The Most Active Threads of the Past Week

Today I'm going to look at the most active threads throughout the last week, rather than just those from yesterday. I am probably getting into broken record territory with my repeated mentions of how different my personal interests are from the most active topics on DCUM. But this divergence could not be better illustrated than by the two most active topics from the past week.

The thread with the most replies during the last week was titled "Queen Elizabeth Funeral" in the "Entertainment and Pop Culture". The thread with the second most responses was "Queen of E's funeral fashion" in the "Beauty and Fashion". In terms of views rather than responses, these two topics simply swapped places. No other topic came close be either metric. Of course this interest is somewhat understandable given the tremendous press coverage the death and funeral of Queen Elizabeth II received in the US. But, as I have mentioned before, British Royal Family topics receive an unusual amount of attention on DCUM even in normal times.

As is normally the case, thread engagement was driven in part by controversy. But where the differences that cause conflict in many DCUM threads frequently involve important issues that may impact health and wellbeing, the controversies of these topics mostly centered on who stood where or who wore what. I envisioned users holding Pantone swatch cards to their computer monitors in order to evaluate the color choices in clothing. Who held or didn't hold someone's hand took on significance similar to that of the discovery of fire.

Two health related topics did see significant engagement last week. One, "Please stop sending sick kids to school!" was originally posted in the "Infants, Toddlers, & Preschoolers" forum but I moved it to "Schools and Education General Discussion". The second, "Covid is over , according to Biden, move on people" in the "Health and Medicine" misrepresents comments made by President Joe Biden. Biden didn't say that "Covid" is over but rather "The pandemic is over". He went on to say, "We still have a problem with Covid." Had I seen this thread early on, I probably would have removed it due to the false portrayal of Biden's remarks. But now it is 16 pages and, I assume, the correct quote has been posted.