palordrolap

Instagram and Facebook feeds already work a lot like this. They throw in a few random posts between the ones you’re actually subscribed to see and after a while you’ll realise the random ones are more of the sort you lingered on for longer and there aren’t so many of the others.

The problem, for both the viewer and the content server, is that this technique gets stuck in local maxima, that is, after a while it tends to serve exclusively one kind of unsubscribed content and stands little chance of broadening into the viewer’s other interests, assuming there are any.

From an outside perspective, this is a good thing in a way because it gets that viewer out of the clutches of the content server for a while once the viewer is sufficiently bored, but it’s a bad thing if you’re a viewer hungry for content, and especially bad for the content server who is desperate for that viewer to stay, eyes glued to the site, where they will see more of the advertisements that pay for everything.

That’ll be me fixating on the grammar of one panel and forgetting everything else then.

Nitpick time: File this under “wrong usage of -eth when trying to sound medieval”. That particular usage became “-es” in modern English, and if you make that replacement in this comic (cometh → comes), it’s immediately clear that it’s wrong. “Come onward” would have been just fine, but that, of course, looks far too modern.

I mean, you could read it as being deliberately demeaning or objectifying - she is being a hard taskmaster - but I don’t think that was the intention here.

If she has permission - or dares take the initiative - to use the familiar form of address, she could try “Now, come thee onward!”, keeping both that “th” that was wrong before, as well as the syllable count. Might still be a bit weird in context, but not grammatically.