Happy 9th Anniversary: Another list, and a discussion of the r/ComicPlot archive
Happy 9th! Now, I know what you're thinking. "Posting quite a bit there, ain't ya, Ross?" Yes. I'm on holiday break, I'm bored. Have another list. This time...r/ComicPlot's top 10 list of all time. Well, sorta. No prizes for this one. Well, sorta.
*9 is misleading; I got into it in the top 10 of 2024 post and I'm not going to rehash it here. For those of you familiar, Booberella has elected to add an asterisk to their flair.
This list is very interesting because this subreddit doesn't "archive" posts. That means that when a post's age is older than 6 months old, you can still vote or comment on the post. In other words, you'll get a situation where the most popular post of all time wasn't even a winner in its year. Which is why there's technically no prizes for this one. The poster of #1 is also the poster of #6, which was #4 of its year. OP of #1 is welcome to claim their prize whenever they choose, they just haven't yet.
Anyway, I'll explain why this is "sorta" the top 10 of all time. This list comes from all of the subreddit posts that survived Imgur. If you look at the post dates, you'll notice that the oldest post was from 2020, back before posting images directly to Reddit wasn't the norm.
So. Back in April or May of 2023, when Imgur said no more TnA, I reached out to another redditor who takes preserving the Internet seriously. They gave me a torrent containing all of the images ever posted to the sub. Problem is, almost none of the images had the titles of the original posts. Nearly all of the file names have random hash letters and numbers. At first, I took the time to figure out the sources of some of the stuff in the file and then sent it to the OP's, assuming they were still active. Thing is, it is a laborious process just to figure that out for one post, and most of the OP's I reached out to didn't really seem to care. So, I gave up on it.
Now for over a year I've been sitting on this file on my computer full of shit that has no source, trying to figure out what to do with it. What do you think I should do with the archive? Does it matter?
I personally had a couple ideas: I could once per week do a "Throwback Thursday" or r/tipofmypenis style post using the automod, where once a week you guys can make a game out of figuring out what the source of some of this stuff is. Alternatively, I could take volunteers to help me figure out who the posts belong to and send their posts to them. Or we could do some combination of both. Or maybe one of you has a better idea. I'd really love to know what you guys think, particularly if you've been a long-time subscriber.