Are zoomers just anemic to lurkmoar? I lurked for a year without posting, and even now barely post unless something hasn't been mentioned in a thread yet. What are they doing just signing up and funposting willy nilly?
Personally, I signed up to effort-post about lolcows who have demonstrable genetic defects or deformities. Instead I have spent most of my logins in recent years making fun of and arguing with lolcow lite retards in the happenings containment sub-forum instead. This isn't a dignified way to entertain yourself, but it's so damn easy to do compared to writing up long and drawn out posts, let alone trying to read up on some new cow-lore from their eight thousand page thread just so you can participate without saying something dumb.
I think this slide into the abyss gives me some interesting perspective here, because I've felt out the changes in the threads over a very long time. I get the impression that the rest of the site is marching on happily while A&H has split off in its own direction, and that the dissonance is mainly from A&H users escaping containment and expecting the rest of the site to simply be more Happenings.
Having a unique culture for each sub-forum isn't a bad thing, quite the opposite, but most of the users who use A&H terminally may have lost touch with the forum as a whole. Meanwhile, some newer accounts that registered just to post in A&H (2021-2022 especially) seem like they never understood it in the first place.
As an apology for taking the easiest road to fun in the least interesting part of the entire website, I have anonymized and tallied the aforementioned most recent 20 posts each from the first 75 users from the top of Happenings down (excluding the stickies). Here, have this graphic to help prove how superior or inferior your own fancy account year is at resisting the primal urge to shitpost:
Jokes aside, the important part is what this data reveals about the "average Happenings user," which is that they spend an inordinate amount of time in that sub-forum (and/or Q&A) while the entire rest of the website gets half their attention at
best. Under the hood, while the final averages around 50/50, the distribution for many years was a lot of 90/10s mixed with 10/90s, indicating that the rest of the site might not wander into A&H that often either.
2013-2016 had a very small sample size, which indicates both that very few users from those years frequent A&H, and that there are far fewer accounts from before 2017 in general. 2018 had 10 users and the highest shitposting frequency of any year that had more than 5 users in it, as well as by far the greatest not-lolcow-related content in total. 2020 accounts were nearly as rare as 2018 and were the most likely to escape Happenings into community related threads, despite having a somewhat low rate of lolcow-related posting.
2019 would have done way worse but I noticed TERFs/Beauty Parlor-goers dropping in to Happenings to make 1-2 posts and buoying up the stats dramatically. Most of their posts are placed in a lolcow related thread by definition, since Beauty Parlor is what happens if you concentrate drama into farming undesirables instead of aimlessly arguing about politics.
Likewise, and I haven't found a good way to measure this, but I noticed while collecting the data that many newer users who are terminally politisperging spent most of their non-Happening posts in either gunt threads or the new catboy deconversion sub-forum, typically still politisperging there too. This was especially common for 2021 users.
2019 and 2021 are at war for "most likely to be trapped in A&H shouting at clouds," with a dramatically higher frequency of accounts than the rest of the years. This could indicate that users of these years have a unique predisposition to Happenings politisperging, or that these were very good years for Kiwifarms in terms of getting new users. Yet either way these years have lower ratios of Happenings posts to non-Happenings posts than most the rest of the years. That may be qualitatively due to the unaccounted-for variation in behaviors that I described for each. In this sample, 2019+2021 users accounted for half of all A&H users.
When the variability and flaws in the data accounted are for, the prototypical Happening user between 2019-2022 will tend to be politisperging around 55% of the time, community posting about 30% of the time, and talking about lolcows 20% of the time, while the 2015-2018 Happening user will tend to be politisperging around 45% of the time, community posting about 25% of the time, and talking about lolcows 35% of the time. This data was collected
while logged out, so posts relating to articles (not otherwise visible) would skew the results
even more towards politisperging.
Even with very favorable conditions, both of the prototypal users aren't very well socialized with the rest of the website and seem to believe it is primarily an arena for talking about current events. The 2015-2018 version at least pretends to be farming sometimes, but it's not only or even
mostly new users that have this problem.
