Spare Words Here

Hey @hotdogsladies, what’s that you’re gloating about? What with your big words, your sexy Raymond Carver jokes, and those torrents of resulting stars, you must think you’re pretty funny.  With your whole “I can -own- favrd whenever I damn well want to” attitude and billions millions hundreds of thousands nearly 30 thousand followers, I bet you spend at least 24 hours a day intoxicated by the power of your comedic reach.

Yeah, well, not so fast.

Consider your 30,000 followers compared to my 600. That gives you a 50X advantage on favrd right out of the gate, making favrd a more effective measure of how many followers you have than of how funny your tweets are.  But mann, we already know how many followers you have, and we’re not impressed.*  If we wanted to be impressed, we could visit your Twitter page and oooh and ahhh over how many followers it claims you have.  30k.  Great, that’s about the size of Amherst, MA., which I hasten to add is a snobby town nobody ever heard of before now.  Well, maybe it’s where you should go live.  But before you do, consider this: Favrd would be a more interesting and accurate measure of funniness of a tweet if it scored by dividing a tweet’s number of stars by the number of people following its author.  That would provide a sort of funniness index which virtually all of us** would find more interesting.***

Here’s how it would change the results of a recent couple of tweets:

Yours (from today’s front page):

90% of all self-help is Buddhism with comfortable chairs and a service mark.

hotdogsladies (Merlin Mann) from SF

6 hours, 37 minutes agoView original

34

Mine (oh, you’ll find it on, say, page 4):

Stuffed cabbage is miraculous in that it can produce warm winds that can simultaneously heat a house, kill the mice, & send the guests home.

texburgher (Geoff Barnes) from Pittsburgh

20 hours, 31 minutes agoView original

13

On the surface, you look pretty funny.  But let’s apply my formula and see how things shake out.  I think we’re in for a real treat.  Well, at least I am.

Yours (not even on the leaderboard, now that it’s scored fairly):

90% of all self-help is Buddhism with comfortable chairs and a service mark.

hotdogsladies (Merlin Mann) from SF

6 hours, 37 minutes agoView original

34/30,000 = .001134

Mine (#1, page 1, all-time best, compared to yours):

Stuffed cabbage is miraculous in that it can produce warm winds that can simultaneously heat a house, kill the mice, & send the guests home.

texburgher (Geoff Barnes) from Pittsburgh

20 hours, 31 minutes agoView original

13/600 = .02167

Do you see that difference!?  When we adjust the scores to remove the unfair advantage conferred to you by how many more followers clearly follow you than follow me, your tweet gets .00134, compared to my crushing .02167.  As it turns out, my tweet is 16.17X MORE FUNNY THAN YOURS.  And that’s a scientific FACT.

So think about that.  Let it sink in.  Because you’re going to have to step it up and be a lot funnier if you want to continue to compete.****