Why is "...Cthulhu-worshipping madman?" a great question?

Question

Please do not click this link: How do I make my document look like it was written by a Cthulhu-worshipping madman? If your finger slips, do not up-vote.

Wikipedia writes: Cthulhu

So what? What is all the fuss about? Is this really one of the great LaTeX questions of all time? Please tell me why I am obviously wrong when I say that it is below average.

Answer 1

Voting is at least to some extent about popularity: questions which get lots of views are more likely to get lots of votes than those with fewer views. Highly complex technical questions don't attract as many views as more accessible questions, so some of the most tricky and perhaps 'insightful' questions attract relatively few votes. At the same time, some basic or indeed 'fun' questions attract a lot of votes.

Voting is meant to be a 'low cost' activity, which in general means if the question is clear and seems to be answerable upvotes can be expected. In the current case, I think that is probably the case on balance, and certainly this topic attracted a lot of interest. Thus a high number of votes is to be expected: it's not meant to mean it's the best question on the entire site. (I'm not sure how you can quantify the 'best question': for a beginner, some basic questions should score highly, while for the experienced TeX user something much more low level, say about the OR, might be much more 'interesting'.)

Answer 2

Keep in mind that this question is about fonts and typesetting and not about Cthulhu. The title is just catchy and the whole thing can be consider funny (you know, by people which have a sense of humor) and draws in a lot of users and with them votes.

I agree that it's not the best LaTeX question ever, but that's just how voting and popularity works. Sometimes I also get +20 votes for something simple, trivial and/or stupid, but only +3 votes for something difficult but technical interresting which took me 1 1/2 hours to code and test.

Answer 3

To be honest I have no idea. I just wanted to make a cool prop. The next thing I know it is mentioned on metafilter (which I missed), upvoted to heck, and I've got more karma then I know what to do with (which lets me help with the edit queue at least)

Answer 4

• Have I upvoted that question? Yes, I have,, when it was fairly new.
• Do I think it deserves so many upvotes? No, I don't.
• Do I care much? No, I don't.
• Does it matter much? No, it doesn't.
• Should people flood the site with attention-grabbing questions like that? No, they shouldn't; such questions, however, are fine from time to time.
• Should people read and appreciate the technical questions and answers more? Yes, they should, it takes a lot of time and insight to answer those, and this should be rewarded.

(This all express just my opinion on that post.)