Well, this is exciting!

[liv]

Of the 1500 posts I've made over the past 10 years, I had no inkling that yesterday's rant about the PhD system would be the one to get passed round all over the internet. Welcome, regular readers and people who came here via links. Especially the Hacker News crowd; I imagine you're probably the reason why this is suddenly my most popular post ever.

Thank you for responding so constructively, whether or not you agree with my rather bleak slant on things. I think there are things seriously wrong with academia and particularly the PhD system, but my emotions about it are not always as negative as they have been this week. I don't promise I'm going to be able to answer every one of the hundred plus comments I've received, but every one contributes something to the discussion.

I am completely frozen up at the prospect of trying to come up with something interesting enough to make a follow-up post while the wider internet is paying attention. So I think I'll just carry on with the random mix of trivial and more thoughtful things I post here. Feel free to check out some of my tags – the thinky stuff is usually under essay and discussion.

ETA: wow, it's ridiculously difficult in 2013 to find a list of sites that link to a particular post. At least 300 Tweets, though.

Comments

[angelofthenorth]

Yay for you. I had a feeling your post would get read when I saw it.

[pretty_panther]

Well to me it is about time you got some web wide recognition because you make people think, and that is always amazing :)

[foxfirefey]

It's also an opportunity for people to talk on a hot button topic. I don't know about the UK, but in the US higher education is a hot topic because:

* the costs have been inflating to frightening degrees
* ...often because state support of the schools is collapsing
* at the same time, economic collapse is driving people to consider doing more schooling
* at the same time, the advantages of having a degree have been eroding...
* ...but the disadvantages of not having one have been accelerating
* and then you have the exploitation of the university workforce itself, in the form of adjuncts working hard for little pay
* simultaneously, people who got their education in years past don't necessarily understand some of the awkward problems currently weighing on people currently or recently getting one

So an essay like liv's can serve as a focal point for commentary about a lot of zeitgeist anxieties.

[pretty_panther]

True. University as a whole has been talked a lot with England introducing higher fees and Scotland remaining fee-free, but PHDs as such haven't cropped up too much as a topic as far as I am aware.

I just meant in my original comment that Liv's entries are never without a push in the direction of thinking outside of the box and so I think many would benefit from reading her thoughts :)

[foxfirefey]

If knowing where you are being linked to from is desirable for you, I do suggest setting up Google Analytics if you don't have things against it (which I would totally understand). That way, you'd be able to see more clearly where traffic is coming from.

[liv]

Thanks for the suggestion. I already have Google Analytics, and it's telling me that a) there were 60K hits on the previous post in 24 hours *hyperventilates* and b) the vast majority came from Hacker News.

However, what it doesn't tell me is what people are saying when they link to the post. Like, I see that people are being referred from Hacker News, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, LJ, and a long tail of smaller sites. But I can't find out which specific page within those big social sharing sites links here. A few years ago sites like Technorati and Icerocket or even a Google search for link:liv.dreamwidth.org would have brought up at least a proportion of the posts that refer to mine. Now there's nothing, or nothing I can find.

[foxfirefey]

Hrm, try going to:

->Traffic Sources-> Referrals

Then click on a domain listed in the table. Does that give you anything more useful? (It might not for places like Twitter or FB that if I remember correctly funnel their links through central forwarding applications.)

[karlht]

The search "link:liv.dreamwidth.org -site:dreamwidth.org 389934" (no quotes) gets me 41 hits, and most of them look useful. Perhaps that might be a good starting point?

It's a fine essay.

[ironed_orchid]

Datapoint: I saw it on twitter because forthwritten (who has a different name there) tweeted about it. I retweeted that, and then made a separate tweet about it because I wanted to share it on facebook, and retweets don't show up on fb.

[innerbrat]

I understand you must have had a tonne of DWers circling you since that post, but you seem like the kind of person I want to read more about, so add me to that.