, it's just that this guy spends as much time as he does online at SDN, but he and his buddies complain that we're obsessed, and here Wong is posting more times a day than all of us do here at SFJN! That Wong has had a his very own special personality cult is nothing new, either. Getting a bunch of little "me too" types to follow him around and make themselves feel warm and special by hanging off his coat tails has been going on since long before there was an SDN. That's why even now on places like ST.com and SB.com you have his little yapping attack poodles patrolling around looking for anyone who dares to speak out. Darth Servo and Vymple/Leo1 ring a bell anyone?
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

That's why I try to stay away from "heavy" discussions, where you have to read for hours upon hours of facts, and rebuttals, and do calculations, etc...

I just don't want to spend that much of my time on the net, and I have much better activities to spend my time on, like sports, play-acting, training, social events with friends, etc...
When you add my job, and the fact that it's where I post from the most (so I try to not take too much of my Boss's time), you'll understand that in the last 3 years here I posted less then 2000 times, and that I probably posted around 4000 times total in the last 7 years on all the forums I've been to...

:)

You are not normal.

Just a side note btw. I don't really feel comfortable, nor interested much in dealing with what is essentially Wong's life, his private and even professional life outside of his debates and perhaps opinions on real life events.
No matter how much I dislike his ways, I think it's neither prudent nor our business to start digging that deep into how he spends his time.
We're literally suggesting that he may be wasting his company's money and being a bad employee.
We know how that kind of information can have real disastrous implications.

Maybe him and his SDN pals did some similar things to others, but I consider not a model, and it's clearly crossing the line.

[Mike DiCenso]

Yet I shed no tear for Wong here. Considering how many times Wong dug into his opponents' personel lives, regardless, such as the smear campaign he directed towards former Versus debator Graham Kennedy by calling his work place and and so on, I wouldn't feel sorry at all for the rat bastard, if someone did the same to him.
-Mike

[Praeothmin]

The problem is, we don't know where is 1-2 hours a day come from:
Work or family time?
And who's to say he doesn't spend less then 30 minutes a day during the week, and just spends a lot more time on the weekend?

Most people spend an incredible amount of time of their hobbies.
Seeing as how he created an entire site on ST vs SW, and the forums boards, I'd say this is his hobby.

I'm not saying he's wasting his or anybody else's time, I'm saying I personally would not want to spend so much time in front of a computer when there are so many other activities that interest me...
My hobbies have nothing to do with Forums and posting... :)

[Jedi Master Spock]

It's not even the subject, it's just that this guy spends as much time as he does online at SDN, but he and his buddies complain that we're obsessed, and here Wong is posting more times a day than all of us do here at SFJN! That Wong has had a his very own special personality cult is nothing new, either. Getting a bunch of little "me too" types to follow him around and make themselves feel warm and special by hanging off his coat tails has been going on since long before there was an SDN. That's why even now on places like ST.com and SB.com you have his little yapping attack poodles patrolling around looking for anyone who dares to speak out. Darth Servo and Vymple/Leo1 ring a bell anyone?
-Mike

Most of those are also active on SDN now - I wouldn't know how it was before SDN existed, of course, my participation in the VS debate is a very recent thing, relatively speaking. Even now, a mere four years after starting work on this website (it went live about a month later, in August '05) I've gotten quite tired of the topic several times.

I also get tired of talking about how much better we are than SDN, or how hypocritical Wong is. He's not going to work up the combination of nerve and poise required to come and politely defend himself and his views here, and the subject is pretty well mined out by this point.

So I'll summarize yet again: Everything, or at least nearly everything, Mike Wong says about his opponents relative to himself is false, though much of it is true of him. He doesn't display exceptional scientific intelligence, education, or competence; his arguments largely fall flat against the tests of logic and evidence; he surrounds himself with people who agree with him, and works hard to maintain a community that excludes real discussion and any dissent. (Case in point: Here. I didn't have to go far for an example at all.)

This makes him the sort of person I really am not interested in getting to know better. I do already know more about Wong than I really care to, except in those occasional moments when I'm possessed by morbid curiosity about what makes someone like that tick, and because we can't talk about SDN without talking about him. That's because SDN is centered on him very tightly.

Frankly, it's about as hard to talk about SFJ without talking about me, since the community is so small, but I should hope that if SFJ grew to ten times its current size, it would be much easier to have a conversation about SFJ without mentioning me. If all I did was keep people civil in their conversations, and had perhaps an occasional nice set-piece debate, that would be fine with me.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Even now, a mere four years after starting work on this website (it went live about a month later, in August '05) I've gotten quite tired of the topic several times.

Dat iz teH end!!1! :p

Before the sky falls, I have to ask if this forum allows for archiving, so we could avoid losing all this thought material.

[Jedi Master Spock]

Even now, a mere four years after starting work on this website (it went live about a month later, in August '05) I've gotten quite tired of the topic several times.

Dat iz teH end!!1! :p

Before the sky falls, I have to ask if this forum allows for archiving, so we could avoid losing all this thought material.

Before I close up shop, I hope I will remember to do something along those lines.

Really, I see no reason why someone else couldn't pick up running this forum where I leave off; it's not terribly much trouble, most of the time. There might not be a graceful domain name transfer, and there might be some issues for the new admin setting everything up on a new host, but it would be the polite thing to do for those of you who've posted so much constructive discussion here.