Giveaway of 70 L&F TTC Hey Linear Switches
This post is a placeholder to announce the giveaway and share some stats of the giveaway questionnaire.
Giveaway Details
I’m giving away 70 L&F TTC Hey Linear switches. Interested parties can fill the form located at: https://forms.gle/eQRmZyVTPJG13z4Q6 to enter the giveaway. Giveaway results and other stats will be posted here at 22:00 hours on February 2nd. I will also cover the shipping cost and the recipient should reside within India only.
Insights of the Questionnaire
As part of the giveaway, participants had to fill a simple questionnaire that aimed at understanding the preferences and gaps of the Indian Mechanical Keyboard Scene. In the interest of the community, I’m providing some insights and statistics at an aggregate level without revealing individual identities (except the winner). I really hope our wonderful vendors can construe one or two things from this writeup, and this in turn, helps enthusiasts like me as well.
Participants
I would like to thank all the entrants of the giveaway for answering all my questions. I was also overwhelmed at seeing more than 150 genuine entries. Apart from a couple of them, I believe everyone answered the questionnaire sincerely. Apart from Discord and Reddit where Indian mechanical keyboard communities exist, I also wanted to provide an option for people to enter with just an Email ID.
Even though a majority of the users were from Discord, a sizable 1/5th of the users preferred Email mode as well. I didn’t delve into finding out if the Email entries were proxies of Discord and Reddit. Still, looks like Discord remains the most effective platform to disseminate information on Mechanical Keyboards.
Switch Preferences
I always thought that the vast majority of the community was equally split between Linears and Tactiles with Clickies forming a non-significant minority (no disrespect to Clicky users, as my first ever switch was a Cherry MX Blue). I was surprised to see that my assumption of a parity between Linears and Tactiles was completely wrong.
An impressive 65% of the choices were Linears, which comprised of silent and long poles as well. On the other hand, only 30% of the choices belonged to Tactiles, which included the long poles also. Finally, ~5% of the choices belonged to Clickies.
Spring Weight
When I started this hobby back in 2017, I used to reject a switch based on its spring weight. This was the main reason why I didn’t try Cherry Blacks for a long time. I can clearly feel the winds of change in this regard as Hobbyists have started to buy the switch based on its housing and then swap springs with their preferred ones.
The choices made in the spring weight category closely resembles a Gaussian Distribution. Close to 76% of total participants chose either the 55-60g or the 61-65 grams, with the preferences split right in the middle between them. Similarly, close to 22% entrants chose either the less than 55g or the 66-70grams, with exact affinity between them. Clearly, the range of 55-65grams is the most preferred one. I also want to give a shout out to those 2% of the population who have great muscles in their fingers to type on greater than 70 gram springs.
RGB Lighting
Personally, I’m neither a fan of the RGB nor I find it an annoyance as I can turn it off at will. I anticipated a similar response for this question. But to my surprise, half of the respondents preferred RGB, 39% of them saying doesn’t matter (my category) and the remaining 10% not preferring it. No wonder, some good boards still come with RGB capabilities.
Changes Required in this Hobby
I believe that this hobby is not just about posting eye catching builds, nor this is about sporting fancier keycaps. This requires time, money and dedication to be able to get something out of it. From my own personal experience, I have and continue to face a lot of hardships both with products and people. I wanted to understand and see how my fellow hobbyists feel about the current state of the hobby and if it requires any change. So, I included an open question at the end to allow the participants to express their thoughts on the changes that they wish to see in this hobby.
This question garnered a variety of quality responses and after reading them, I could relate to each one of them. Here is a word cloud of the responses.
I could make out three important themes from the responses:
Instock Availability and long GB wait times: Probably the Achilles heal of this hobby. There is just not enough instock boards and premium keycaps. I won’t even talk about the GB wait times for some Keycaps.
Budget Constraints: Affordability is not the strongest suit of this hobby, and clearly people called out the expensive prices. Also, many asked for affordable DIY kits to dig deep in the hobby.
More Local Vendors: More vendors means we get to enjoy variety in products and brings about healthy competition among them.
Giveaway Winner 😇
I never envisioned this giveaway to be this successful. Thanks to all the participants once again. To select, the winner, I ran a sampling algorithm which chose one entry at random. Here is a video of the same:
Congratulations to aditya#3333 (Discord) on winning the giveaway 🙌. You will be contacted soon for further formalities and delivery.
“To give pleasure to a single heart by a single act is better than a thousand heads bowing in prayer.”
― Mahatma Gandhi