Friday Q&A

Questionable Prognostication

Greetings, crickets and trolls. Welcome to another edition of the Friday Q&A. I'm glad you took the time to join me again. Each week, I examine various issues that are occasionally of interest to Photoshoppers of Fark.com. The elite cadre of image manglers who choose to push pixels for that site are some of the best people the Internet has to offer. We often wonder what the future holds for our community, so this week I'm going to use the power of my superior intellect to forecast, nay dictate what is to come.

Q: What is to come?

A: Examining the current trend of incremental reduction amongst contest participants would lead one to believe that we will continue to see a decline in entries per year. However, there has to be a point where it levels out. Otherwise we would eventually just be a handful of people entering contests, with masses of empty threads unchristened by any Photoshopper. I have yet to see a contest go live with zero TF entries, and even in low volume threads the Liters always pick up the slack.

Q: What about the current scheduling effort?

A: The current policy amongst Fark's administrators of keeping the contests to a schedule is probably the most ambitious effort made on their part thus far to breathe life into our community. It can be argued that it's a bit too little too late, but I'm just happy to see the gears are turning. I believe that if kept up, it might just turn the tide. However, it's going to take a long time to see actual results.

Q: What will we do in the meantime?

A: The same thing we always do. Either bitch about the decline of Fark or rigidly defend it. At no point should either side consider the points made by the other. Remember, this is the Internet, where opinions do battle on a glorious field of misinformation. I doubt that Fark itself has much to fear, as the community seems to be self-sustaining. Declining percentages mean nothing to me when I can still browse a contest thread and get the same amount of enjoyment as I did in previous years.

That's all for this time, gentle reader. Thanks again for stopping by. I hope you enjoyed this look into the future. Feel free to refer back to it later on to see how right I was. I feel confident enough making these predictions, as we already know the world is set to be destroyed by the Mayan death gods in 2012, if that John Cusack movie I only saw the previews for was any indicator. So we really only have to make it another year or so.

Stay tuned for more certain demise from the Doctor!