

Who tweets about xkcd? - thetwoweeker
http://www.thetwoweeker.com/blog/2014/6/30/kkbbwyicx0nwlprkn7yh2edsiwlrw2

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grecy
That looks like data about

People who read xkcd AND have twitter AND feel compelled to tweet about xkcd.

I suspect that's a small subset of the total people that read xkcd.

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rhizome
Maybe the people at "thetwoweeker" only spent two weeks learning logic and
statistics.

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thetwoweeker
you give us too much credit...finals week at our school was only 1 week long

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rhizome
Probably.

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omnibrain
Recently I enjoy Abstroose Goose
[http://abstrusegoose.com/](http://abstrusegoose.com/) a bit more than the
recent XKCD strips. If you enjoy XKCD it's probably worth for you to check
Abstroose Goose out.

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prawks
Seconded, although they're rarely as concise as xkcd.

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jere
Assumptions in this post:

>Who reads xkcd?... In the process, we've scraped 20,000+ xkcd tweets

>Although Twitter doesn't contain gender data for tweeters, we were able to
identify the gender of each user by their first name.

>We again applied fuzzy string matching to match a reference set of time
zones/countries/continents to each tweeter's self-reported time zone.

>We had to make one critical assumption here - namely, that people will tweet
shortly after reading.

>We measured this on Twitter by defining: Popularity = # of Followers
Likability Ratio = # Followers / # Following

The likability one takes the cake though. Celebrities would be popular _and_
likable. So would people who bought fake followers. People who like to follow
a lot would be _unlikeable_.

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thetwoweeker
Phew looks like we generated some statistical controversy here....so re: the
complaints that our sample doesn't actually capture "who reads xkcd" but
rather "who tweets xkcd" \- we hear you. Unfortunately the crux of the problem
is that there doesn't appear to be an easy way to draw a random sample from
the xkcd population, unless you are Randall Munroe or have access to xkcd
traffic logs. Any API you use will probably lead to a biased sample, and given
that there's no physical location it's not like we can check who checks into
xkcd on foursquare either. But that being said, if anyone knows of a better
way to sample "who reads xkcd", please hit is up!

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Dorian-Marie
I expected to see XKCD-style graph, like this:
[http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/11350/xkcd-
st...](http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/11350/xkcd-style-graphs)

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kosei
One of the problems with assuming male/female within datasets is that
typically more females keep their gender information confidential, which ends
up skewing the dataset significantly.

Also it would have been interesting to compare some of these charts to the
overall sample set of Twitter, considering that it also skews more towards
"geek", "student", "developer" as well.

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ugexe
I'm surprised more people don't find xkcd author's obsession with his ex more
disturbing, especially when he makes passive aggressive comments about it in
his comics.

I also personally don't find the formula of 'ha ha some science reference I
know of!' or graphs in comic form to be humorous.

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ecesena
At first I missed the links "Nerd talk" (as I usually don't click on
-potentially external- links). They add quite interesting insights!

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th3iedkid
>>They are fathers, husbands, and software engineers. They love, and they
like. But above all, they read xkcd.

What about female followers?

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tekmate
the "Are they male or female" link is wrong

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thetwoweeker
Thanks for the catch, fixed now

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Infinitesimus
The headline and pitch are misleading (clickbait?). This is an article about
_people who tweet about xkcd_. Which is a combination of people who read xkcd
and people who think "Oh, look at this cool comic my friend showed me. I
should tweet about it!"

It isn't accurate to extrapolate data from such a specific group to the whole.

[Also, privacy badger blocks squarespace on this site, which breaks the
styling ]

Edit: Relevant SMBC comic: [http://www.smbc-
comics.com/index.php?id=3374#comic](http://www.smbc-
comics.com/index.php?id=3374#comic)

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vlunkr
I was going to make the same comment. Not everyone who reads xkcd tweets about
it, or even uses twitter.

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sz4kerto
And?

You could say that the people who tweet about xkcd are not a representative
sample of the people who read xkcd. However, I don't see this as something
absolutely intuitive -- my intuition is that it's a slightly distorted sample,
but should not be _that_ off. I don't see why the people who tweet should have
different characteristics to the people who read.

The thread is full of comments complaining about why the OP took this
particular set -- I don't have too much problem with it. It's a sample, and
quite a large one.

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dragonwriter
> You could say that the people who tweet about xkcd are not a representative
> sample of the people who read xkcd. However, I don't see this as something
> absolutely intuitive

That a sample drawn from a group distinct within the target universe by a
common factor (as "people who tweet XKCD comics" is within the universe of
"people who read XKCD comics") is otherwise representative of the target group
is a point which must be justified when using analysis of the sample group to
draw conclusions about the target group, not something to be assumed unless
there is evidence to reject it.

Because the distinction is, _in and of itself_ , a manner in which the sample
group is _not_ representative of the target group.

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simonw
For anyone trying to make sense of this post in the future, the permalink for
this blog post is
[http://www.thetwoweeker.com/blog/2014/6/30/kkbbwyicx0nwlprkn...](http://www.thetwoweeker.com/blog/2014/6/30/kkbbwyicx0nwlprkn7yh2edsiwlrw2)

(I actually had to view source to find that - it's not visibly linked anywhere
on the [http://www.thetwoweeker.com/blog/](http://www.thetwoweeker.com/blog/)
page)

(stable links are important, people!)

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oevi
A good trick to get this information without viewing the source code is to
simply hit the tweet button ('Share' on the bottom of the page). It will open
a popup window with the static URL of the page as a template tweet. Works on
most pages and without a twitter account.

