The Town of Odyssey

It is true that less people are joining the ToO than used too. In recent times, about 3.6 people joined per month on average. Back around 2008, 15 people joined per month on average.

Data collected to discover this finding: In case anyone is interested, here is updated data on election votes

Thanks for verifying this. It makes my day better.

Yep, there's definitely a trend there. Thanks for compiling the data, Moontide - this seems to be an area of interest for you! I liked the random comments, like how snubs knows 2 people who forgot to vote last election.

That wasn't random, it was important information to include because it means the count could/should have been at least two larger. Not knowing that skews interpretation of the data.

It's still kind of random because what are the chances that only one election ever had people who forgot to vote? I know that's happened multiple times before. It's probably happened almost every election, if not every election, and we have no way of knowing or tracking the exact numbers, so to me it's still not significant data. If we knew the numbers for every election, it would be valuable. Knowing for just one election in an anecdotal way actually could skew things more than leaving it out entirely.

It is only noted for a single election because that is the only one where I noticed the contest.

I disagree. I would say that fewer people join the ToO than before, not less. Not that the people who joined post more, and I would agree that activity is dwindling. I think we've all known this for a while.

Moontide wrote:It is only noted for a single election because that is the only one where I noticed the contest.

I have no problem with that info being included as a bonus - I was just disagreeing with bookworm as to what extent it is valuable in the larger scheme of things.

Connie G. wrote:I disagree. I would say that fewer people join the ToO than before, not less. Not that the people who joined post more, and I would agree that activity is dwindling. I think we've all known this for a while.

You are correct that the standard prescriptivist opinion would recommend fewer.

Catspaw wrote:If we knew the numbers for every election, it would be valuable. Knowing for just one election in an anecdotal way actually could skew things more than leaving it out entirely.

I see what you mean, but I'm not sure I agree. Of course a handful of people who would otherwise participate miss each Election. So yes, inflating that number but not the rest doesn't suddenly make the statistics exponentially more accurate. But I don't think the converse is true where doing it inherently makes the rest less accurate. That was only the number we know for sure, there were probably others who missed in addition to that. So adjusting for the number we know leaves the one we don't still present across all the votes to maintain balance. I think. I'm not a statistician. (Perhaps contrary to popular belief )

bookworm wrote:

Catspaw wrote:If we knew the numbers for every election, it would be valuable. Knowing for just one election in an anecdotal way actually could skew things more than leaving it out entirely.

I see what you mean, but I'm not sure I agree. Of course a handful of people who would otherwise participate miss each Election. So yes, inflating that number but not the rest doesn't suddenly make the statistics exponentially more accurate. But I don't think the converse is true where doing it inherently makes the rest less accurate. That was only the number we know for sure, there were probably others who missed in addition to that. So adjusting for the number we know leaves the one we don't still present across all the votes to maintain balance. I think. I'm not a statistician. (Perhaps contrary to popular belief )

To clarify, I don't think it skews things much either way, since it probably mostly balances out in a roughly proportional way. That's why I don't worry about it.

Of course you're not a statistician - how could you be the Town Historian and the Town Statistician?