Demographic Ranks
In the past few weeks, we received over 200 unique suggestions for demographic ranks. They ranged from “3 kids, 2 cars, and a house” to “Borderline Alcoholics” (actually, likely some significant overlap there). If there’s one thing that quickly became clear from this whole exercise, it’s that the ability to create groups is far more interesting than “demographic ranks.” A lot of the suggestions would make awesome groups, but kind of so-so demographic filters (we’re looking at you, Disco Runners). So, the crowd has spoken and been heard, and we’ll plan to add groups to our development timeline.
Nevertheless, demographic ranks is what we promised, and so that’s what we’re working on. The next step is to pare down the list, since a rank needs at least 100 people onboard in order for it function.
To do this, we merged any duplicates and similar suggestions, and we dropped demographics that had less than 10 members. You can imagine that this was a long, drawn-out, and somewhat painful process for us, because who’s to say that “Soft and Sporadic” and “Middle-Aged Beergut Ultra” wouldn’t make good demographics?
If the demographic you chose has been merged with another or dropped because it didn’t have enough votes, you’ll be prompted to choose again. Note that we will keep the traditional demographic categories including: “Everyone”, M/W, M/W < 30, M/W >30, M/W >40, M/W >50, M/W >=60. The custom demographics that resulted from the merge and cut are (drum roll please):
Runners with kids
Desk jobbers
Marathon Training
Clydesdales
Athenas
Newbies
Students
Just for fun
Trail Runners
Ultra-Distance Runners
Run-Walkers
Couch to 5k’ers
Overcoming Chronic Disease
Redditors
Military
A few notes:
- If enough women hop into any of these groups to carve out a separate group, we’ll break it up.
- Redditors is a weird demographic. We know. And yes, it flies in the face of pretty much everything we just said about distinguishing groups from demographics but, the thing is, there’s just so many of you. You need a home on Smashrun somewhere so, for now, the ranks it’ll have to be.