There's been a lot of conversation on Twitter and elsewhere as to whether or not the 12/31/21 #Phish show should "count for stats." What the heck does "count for stats" mean anyway? A thread:
At first blush, of course 12/31 shouldn't count for stats. If you look at our internal directive at @phishnet, it says "public performances of only one or two songs" and "private performances after 1991 with little to no audience." Pretty clear, right? phish.net/faq/counting-s…
But here's the rub, at least for me: these scenarios never envisioned a full Phish show, intended to be seen by an audience, watched live by tens of thousands. I can tell you, without breaking confidence, that there is still debate amongst the @phishnet team.
I don't see, though, how we can pretend this isn't a real Phish show. If Phish busted out something like Leprechaun, and then played it again in Mexico, would we really say "last time played, 1993"? That'd be crazy, right?
That got me thinking - what the heck is "doesn't count for stats?" Why is that a thing at all? Why do some performances simply and arbitrarily not count? I understand if you want to record what shows *you've seen*, but in general Phish canon, what happened happened.
Why is a performance at Letterman not considered a performance? Are we really suggesting that Phish didn't debut "Farmhouse" on Conan? Has Phish never actually played Watcher of the Skies? These seem like silly distinctions. And since I write the code, I get to solve this.
I just added a new filter to phish.net stats that allow you to enable or disable the "does not count for stats" flag. You can run stats for any shows, collection, user, venue, etc, and you can include all of those shows. However, this opens up another can of worms.
We track certain soundchecks (e.g. day before festivals) as shows, but others (e.g. afternoon before any standard concert) differently. And there are many things that arguably should be added to be consistent. Lemme make it simple: we're never going to get this 100% right.
For now, you've got the power to use all the data in the phish.net database to run stats however you like. @zzyzx will run his stats on our data but still use the "does not count" filter, which makes sense. His site is for show stats - not trying to be encyclopedic.
For now, 12/31/21 is marked "does not count for stats," and the setlist team will determine if that ever changes, which feels like a reasonable stance for now. And if you don't agree, toggle the switch and run your @phishnet stats that way, problem solved.
With all of that said, I think we can all agree on one thing: if you mark yourself in attendance at 12/31/21, you're doing it wrong. 😂 Happy New Year (and pray for that Leprechaun bustout)! 🍻
This is the filter: 
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
