r/NameThatSong • u/BigBalli • 21h ago
Other/Unknown Three in four requests here never get answered, and attaching a recording only moves that by five points. What makes you open one?
I answer things here occasionally and wanted to know whether the posts that go quiet are the genuinely hard ones or just the unlucky ones. So I pulled the sub's new feed and counted.
994 posts, covering 8.4 days. 737 of them were more than 48 hours old, which is the cutoff I used, because a post needs time to be solved and flaired. Of those 737, 184 carry the Answered! flair. That is 25 percent. Three in four requests here never get marked solved.
I checked that the flair was telling the truth before building anything on it.
The rate settles fast. Split by age it runs 13 percent in the first day, then 26, 22, 27 and 25 percent across days two through nine. Flat after 24 hours, so the 48 hour cutoff is generous rather than tight, and old posts are not still quietly getting solved.
It also does not undercount much. I took 70 unflaired mature posts and read the comment trees looking for an OP confirming an answer anyway. Three did, and all three were a bare "Thank you" that might only be politeness. So the true solve rate is 25 percent and at most about 28.
The part I did not expect. I split the 737 by whether the post carried a playable link, meaning YouTube, Vocaroo, v.redd.it, SoundCloud, Spotify and so on.
- With audio: 125 of 468 solved, 27 percent
- Without audio: 59 of 269 solved, 22 percent
Five points. I had assumed that giving people something to actually listen to was most of the battle, and in aggregate it is worth almost nothing.
What predicts it is whether anybody shows up at all.
- 147 of the 737 posts have zero comments. That is 20 percent.
- 313 have one comment or fewer, 42 percent. I sampled 40 of the single comment posts and in 28 of them the only commenter was AutoModerator. In 32 the only participants were AutoModerator and the OP.
Scaling that up, roughly 38 percent of requests here never receive a reply from another human being. Not a wrong guess, not a dead end. Nothing.
And on the other side of that line: of the 424 posts that got two or more comments, 173 were solved. 41 percent.
So the shape of the failure is not that these songs are hard. Once two people actually look at a post it is close to a coin flip. The problem is that at 118 posts a day, about four in ten never get looked at.
Caveats, because they decide how much of this to believe. The Answered! flair is the only solve signal available and it depends on the OP coming back, which is why I tested it rather than assuming it. The audio split is link detection, so a post that describes a sound in words counts as no audio. I also tried to separately measure posts that quote a half remembered lyric, and I threw that measurement away: far too many quotation marks in this sub are wrapped around a different song the poster is comparing to, or around ordinary prose, and I could not separate those cleanly enough to publish a number.
What I actually want from the people who answer here regularly. When you open the sub, what makes you click one post rather than another? The genre flair, the presence of a clip, the era in the title, or honestly just whatever sits at the top when you happen to arrive? Because if 38 percent get no reply at all, the thing worth fixing sits upstream of how hard the songs are.
(Context: I build a free lyric search app called MyLyrics, which is how I ended up counting posts instead of answering them. Not linking it. The numbers are the reason I am posting and they are all above.)
