I deactivated my personal Facebook account over a year ago. I recently reactivated it to convert it into a strictly promotional/networking asset for my music, writing, and art. It was humorous to see a bunch of people on my friends list link the RoK article and bitch about it. It's like clock work how people feel the need to bolster themselves by assuming the authors of these articles are "basement dwelling virgins who live with their parents and can never get a girl." That's generally the go to argument, or they cast armchair threats of violence. I see I've missed nothing while staying away from social media.
I will say this at least: for better or worse the awareness of this site and community is certainly spreading. I never saw links to RoK from my FB friends before I deactivated last year, now I see it often.
I wonder what the total economic value of a viral article like this is. I am pretty unfamiliar with website economics.
The direct impact/traffic, i.e. almost a million facebook likes/tens of thousands of comments/ ??? # of page impressions.
And the indirect impact - how many click on the article, then read other ROK articles, and how much of a short and long term boost does ROK get in traffic?
10k USD direct and 10-20 indirect?
I know that youtube channels get a net of something like 1000-1500 USD per million views.
Also, on an unrelated note, I think disqus should make some changes to their commenting system.
Specifically, to allow for collapsing replies to a comment.
On a thread with many comments, it becomes laborious and annoying to scroll through dozens or hundreds of replies to one original comment to get to the next original comment.
I stopped reading the 30K+ comments on the ROK article due to this.