Monday, April 23, 2012

Uncommon Descent in numbers

Uncommon Descent was started in April 2005 as the “Intelligend Design WebLog of William Dembski”. Since then some 200,000 comments (77 per day) were made to 8,600 (3.4 per day) posted articles.
That's not shabby: I don't think that Panda's thumb (including AtBC) or the discussion board at www.RichardDawkins.net are more busy, though PZ Myers would probably be disappointed by such a low turn out.
But other than PZ Myers, William Dembski didn't intend his blog to be a place where he would get involved himself in discussions and defend his theories, but just a lectern to make proclamations:
while he posted 1588 articles under his name, he made only 527 comments! Granted, sometimes he used the loudspeakers in the ceiling, i.e., he altered a users comment by putting his answer in it, and he is said to use a couple of sock-puppets.
And so Uncommon Descent never was a place to discuss Intelligent Design with its most prominent proponents. William Dembski became quickly bored by his toy, and enlisted fellow creationists/intelligent design supporters to run the blog for him.
Those tried with various methods to squelch dissent while keeping the appearance of bustling activity. E.g., the number of posts exploded over the last year to such a point that a substantial number of them was never addressed by a single comment. Until February 2012, they seemed to have some success, but in March 2012 the number of comments at Uncommon Descent was the lowermost since November 2008.

1 comment:

  1. Speaking of Squelching dissent, I should probably link to the 'banninations thread' cataloguing all of the recent expulsions (we know of)


    http://www.antievolution.org/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi?s=4f955d384c948c27;act=ST;f=14;t=5141

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