this reporter has just gotten word that apathy is up
%800 after slowman began talking about the USAT. Seems that instead of doing thier job the board wants to play “FLorida 2000”.
Constant crying and moaning by board members and other parties inculding one forum king have made people swear never to vote and pray for the demise of the USAT and keep things local.
This is Mr. Tibbs saying boo hoo to you and I’ll be out running if you want to join me and have fun.
C’mon, give it up. It’s time to get back to arguing about seat angles, aero theory vs real world testing, PC’s or whether or not Tim DeBoom is great or not.
There are times, my friend, when a wise man goes hiding in an obscure thread that is totally irrelevant. I have sensed that this is such a time, and am trying to do so. As you know, I am incapable of creating short posts, and given the length of the posts in the SOS topics, any response I could craft would be epic. There simply aren’t enough hours in the work day.
If I correctly recall Slowman’s numbers, this forum has about 2000 members, and 50 regular posters, along with another 100 or so occasional posters. So out of the 40,000 USAT members, this drama is being played out in front of only the most deranged, bored, lonely, desperate, and tyrannical triathlete type humans. And most of us do not want to get drawn into it.
Let us not say that we are apathetic. Instead, let us say that since I know that they don’t care what I think, I will save my thought, time, and effort of something far less Sisyphean than the current discussions.
Let us all now pause to reflect upon the Serenity Prayer. Excellent. Now grab your 40.
Let us not say that we are apathetic. Instead, let us say that since I know that they don’t care what I think, I will save my thought, time, and effort of something far less Sisyphean than the current discussions.
I just come here to avoid work…really not that interested.
"If I correctly recall Slowman’s numbers, this forum has about 2000 members, and 50 regular posters, along with another 100 or so occasional posters.’
the forum has 2500 registered POSTERS, and serves a half a million forum pages a month to READERS. so you might want to reestimate the size of the audience.
Kinda of like McDonalds I can see the sign now 
OVER HALF MILLION SERVED thanks for the great website
.
My bad. I thought that you had said there were around 2000 members, but that only around 50-100 posted “regularly”. In any event, if I’m wrong, I’m wrong.
The point of my gross generalization was that this is a relatively small community, and that you are mostly preaching to the choir, since the people you want to get more involved are, perhaps, not here, while the people who are here are doing all that they know they can do. I did what you asked; I got what meager information was available, I voted, and then I found out that the organization appears to suffering from systemic corruption. I know that many others feel similarly disiilusioned by this whole experience.
As far as the size of our community goes, indulge me for a moment.
Assuming that you performed analysis such that you identified the unique IP address of each person visiting the forum every month, then you could have a theoretical maximum number of people viewing the site. (This can be done with simple server log analysis tools.) Divide by 2 to account for the likelihood that many people are viewing from both work and home, and you have a theoretical minimum number of unique visitors. This, of course, doesn’t take into account multi-twitcher households or users who get a new IP address every time they log on.
Looked at another way, out of the 500,000 monthly page views, some of that comes from knuckleheads like me who are viewing 25-50 thread pages a day, every day, and some of that comes from people who might only check once a week or less. If we assume a baseline of 1 post per day per person, then you might have as many as 16667 readers(this is an unreasonably low usage rate). If everyone were like me, at 25-50 views per day, every day, it’s closer to 500 readers. The probable reality is that more than half of the traffic is generated by people like myself, while the other half is generated by a much larger group of less active viewers. I’d love you to prove me wrong again, but I’d guess that you probably have around 2500-4000 total unique viewers in any given month, and these are people at various levels of actual involvement in the sport.
Obviously, I am making quite a few SWAG’s here, but you can easily verify the statistics for your own edification if you so desire, and pillory me if I am, once again, wrong.
So much for my attempt to hide in the shadows.
as to the number of readers, who knows? i’m not yet motivated enough to find out. it might be 2500, it might be 25,000. it’s probably somewhere in between.
my guess is that it’s more than 2500, because that many people have gone through the registration process, and you don’t need to register in order to read. i know from private emails i get that there are quite a lot of people out there that read and don’t post, and when a new person registers it is almost always either:
my unique user rate of the ENTIRE site seems to be about 20% larger than my weekly newsletter email list. do only 8% of all these people read the forum? perhaps. if so, that would dovetail with your analysis. but the forum is such a FUN PLACE! it’s sad to think of all the fun these people are missing!
“I found out that the organization appears to suffering from systemic corruption. I know that many others feel similarly disiilusioned by this whole experience.”
i find that the excuse of the lazy. “i’m just so traumatized by it all, so i don’t vote.” USAT is a remarkably uncorrupt organization. tim becker, val gattis, diane travis and jim girand, along with whatever pro athletes they can persuade thru whatever means is at their disposal at the time, represent a bloc of people who voted themselves an election process designed to cement their hold on power.
but, they’re all good people. other than diane travis, i know them all. i work with becker on a semi-regular basis. girand has done certain necessary things while on the board that previous board members haven’t done, and i’m SO glad he did them.
my difference with them is solely on process. they figure the ends justify a bad election process, for me this is a deal-breaker. i’ll die trying to take that hill.
but they’re not corrupt. there aren’t any traficants on the board. you either have a low threshold for disullusionment, or you’ve got a skewed view of how USAT is really run.
2,500 posters is awesome Dan.
Which number am I? I got in on things pretty early.
If you ever start numbering us, can I be No. 35? That was my high school basketball number. Or No. 12 would be good – that’s Vlade Divac’s number.
Are there any retired numbers? Is there a Hall of Fame? If there isn’t, my first Slowtwitch Hall of Fame class of inductees would be:
And the Orange-Utan? I guess he’s like Pete Rose, banned for life until he repents and writes a book.
– The Big EE
“this drama is being played out in front of only the most deranged, bored, lonely, desperate, and tyrannical triathlete type humans. And most of us do not want to get drawn into it.”
I resent that comment. I am not tyrannical.
“And the Orange-Utan?”
2499 posters.
Haven’t you yet figured out my secret identity? I am HYPERBOLIC MAN! Able to exaggerate numbers by orders of magnitude! Can generalize situations to their illogical extremes. Willingly slams liberals while eschewing conservatives, oh, no, wait, that’s my other secret identity, radical conservative man(also called libertarian man). I suffer from multiple secret identity disorder.
I recognize that my statement that there is “a catastrophic systemic failure” is extreme, however I use such statements in my feeble attempts to get responses that a simple coherent logical argument might not yield. As someone who is not as involved as you, and hasn’t been around as long as you, it is easy for me to start reading some of the USAT related threads and give up. The personal attacks that some people are using(which have become de rigeur), along with the accusations and denials, obscure what the topic is supposed to be. Your priming material was clear enough(and frankly, I applaud your balanced demeanor), but it all quickly devolved, and dude, some of those posts are loooong!
As far as my being lazy goes, as I stated before, I did my homework, I voted, I did my part. You’re now telling me that I need to do more. Well what? Run for office myself? Fly to wherever USAT is based and picket? Call someone? I’ve only been at this for a year and I am more involved than most of the triathletes that I swim with, even though many of them have been tri-ing for 20+ years. That’s not an excuse either, just a simple fact. The reality is that in the grand scheme of prioritizing, following USAT is somewhere below “spending quality time with the cat” but above “spackle the cracks in the bathroom.”
If it makes you feel better, and I know it won’t, I volunteered to help Tom, the guy who runs my Master’s Swim team(and is undergoing cancer therapy), run our home meet this year, because last year he did it all by himself. Most of the people in the club come swim, and that’s it. There are probably 3-4 people who do everything, and everyone else justs swims, and then complains about how poorly run so many meets are. I also have to open the pool and write the workouts when those 3-4 people aren’t there. I’d love to do some coaching for our team, since we have none, but I’m an awful swimmer with little experience(but I know how you should swim!)
I also noticed that New England Masters(our branch of USMS) has basically no staff to do any normal maintenance, or even process membership fees. They haven’t published a newsletter since October. This disconnectedness and lack of participation is far more pervasive than just USAT. It is part of a cultural withdrawal from interaction and participation in activities involving others. Make no mistake: I’m a hermit. But I vote with my ballot and with my wallet, and I will do what is asked of me. God help everyone if you put me in charge of anything, because I run a tight ship, and my bedside manner leaves a little to be desired.
I know that I am rambling as usual, but I hope that some of the dots connect.
Fleck, here!
Web forums are always very interseting, and as Dan noted in another post on this thread, fun. I often wonder two things:
Why more do not participat
Why more “known” people don’t take part - there are so many interesting and crazy characters in this sport. If you think the discussions are involved and engaging now on this forum imagine if some of these folk where in on the game.
I recall when I first stumbled upon the rec.sport.triathlon newsgroup years ago. I thought that “everyone” read it. This illusion was shattered several months later while out on a group ride with about 60 people. Much to my dismay, exactly no one had even heard of it! I suspect that many don’t have the time. I am here frequently because A) I love the sport. B) I love good debate C) I always learn something new D) My job requires that I be online almost all day most days.
As for the apathy - generally, it seems to be something that is increaseing all the time. Ironic that in many developed and democratic countries that people seem to be walking away from the one thing that they can do that can REALLY make a difference - getting out an voting!!
I tease because I love.
“You’re now telling me that I need to do more.”
no you don’t. you did just fine. except you overloaded. you read my posts. i didn’t write my posts to be read, except by SFTriGuy and, of course, me (admiring my own work). but i never meant for you to read them. perhaps i should’ve attached a warning.
jmorrisey, I have about 300-500 swim workouts buried in a box somewhere from my days as a USS swim coach. Email me the yardage and I’ll send you a couple of workouts off the top of my head.
This whole USAT vote thing is smelly. The simple and common sense, at least it seems simple solution, is to null and void the whole election and start over I’m sure it is a bit more complex than that but its a good starting place.
If your on the BOD and you collected votes, I’d like to think your an honest person, but the temptation to lose a vote or three for a competitor is well rather tempting. Any person could and should see this as a potentially minor (sarcasm) conflict of interest. Please excuse yourself from the election and gracefully step down from the BOD for not being bright enough to avoid this huge pothole. If the BOD couldn’t see the faults of this practice then they deserve to be fired for stupidity. IMO anyway.
Desert Dude, how do you feel about being in the candidate’s database that collected your vote, with a tally of whom received your vote?
the forum is such a FUN PLACE!
That’s the point.
I don’t live in the US and I couldn’t care less about about USAT, but boy did I read what you guys said about it! You know it’s damn hard to find a better way to waste time surfing the internet than to “lurk” at this forum the whole day. The great thing is that one gets to read about so many topics that I keep the site open about the whole (working) day, trying to find new issues and new rants.
You guys are definitely a cool bunch, people I’d love to hang with even in real life.
Keep up!