Comments on: Threadless Numbers: A Quantitative Exploration of the Nature of an Online Community

By: Joe

Joe — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 20:47:47 +0000

Thanks for your comments, Troy! Remember that my data and research is now four years old, so probably doesn’t reflect the current state of Threadless’s community. It would be interesting if somebody did similar research and compared it to my findings.

By: Troy

Troy — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 13:34:55 +0000

This is very interesting data but it really only allows for a lot of speculation because one has to assume that Threadless is truthful about scores and how it determines prints.
I have seen recently an example of 2 designs (1 by an alumnus and 1 by a non winning submitter) that were identical and submitted at exact same time. The alumnus scored half a point higher which is fairly significant. It was so obvious that they were identical works so i was curious if someone was trying to see if the theory of alumnus scoring higher was true. I have always thought it was.
To be honest…i think Threadless isnt a community of artists but more of a club where the “house artists” and regular winners help each other out. Sure, new artists get printed but way more regular alumnus (who many work for threadless) get consistently higher scores and prints and not necessarily with better designs or ideas.
I dont think Threadless is honest in its public claim of prints by the people, unless those people are its paid members (employees) or faithful followers who are still hoping to get printed.
I wanted to believe in Threadless because it seems a great idea but after 2 years of seeing good work get passed over and bad work scoring high, i no longer trust their ethics nor the people scoring. There is just too much mediocre designs by winning artists that that rarely get bad scores. They cant all be gems…but the “community” seems to overlook that and give them good scores anyway
I appreciate your analysis and it touched on some areas that i have always been curious about too. Thanks

By: Joe

Joe — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 17:26:01 +0000

Hi Mike,
I’m glad you enjoyed my analysis! I’d bet the Threadless folks have better data that they automatically scrape from their site. I’m sure somebody else could write a script to do the same thing, but I don’t have the technical skills. I would be very surprised if data from the past 6 months fits the data that I collected over 3 years ago, so I’d be happy if somebody wanted to do an updated analysis!

By: Mike

Mike — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 12:17:48 +0000

I enjoyed reading as someone trying to to be printed. I did notice that my last design (Downtown Threadless) would be a bit of an outlier in your data set. (3.26 Score, Just under 60 comments). It didnt print and I just redesigned and resubmitted [hence my sudden interest in scoring]. Anyway, this is the only data i have found on Threadless submissions which is based on any data whatsoever… I wish there was more info like this out there.

By: Justin

Justin — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 06:55:24 +0000

Really great stuff! As an amateur Threadless competitor, this information is really interesting to me.