The Really Unpleasant Computer Problem viewed by flood

[buster]

         94,135

That's the number of views for the unpleasant computer story, which is a totally unrealistic number. That's almost a thousand a day.

And it's only in second place behind a forum started by BusterE, "The Fallout from Covid 19", which is rocketing ahead for some reason. I read the Covid thread this morning, and it is a good look back at the start of the whole thing. It ran for about a month with quite a few ideas, and Jason added a new post in March I believe.

Still, the popularity of both is unexpected.

Maybe reality has no part to play in the virtual world. I still suspect aliens.

[buster]

This is an insert into this thread because of an unusual event taking place as I type.

The 100,000 views barrier is going to be broken this evening by a dark horse breaking into the lead.

The "Fallout from Covid 19" has surged from behind out of nowhere, well ahead of "The Really Unpleasant Computer Problem", which should reach the magic number about next midweek.

Strange things happening on the Peterborough Linux site.

[buster]

'The Really Unpleasant Computer Problem' reached 6 digit numbers in its views overnight.

[ssfc72]

Nice going! NetFlix will probably make a movie series, based on it. :-)

[Jason]

Nice going! NetFlix will probably make a movie series, based on it. :-)

Or Buster will.

[Jason]

So that will be Jason, Bill, Mike and Harry (sort of) will get a free coffee and a sweet. I'd also like to treat anyone on the list that included those who contributed to the story and helped to make it better.

While we post the most, more members do post nowadays. Credit where credit is due.

[Jason]

The "Fallout from Covid 19" has surged from behind out of nowhere, well ahead of "The Really Unpleasant Computer Problem", which should reach the magic number about next midweek.

I expect the COVID thread surged because I put a new post there recently. Google (and other search engines) put a lot of value on the "freshness" of pages.

[Jason]

That's the number of views for the unpleasant computer story, which is a totally unrealistic number. That's almost a thousand a day.

Why is that unrealistic? I've seen the stats for some other websites, and the PLUG Forum gets a lot of traffic. I'm not saying they're all readers. And keep in mind those views are for the entire topic, which spans several pages. It's by page views, not topic views. The more pages in a topic, the more page views it will generate because every page is a new view.

[buster]

Well, the story is receiving views at the rate of approximately 1,000 per day. There is no way these are humans. The whole site is being hammered, and I suspect it's AI bots. That seems the easiest explanation. Here's why I think this is algorithm driven and not human driven.

2018: This year we more than doubled our views to over 700,000.

2019: Here we crossed the million view mark with over 1,300,000 views.

2024: We suddenly got to 13 or 14 times the number of the previous year 2023. Suddenly and unexpectedly, we had reached, unbelievably, over 25 million views for the year.

2025: We are getting over 3,000 million views per month.

This is not readers curling up with a good story.

https://plugintolinux.ca/forum/index.php?action=stats

[ssfc72]

Sort of reminds me of the ominous Skynet from the Terminator movies.

All these bots on the present day internet, wasting enormous amounts of electricity doing useless searches.
These wasteful useless searches are requiring huge server farms which are wasting huge amounts of electricity to run the servers and water, to cool and get rid of the heat the server farms generate.

[buster]

Our whole economy seems to be built on waste and expansion. Well the apocalypse should solve much of this.

This type of exploitation would be much easier to comprehend if we all lived on one small island. The earth is an island of course. And we can't simply pack up and move somewhere else.

[Jason]

Sort of reminds me of the ominous Skynet from the Terminator movies.

All these bots on the present-day internet, wasting enormous amounts of electricity doing useless searches.

Now replaced with AI!

[Jason]

This type of exploitation would be much easier to comprehend if we all lived on one small island. The earth is an island of course. And we can't simply pack up and move somewhere else.

It's because no generation thinks of the next. Indigenous people have this concept of thinking seven generations ahead. The best we seem to be able to do is to think of our children (if that). That's why it's so hard to deal with huge issues like climate change, besides the mammoth task of getting every country to do it, is that we're just thinking of our generation. It's easier for governments to kick the can down the road than do something. Look at Carney; we had a consumer price on carbon. Gone for political expediency.

Shush with your apocalypse talk, Buster. I have at least another couple of decades ahead. I'm an apocaloptimist. I know everything is going to shit but I think it'll work out anyway.

[buster]

Love the word "apocaloptimist".