15 Minutes of Fame and The Joel Effect 11

Posted by Christopher Smith Wed, 13 Sep 2006 16:45:00 GMT

Last night I experienced my fifteen minutes of ‘net fame. I had submitted my article rebutting one of Joel Spolsky’s comments on Ruby’s performance to both reddit and digg. I watched how my submission performed on each while it was on the “new” lists on each, and it didn’t seem to garner much excitement. On reddit the first person to vote on it voted it down (my best guess is that they were sick of Joel articles) and I got one digg and then dropped off from view. Ah well, I already had strong evidence indicating that most of what I say isn’t of interest to anyone, so this was just further confirmation.

Just before I went to sleep, I discovered the performance problems I was having with Typo, so I tweaked things and watched the logs for a bit, and that was when I noticed that my article was getting a lot of hits, and they weren’t all coming from ‘bots (which is what my logs usually look like). Sure enough, some generous souls had voted me up on reddit (digg never bumped me up beyond the initial digg, which is either an indictment of reddit or digg depending on your point of view ;-). In fact, I was in the top 4 on the hot list on both the main page and the programming subreddit for a brief while (actually, checking now I’m still in the top 5 on the programming subreddit). As of this morning I’ve had about 800 page views of the article from the non-bot world, which by comparison to the usual attention I get, makes me famous.

But that’s not the interesting part.

The interesting part is that when I looked a the rankings, particularly on the programming subreddit, it seems that anti-Joel articles were all over the hot list. In just the top 5 there was my article, one titled Coding Horror: Has Spolsky Jumped the Shark?, one titled Why Joel Is Wrong to say that Duck-typed Languages Cannot Optimize Down To a Single Jump (interestingly the title on the web page makes no mention of Joel), and another by DHH titled Outsourcing the performance-intensive functions.

So, when I said last night that Joel had kicked up a lot of dust, I was perhaps understating it.

Joel has been criticised for running his blog as a big publicity and recruitment engine for his company (to which the rather logical retort would be: “how unusual that an entrepreneur would leverage whatever assets they have, including fame, to help their company!”). His postings almost always get bumped up high on reddit, and his articles seem to get linked from all over the net. So, there is a strong incentive for him to keep posting to his blog.

Observing reddit though, you have to wonder if this produces and an opposing force in the blogosphere: critical incentive. See, by taking on Joel, you get a fair bit of traffic (since I was the Johnny come lately to the party, I suspect some of the other posts have drawn significantly more traffic), you make reddit’s hot list, etc. At this point it’s just a theory, which I’ve dubbed as “The Joel Effect”, but one can definitely observe that Joel bashing has become a bit of sport in the programmer blogosphere.

Now, before anyone comes up with an Underpants Gnome business plan that looks like:

  1. Critique Joel Repeatedly
  2. ?
  3. Profit!

I would like to point out that out of all the page views I got, I got zero AdSense clicks. I checked, and the AdSense ads were highly relevant to programmers, so I think it’s fair to say that programmers filter out sponsored links significantly more so than your average ‘net visitor. I probably could have made more money writing about some totally unsubstantiated rumor about a celebrity, or by listing out the “ten tips for finding the best mortgage”. So, you’re going to have to fill in step 2 with something fairly creative in order to make it to step 3.

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  1. Harry Fuecks about 19 hours later:

    “Observing reddit though, you have to wonder if this produces and an opposing force in the blogosphere: critical incentive.”

    Interesting angle.

    Related to the “Jump the Shark” blog entry, was positively surprised to see that, although the comments http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000679.html amount to the collected gibberings of Rails fanboys, the comments on Reddit were far more measured (http://programming.reddit.com/info/ia3o/comments), the occasional fanboy burp quickly getting downmodded

  2. Ben Armston about 20 hours later:

    You now have at least one adsense click.

  3. Bill Mill about 20 hours later:

    Well, I wrote the “Why Joel Is Wrong to say that Duck-typed Languages Cannot Optimize Down To a Single Jump” title, and in my defense, the article mentions Joel immediately, although its title definitely does not mention him.

    Anyway, make it at least two clicks.

  4. xyz about 21 hours later:

    I can’t even see your ads. I’m probably not the only programmer who has them filtered out either.

  5. Joel De Gan about 22 hours later:

    Joel (the other programming Joel with his fog… stuff, who also happens to live in NYC) has a method..

    1) identify latest buzzword / thing.. 2) bash it, rile up the natives, get inbound links 3) keep pounding it for a while and pimp company 4) move on to next buzzword..

    ruby is the current “wheee!” language. if it was python I am sure he would find something to complain about.

    He has gone off on the term “web2.0” a bunch and all the others.. basically he just needs to be ignored. I have not read anything on his site I would consider using in business myself and I keep getting the feeling that he is only half-informed on things before he starts writing articles about them.

    Most programmer “blogs” can be measured in the amount of code you find on them..

  6. Chandru about 22 hours later:

    Here is another click :-)

  7. Banjaxed about 24 hours later:

    Quote: Joel De Gan

    “basically he just needs to be ignored.

    I have not read anything on his site I would consider using in business myself and I keep getting the feeling that he is only half-informed on things before he starts writing articles about them. ”

    Difficult to follow your own advice then?

  8. Christopher Smith 1 day later:

    xyz said:

    I can’t even see your ads. I’m probably not the only programmer who has them filtered out either.

    Yes, I expect this is very true. I put up the ads more as an experiment than with any dreams of getting revenue. My theory was that programmers in general don’t see/look at ads, even well targetted ones. So far my total revenue is $6.23, which is actually higher than I had expected (probably due to me mentioning the ads in this blog and some kind souls clicking to give me revenue).

    My next step is to add analytics to the system so I can better analysis of the activity.

  9. Following Joel 1 day later:

    The louder a particular perspective is, the louder the counterpoint will be. In the case of Joel, he happens to have a large contingent of fans who hold his perspective as some sort of pure-truth Joeliality, bring forth his positions almost as a “final say”. Thus when he says something that people disagree with, they are more motivated to respond: It’s harder just ignoring the rantings of a madman if a lot of people are listening to them.

    Nothing really surprizing about it.

  10. Christopher Smith 1 day later:

    @Following Joel

    I’m not at all surprised that people have responded in large numbers to his statements. That’s part of the incentive for him to write. What I hadn’t considered is that there is potentially an incentive to be critical of him.

  11. Two 1 day later:

    One click from me too. And another one!

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