You have to know the distribution of user join dates for this to be meaningful at all.
If there are 10x as many users who joined in 2010 as there are those that joined in 2007, then this graph implies that more veteran users are more likely to post.
> newly joined users post a disproportionate amount on the website.
What is your definition of a new user?
> For me the answer, as borne our in data, is no. I find from ~ 2016 a change in the types of discussions on the site and find that the newer the poster distribution skews from that time period onward the less interesting the discussion becomes to me.
I am curious: Can you elaborate on how such analysis is being made?
It says the number is a measure of users who posted their first comment or submission in 2023. So that, at least, is the correct way to read the graph.
That is interesting! Especially considering the true number of signups would be higher based on users who signed up but have never posted anything. Although we dont know how many are spam accounts that signed up, posted, and got banned.
There are definatly a lot more people now, stuff of limited interest can pull 100 or more upvotes, I guess a better way to compare would be upvotes / active users.
The graph should only count things that have reached at least 50 karma, or even maybe 100 recently.
Im curious, what percent of user accounts are over a year old vs not?
Also, do accounts with higher karma boost up a story more?
Im wondering if the reason why the two lists are very similar is that the old users inherently have a high weight (in terms of number of accounts and karma power) on the normal page already.
Very cool. It'd be interesting to see some kind of influence ratio, such as karma / # of posts, or date joined.
Wonder if the pool is made most of older loyalists or newer upstarts? Seems like people who have been hanging around for awhile, both due to their usual heavy involvement in tech industry as well as if you're around longer, you can make more posts :)
Can you share this analysis across a longer time span?
For starters. There are so many possibilities here that any attempt to even think of a trend let alone what it's caused by, is wrong :) On the other hand: without knowing number of users, number of who's hring posts, when they were posted, location, ...: still really hard to give any sensible meaning to it. Just nice to look at.
Look at it this way; your account is 10 days old and my account is over 1000 days old, so by this metric I'm 100 times "better" than you. In contrast, your account has a karma over 600 and my account has a karma of a bit over 100, so by this metric you are 5 times "better" than me.
The real answer is, the metrics are flawed.
One of the more interesting ironies is the people claiming the quality is declining due to new users are actually new users. Ask PG what he thinks, and you might be surprised.
The dynamics of open groups necessitates a group will change over time as its membership changes. It is unavoidable. But change can be for the better.
I don't know if this is a good metric because Reddit five years ago had 4x as many active users than 9 years ago.
It would probably be an interesting exercise to download the data for all the AMAs and adjust by MAU to see what the actual most popular threads were, but I'm not going to do that right now.
I wish I still had the graph, but someone posted something for their (150k subs) subreddit recently, and it was below 10% old. No idea what sub, or what the source was so, so take this with a pitcher of salt.
> Summary: In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.
The article is from 2006. Given all the reddit drama, I'm wondering if those numbers are similar of Reddit users today.
One could, but the author clearly didn't check that. The number of users seems pretty much related to the amount of activity. Not very surprising.
To verify, I've taken the top entry, lemmy.world, and looked at the 10 most recent posts, and they're within the last 10 minutes. One post per minute isn't awesome, but well. Then I took 10 of the 0 user instances, and lo and behold, one instance had one post, the rest zero. So the number of users does seem to predict activity (atm).
Just curious, was this story upvoted by mostly newer users?
Could you compute the average "age" by averaging how many days ago each user created their accounts? (I'm wondering about the "age" result of this specific story, but it also seems like a potentially useful metric that you could use to push stories like this down the page faster.)
If there are 10x as many users who joined in 2010 as there are those that joined in 2007, then this graph implies that more veteran users are more likely to post.
reply