Dr. Conspiracy
I get these introspective moods sometimes, and I ask myself again what this blog is here for. It was originally intended to debunk conspiracy theories about Barack Obama and it still does. What has changed over the last couple of years is my increasing realization that birthers really don’t care about facts, and my increasing respect for the quality of thought coming from some folks on the other side. While Obama Conspiracy Theories will always be a place to help settle arguments around the water cooler, I also want it to be a place where people who want to do independent thinking can find links to information and a place where they can express themselves. This is why you see less “point of view” writing and more “pointing to” writing these days.
While I focus on the comments from a group of regular visitors, statistics show that these make up only a small part of the site’s total visitors; most are from our silent majority, 2318 of them over the past 2 days. Over half of the visits each day come from search engines and links on other web sites and only about 41% arrive by typing the URL in their address bar or using a browser bookmark. Of those arriving by search engine, visitors view 4.7 pages on average and only 3.7% leave after viewing only one page.
So to the thousands of first time visitors, welcome. Look around. Enjoy the features. I hope you learn something that helps you think independently.
Doc – another one to add to the Uglies at the bottom – http://themadjewess.wordpress.com/
I am a regular lurker on this site. I find it very well-written and interesting. I’ve been coming here regularly since Obama was a candidate. Perhaps I have a particular interest in the psychology of conspiracy theorists. I find their particular version of non-rationale perversely fascinating.
Of course, ultimately, I think such thinking comes down to someone making up his/her mind before weighing evidence. Then, confirmation bias helps out along the way.
I mainly don’t post because it seems someone has already posted my thoughts.
My hats off to Dr. Conspiracy as well as all the regular posters around here. Your perseverance and indefatigable willingness to answer and answer and answer again amazes me.
How does this compare to regular amounts of visits? Is it more since Trump has brought the controversy to the forefront.
Bob
I observe that for some time the site has been serving around 10,000 pages a day and this was the case through the third week in March, when traffic started picking up each week thereafter with the week ending April 16 averaging 16,000 pages per day. That is, the number of pages served per day has grown 60% over the past month. The peek day was April 12, when we served just over 20,000 pages.
It is plausible that all the media coverage of Trump has led folks to type “obama conspiracy theories” in a search engine and end up here (the number one site on Google for those search terms). On the flip side, though, “Trump” does not show up as a search term on my statistics.
I’m not sure what all that means. I have installed some new tools for analyzing traffic, but I only have 3 days data — not enough to tell anything.
This of course is anecdotal but along with confirmation bias bigotry, close-mindedness and fear seem to play a pivotal role in driving many birthers to keep trying to convince anyone of their convoluted lies and ridiculous scenarios . . . over and over and over again.
I had commented earlier that Donald Trump’s dalliance with birtherism likely boosted traffic to my web site; however, I’m not breaking all-time high territory. Pages served this month are about the same as May of 2010. Check out this graph for the past year. And yes, it does look like some kind of an exponential curve in 2011, but it’s just a few data points.
Interesting. I wonder what the May 2010 spike was all about… Manning’s circus trial EPIC FAIL, perhaps?
Anything is a straight line when plotted on log-log paper.