Vlad the Impala Update: Going Bacterial

[stephbg]

For those who came in late, click here for the story of Vlad the Impala so far. tl;dr: I made a lol and had a think about the nature of social networks. There have been developments since then.



For ease of reference, here's Vlad in all his glory:


see more Very Demotivational

So what happened? Well, for reasons that are not particularly clear, with the following words Vlad was promoted from the wilds of general submission land to be featured on the Very Demotivational home page: "Congrats! Your submission was featured on the home page of Very Demotivational. Other members of the Cheezburger Network voted for your submission to make this awesome day come true."

I don't know how many get this treatment every day, but it was certainly a handy boost to numbers: strangers could find him! And find him they did. To date his vital statistics on the VD site are as follows:

+ve votes: 1237 (92.7%)
-ve votes: 98 (7.3%)
Facebook shares: 297
Tweets: 7
Comments: 23
Added to a collection: 158

I'm mildly puzzled by the conflicting total of 1356 votes on the original page in my account. Measurements of social media penetration are not exactly glowing examples of precision. Still, I reckon that counts as bacterial.

The negative vote ran at about 10% quite consistently as the numbers grew, and I imagine the 98 people who expressed their displeasure were probably mostly Twilight fans. And of course the unthinkably tiny minority who don't think that I and everything I do are hilarious.

There are other stats scattered about from shares, likes and comments on various incarnations of the post on Facebook, but as previously noted they're far too difficult to keep an eye on. In theory those mere 7 Tweets could have been retweeted by millions of users.

*sound of crickets*

Let's forget the orginal sketchy data on FB and those potential retweets. Having been unexpectedly featured on the VD website, I'll use that as the official count. This of course invalidates my original conclusion that it was better to host the image on my Facebook wall so I could track shares, comments and likes from there, on the assumption that all growth would be from friends of friends. Who knew that strangers would find it?

Emboldened by this success I had another go (my last I swear) at posting Vlad on George Takai's wall on FB, but I think he got lost in the middle of a captioning contest. I'll keep an eye on the stats and see if there's any effect after today. Unsurprisingly the rate of new hits dropped noticeably over time as Vlad's position slipped gradually page by page from home. I think his run is probably done, but really who knows? Maybe there'll be a Vlad revivial. If I'm really lucky someone else will claim authorship.

It's possible I did make one slightly viralish mark on the world, as I've seen a few similarly worded VD posters out there. "Still a better romance than Twilight" has turned up as a tag line a couple of times at least. I haven't been keeping an eye out for such things so maybe there's more. Maybe I'm Meme Patient Zero after all :-)

The comments are the most exciting part of all this. It would seems that some people out there have struggles with history (not unreasonably), literature (fair enough), animal recognition (hmmm), the reality of vampires (hello), and the nature of puns (sigh).

This is one of my favourites:

"Thats supposed to be Vlad the Impaler, not some stupid car"

I don't know where to start on the wrongness of this. Sure, there's such a thing as a Chevy Impala, but I'm pretty sure the animal came first. Most commentFail came from protests that Vlad the Impaler was "not a real vampire".

"Vlad the Impaler wasn’t a vampire…"

to which one hardy soul responded:

"Damn right he wasn’t, but Americans are too ignorant of Romanian history to know any better."

I wonder if I'm supposed to be the ignorant American in question here?

There remains a certain confusion over who's real, who's the vampire, and who's on first:

"The famous Dracula vampire that you know was not Vlad (although he did go by that nickname). The vampire Dracula was inspired by and named after him."

Oh what fun. Sadly the most earnest arguments as to the nature of humor and why this Just Wasn't Funny (from one Facebooker explaining to another who'd shared the image) are lost in the mists of time. Not impossible to locate (and I'd thought I'd done a screen capture but it appears not), but to demonstrate the intractability of Facebook as a data storage and retrieval system, to track this down again I'd have to:

1. Identify every wall where Vlad was originally posted by me. (I suppose it's possible that the FaceBook API includes tools for tracking particular items posted by unknown users, but that's a hell of a search. Google Analytics might do it, but only for public posts.)

2. For each wall, page back in time to where the post was made. (Perhaps not quite so difficult once Timeline is everywhere.)

3. Follow each Share and Share of Share to reach all the comments. (Be horrified by The Stupid.)

So, Very Demotivational stats it is.

At least I managed to restrain myself from feeding the trolls or explaining the joke to strangers, even though I had already made a handy guide to understanding Vlad.

So, what have we learned?

* Blind chance plays a very large role in whether your message survives to swim in the social media sea.

* Any statistics reported for social media penetration are likely to be in the ballpark of "bullshit".

* People are stupid^.

* Unless you have a good reason to, don't read the comments.


(^) Not the ones I know, obviously.

Comments

[drhoz.livejournal.com]

wow

[stephbg.livejournal.com]

Wow how?

[drhoz.livejournal.com]

the comments. that XKCD suggestion of a computer virus that plays all comments as anaudio file before you post them seems like a better idea every day

[bunny-m.livejournal.com]

The internet: It's a dogmeme eat dogmeme world out there.