We're up to 12,500 users

November 10, 2001 1:00 PM

12500, everyone. Lovely round number.
posted by feelinglistless to MetaFilter-Related at 1:00 PM (17 comments total)

pssst. At 3pm, everyone is going to stand up and walk out of the classroom. Pass it on.

If you're planning another 1142, don't you think it's better that they happen spontaneously rather than being announced beforehand?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 1:28 PM on November 10, 2001

not to not accuse feelinglistless of being a troublemaker, but 12500 is also the exact number of MeFi members right now, is it not?

(when I was in the 7th grade, we tried doing the book dropping thing to a substitute english teacher, but nobody did it....)
posted by epersonae at 2:02 PM on November 10, 2001

... also the exact number of MeFi members right now, is it not?

Exactamundo ... I was commenting on our ever growing band ... hey everyone ...

(once before a Maths lesson we turned everything in the classroom to face the opposite way and moved the teacher's desks and blackboard to the back. The teacher entered and took the class as though everything were normal ...)

Actually another 1142 doesn't sound like a bad idea ... especially if we've all got time to prepare, you know make costumes, cook some Gumbo and pancakes ... pity the party at No 12500 has been shut down by the police ...

posted by feelinglistless at 2:19 PM on November 10, 2001

ha! I thought you were planning an upcoming thread hijack. my bad.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 2:24 PM on November 10, 2001

Matt -- have you thought of renting out threads to users as extra blogging space -- I'm sure there's some damn good real estate in here somewhere ... you can see the classified advertisement:

Poetry thread with a view of the seasons, available now to aspiring writers. Attractive spot with inspiring prospects. Loft conversion and fitted kitchen. Low price for quick sale. Apply ref 11100.
posted by feelinglistless at 2:56 PM on November 10, 2001

There was some user, back around thread 11500 or so, whose user number almost matched the thread number he posted. It's another meaningless stat, but I wonder if the user # of the poster has been the same as the thread number before.
posted by gluechunk at 3:31 PM on November 10, 2001

wait until it is millions
posted by clavdivs at 4:05 PM on November 10, 2001

If it were possible to take the Wayback machine back beyond the shimmering veil that is thread #19, I suspect #1 thread may have been created by user #1.

This is, at best, apocryphal.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 7:09 PM on November 10, 2001

Yeah. what's up with that shimmering veil, anyways? It that like 10^-43 seconds? It always kind of seemed that way to me...
posted by j.edwards at 7:29 PM on November 10, 2001

That's like, a eighth of the way to a million, or something.
posted by MonkeyMeat at 8:53 PM on November 10, 2001

And on the first thread, The Prime User declared : "Let there be linkage!"

And there was linkage.

And it was good.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 10:56 PM on November 10, 2001

first post argument

This argument for matt's existence assumes that each post is caused by a previous post, i.e.: it is a double post. It argues there cannot be an infinite series of such posts and concludes there is a first cause of posting whose existence is not a double post of anything other than itself. There is only one such prime-poster and it is Matt.

QED

posted by signal at 1:43 AM on November 11, 2001

And on the first thread, The Prime User declared : "Let there be linkage!"

I knew I should have used "Noah" as my username.
posted by mattpfeff at 7:01 AM on November 11, 2001

Well, signal, our laws for post generation work fine out here, but once the number of posts gets down to, oh, about 19, we find that we cannot know the exact post topic and the exact number of preceding posts with that topic -- in fact, we find the product of their uncertainties must be greater than a number that we'll call Miguel's Constant (due the "exact post topic" factor). Thus, out normal laws break down at post 19 and conflict with the originality theory. However, there is a theory in the works that says that each post is merely a generic post vibrating at a different frequency, and through additional research we hope to use this to unite our originality theory and our post topic uncertainty theory into a Unified MetaFilter Post Theory. Wish us luck!
posted by j.edwards at 6:20 PM on November 11, 2001

j.edwards: but even if you do manage to create a UMPT, you still haven't explained what happens before post 19, or more specifically, where post 1 came from. What was before post 1? And endless sequence of metafilters, all rising out of obscurity, then suffering runaway growth in the light of some tragic event, then imploding as the mass of users excedes the mass of posts multiplied by C? Obviously, this eternal regression makes no sense, ergo, there must exist a prime-poster.
posted by signal at 10:59 PM on November 12, 2001

sheesh, don't you guys know anything? The post before 19 is a turtle, and the post before that, and the post before that, and so on. It's obviously turtles, all the way down.
posted by mattpfeff at 9:10 AM on November 13, 2001

Only if you accept The Axiom of Choice!

Also, the posts have to be inductively ordered, which most likely isn't that hard to prove, unless we take into account cross-post-linking (like when a certain unnamed thread linked to another, younger, unnamed thread adn that one linked back... Not to mention the .orgs).
posted by j.edwards at 2:24 PM on November 13, 2001