Changes

The RationalWiki Moderator Bongolian wrote at RationalWiki: "Over time, RW has clearly become less snarky over time, particularly in 2017 when the Scientific Point of View became favored over the Snarky Point of View when there was any issue over SPOV." <ref>[https://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=RationalWiki:Saloon_bar&diff=2477600&oldid=2477597 Revision as of 06:33, 14 August 2022 (edit) (undo) Bongolian (talk | contribs) (→‎Rationalwiki should tone down on the snark.)]</ref> Historically speaking, atheists have a reputation for having an overreliance on mockery in terms of their rhetoric (see: [[Atheism and mockery]]).  

The RationalWiki Moderator Bongolian wrote at RationalWiki: "Over time, RW has clearly become less snarky over time, particularly in 2017 when the Scientific Point of View became favored over the Snarky Point of View when there was any issue over SPOV." <ref>[https://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=RationalWiki:Saloon_bar&diff=2477600&oldid=2477597 Revision as of 06:33, 14 August 2022 (edit) (undo) Bongolian (talk | contribs) (→‎Rationalwiki should tone down on the snark.)]</ref> Historically speaking, atheists have a reputation for having an overreliance on mockery in terms of their rhetoric (see: [[Atheism and mockery]]).  

   

   

RationalWiki tripled its organic traffic from 2017 to late 2019 in a big way and then various things happened to cause a massive decrease in organic traffic in November 2019 and beyond (See: [[RationalWiki and Google referral traffic]]). [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=RationalWiki Google Trends data] from 2017 to November 2020 indicates that worldwide Google searches for the keyword "RationalWiki" bounced between a somewhat narrow range between 2017 to June 2020 which presumably was due to websites with large amounts of web traffic mentioning RationalWiki periodically during that time (see graph to the upper right in this section). Starting in June 2020, worldwide Google searches for the keyword "RationalWiki" saw a significant decline.  

RationalWiki tripled its organic traffic from 2017 to late 2019 in a big way and then various things happened to cause a massive decrease in organic traffic in November 2019 and beyond (See: [[RationalWiki and Google referral traffic]]). [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=RationalWiki Google Trends data] from 2017 to November 2020 indicates that worldwide Google searches for the keyword "RationalWiki" bounced between a somewhat narrow range between 2017 to June 2020 (The range on a relative scale varied between 67 and 90) which presumably was due to websites with large amounts of web traffic mentioning RationalWiki periodically during that time (see graph to the upper right in this section). Starting in June 2020, worldwide Google searches for the keyword "RationalWiki" saw a significant decline.  

The data does not support the notion that a change from a less Snarky point of view to a more Scientific Point of View made a big improvement in RationalWiki's brand awareness. RationalWiki's brand awareness stayed about the same from July 2014 to June 2020 even though its organic traffic tripled during some of this time period. And then, as noted above, something happened around June 2020 that caused RationalWiki's brand awareness to go significantly down.

The data does not support the notion that a change from a less Snarky point of view to a more Scientific Point of View made a big improvement in RationalWiki's brand awareness. RationalWiki's brand awareness stayed about the same from July 2014 to June 2020 even though its organic traffic tripled during some of this time period. And then, as noted above, something happened around June 2020 that caused RationalWiki's brand awareness to go significantly down.