I have two, actually. The first garnered a few more replies than the second, probably due as much as anything else to the fact that half of those replies were posted by me.
Anyway, first off, there’s my giant incomprehensible wad of autopsychological rambling crap. Two people seem to have understood it. The rest either think I’m insane, or else they got bored when I didn’t reach any cogent point by a third of the way through and quit reading it.
I thought my thread about the university students who threw a guinea pig tied to a parachute out the window would lead to a few jokes and/or replies. I got one.
If you want a thread to REALLY die fast and get no views, try something on motor sports.
I have twelve threads that got nary a reply. A few I wasn’t too surprised, since I knew they’d have limited interest. A couple were disappointing. Most also had well under 50 views. So sad. But most of those threads are at least a year old. Perhaps I’m getting the hang of it.
I once started a thread asking for 5000 Dopers to donate £1 each so I could be debt free and go uni, which was so utterly crap it got deleted or the hamsters got it.
I once wrote a thread on all the little philosophical niggles that kept occurring to me when posting on message boards, like whether or not a non-meeting board actually consituted a community, and where we were when we posted, and who we were, and what it said about self that we could post on three different boards under three different personas quite easily, and so on. It was well thought-out and I had put at least as much effort into it as I do into course essays. One person said “wow, nice thread”, and it sank like a brick.
Simultaneously on another board I was posting a minor three-line waffle about how I’d always fancied Betty off of Frank Spencer, and that image-heavy, intellect-light thread ran for something like 90 pages as everyone confessed their less commonplace fancyings. Eventually the thread was shot as a danger to the stability of the internet.
The moral is that thread popularity works on the same principle as book publishing. SEX SELLS.
