Well, it is the fourteenth birthday of our site. And maybe, like any other teenager, this site is a bit insecure about itself. After all, its not very popular, and it doesn't have the flash and sparkle of so many of the other kids. But I have a pretty good case for E2 that it is doing okay:
http://buzzfeedminusgifs.tumblr.com/
This is a blog hosted on tumblr that takes the image heavy articles on buzzfeed, a popular purveyor of listicles, and removes the pictures. What is left is a collection of sentence fragments upon a barely definable topic. And yet every one of those Buzzfeed articles will be read by thousands of people within hours of being published, mostly bored people clicking links on their facebook page. Did I say this was supposed to make us feel better? That a series of animated gifs adorned with sentence fragments is what the internet loves while our literate, nuanced writing gets ignored? Okay, maybe that doesn't make you feel better.
I am on a lot of internet sites. I like the social networking game, although it gets wearing sometimes. But currently, when I need to broadcast my feelings and opinions, I have recourse to the following forums:
...all of which I use for different things, and some of which can be quite useful. But I don't stick around here on E2 out of sentimentality. I am on here because there is no better forum for expressing myself online. There are places that are quicker and where I will get more of a response, but E2 is still technically and communitywise, the best way to discuss things.
I think there should be more people on E2. Not as a moral judgment, it is just surprising to me that a unique site like this isn't drawing more people. I have a form of Drake Equation for how many users should be on E2. First, you take the worldwide pool of internet users: probably around 2 or 3 billion. But we reduce that down to people who have regular, good internet. Maybe a billion. Maybe 500 million of those people are native English speakers (since this is an English language site). Now of those 500 million, maybe 100 million of those people are "contributors" to the internet, people who want to create content in some way. Of those 100 million, maybe 20 million want to create content seriously: write something that has some type of structure or review required, as opposed to writing comments on youtube videos. Of those 20 million who want to create content, many are going to look for specific channels: they want to write about souping up their Honda or digital photography or a specific hobby that gets discussed on a specific message board. But still, even using these numbers, there must be one million possible people who have the skill and desire to write on here, and have something they just need to tell the internet about: a favorite movie or book, a skill or hobby they have, or some local tradition or political controversy. There are a lot of opinionated people in the world, so why aren't they here?