Find counts, streaks and the argument about the numbers

The name is a position

Most sites about a hobby are named after the hobby. This one is named after an argument within it.

“It’s not about the numbers” is what cachers say to each other: sometimes generously, sometimes pointedly, when a find count starts to look like the objective rather than a side effect. It shows up in milestone congratulations, in forum disagreements about power trails, and in the tone people use about caches placed for volume rather than for interest.

It is worth noticing that it is said by people who nevertheless know their own total to the digit. The phrase is not a description of how the community behaves. It is a claim about what would be better, made by people who are not entirely living up to it, which is what makes it interesting rather than smug.

Why counting changes the number it counts

The argument would be trivial if the number were merely decorative. It is not.

What gets counted gets optimised, and optimisation changes production. A community where the visible achievement is a total gets more caches that can be found quickly, placed where they can be reached easily, in series that can be done in sequence. That is not a moral failure of anyone involved; it is what happens when a metric becomes the scoreboard.

The counter-argument is equally real. Power trails and streaks give people a reason to drive somewhere they would not otherwise go, spend a day outdoors, and meet other cachers doing the same thing. A hobby that only rewarded exquisite hides in remote places would be smaller and more exclusive.

Neither position is stupid, which is why fifteen years of argument have not resolved it.

What is in this section

Five pages. Two are about the mechanics of the argument, counts, streaks and power trails, then challenge caches, which are the argument turned into a cache type.

One is about etiquette, which is where the same tension shows up in miniature: what you write in a log, what you photograph, what you give away.

Two are about context. Where the hobby came from, because the original was explicitly not about numbers and it is useful to know what it was about instead. And how caching differs by country, because the balance between volume and craft is struck differently in different places, which is the strongest evidence that this is a cultural choice rather than an inevitability.

Why this section is last

Every other section eventually arrives here. The listing services argue about what should be publishable; the craft pages argue about what makes a hide worth the walk; the safety pages exist partly because volume caching produces placements nobody thought hard about. All of it comes back to the same question about what the hobby is for.

The find count is a property of the software

It is worth remembering that the number everybody argues about was not part of the original activity.

The first hides in 2000 were announced on a mailing list. Finders replied to say they had been, and that was the whole record. There was no profile, no total, and no way to compare yourself with anybody, not because the early community was more virtuous, but because nobody had built the feature yet.

The find count arrived with the websites, for entirely sensible reasons: a database that stores logs can count them almost for free, and showing somebody their own total is an obvious thing to do. Nobody decided that the hobby should have a scoreboard. It acquired one as a side effect of being written down.

That history does not settle the argument, but it changes its shape. The question is not whether to remove something essential. It is what to do about a number that was never the point and became prominent because it was easy to compute.

The arguments that actually move people

Fifteen years of this debate have produced two arguments that change minds and a great many that do not.

The first is what you remember. Ask a cacher with a large total to describe five finds and the ones they reach for are almost never from the days that added most to the count. The number and the memory turn out to measure different things, and noticing that is more persuasive than any argument about principle.

The second is what gets built. A community optimising for volume produces caches that are quick to find and quick to place, and after a few years that is what the map near you looks like. This is the argument that lands on cache owners, because it is about the thing they make rather than about how anybody logs.

What does not move anybody is the moral version. The suggestion that people with high counts are doing the hobby wrongly. It is unfalsifiable, it is rude, and it has never once persuaded a numbers-focused cacher of anything. The phrase this site is named after works when it is a reminder and fails the moment it becomes an accusation.