» Randall Munroe writes to Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle
Mathew Honan, who did Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle, shares an e-mail he got from Randall Munroe, creator of XKCD:
Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:03:32 -0500
From: “Randall Munroe”
To: mhonan@gmail.com
Subject: Barack Obama (from Randall Munroe of xkcd)
Hi,
Assuming you’re the guy who did barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com:
You should try adjusting the randomizer on your site (barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com) so that it takes you through all the items before repeating one. There’s a subtle probability-related problem that occurs in showing people stuff at random that isn’t sufficiently appreciated.
If you have 1,000 factoids, you know how many you’ll have to show before the reader will probably see a repeat? 38. And when they see that first repeat, they think “okay, I’ve seen most of them.” Even if you write 10,000 entries, they’ll see a repeat on average after 119.
Bottom line, you can make the site much more enthralling if, for each visitor (IP/whatever), you shuffle the factoids and then show them one at a time, so there’s no repeat. This will look almost exactly the same to the reader for the first few refreshes, but it fixes the fact that under the current true randomness, the site looks like it has only 1%-10% as much content that it ACTUALLY does.
This affects a lot of sites, but yours is cute and I thought I’d let you know.
— Randall
September 09, 2009, 4:06pm Comments
