A user counted as active in each day if they had created a post or comment in the past 14 days
I wonder what the ratio of active users to lurkers are. There have definitely been times when I’ve been here but haven’t commented for 2 weeks.
EDIT: ok so I did some tangential math. If we have ~1375 active users out of 20,000 accounts, then ~7% of the site actively produces content. In reality, the % is even higher if you factor in alts/dead accounts, but I don’t know if that’s possible :shrug-outta-hecks:. It also can get lower if you factor in the density of posting (I post once and someone else posts 100 times, so technically we’re both “active” but the site depends much more on this smaller minority of super posters.) Overall though, if we look at the 1% rule, which I admittedly don’t know the validity of, then Hexbear :hexbear-retro: is actually overachieving!
I likely only count as active less than 20% of the time. I wonder how many people are similar
When do you comment? Is it cause it is something pertaining to your day life?
if posting is praxis, then call me an armchair revolutionary :bordiga-despair:
I guess we need to post more comrade.
:fidel-salute-big:
2 weeks? Consider 2 months. I feel like I hardly have something worthwhile to contribute.
I rarely have anything worthwhile to contribute but I comment anyway cuz I like notifications :blob-no-thoughts:
yeah that's me. I check every other day or so but don't post too often
I likely only count as active less than 20% of the time. I wonder how many people are similar
certainly any venture capitalist would have thrown us out the window with these numbers
theres more of us here than i'd have guessed! we're a healthy little community :Care-Comrade:
This is a great size in my opinion: big enough for a diversity of personality, knowledge, and opinion, but small enough to feel like a fairly intimate community where the regulars actually get to know most of the other people.
I'm almost 40. Being here reminds me of being on early BBS communities in the 1990s, and I love it. The death of that kind of thing after around 2012ish because of :reddit-logo: and Facebook was a real tragedy, and the internet was a better place when more things like :sicko-hexbear: existed.
That's fuckin wild. Usually activity spikes on brand new services are much higher than the number of retained users. The stability of the population is crazy.
I don't think we really have anywhere else to go that's friendly to both Stalinposting and trans rights
If I've learned anything from 13 years of moderating subreddits, it's that there is zero if not an inverse correlation between subscribers and quality. A community reaches a point where there's a healthy amount of content from a userbase that understands its culture and concept. That's its plateau. It can be a thousand people, ten thousand, even a hundred thousand. The number is arbitrary to a point and then the way people interact with content takes over. If people can digest one post faster than another, they'll upvote it faster and that will start to dilute the quality of the community. Images take precedence over text, templates over original content, popular over innovative.
this is why liberals overrun any decent small left subreddit once it starts to get reposted to other subreddits too much
honestly surprised we've remained so consistent, and that our baseline is such a large percentage of our peaks
what do the 4 spikes correspond to?
early Nov 2020, early Jan 2021, mid March 2021, and mid May 2021
Election, January 6th, trial of Derek Chauvin (though maybe not as that was right at the end of March), withdrawal from Afghanistan?
mid march i'm 99% sure was vegan struggle, and may is i think when reg opened back up?
Nice! Does this account for the bug that the site had in the early days where it'd count multiple tabs as a unique user?
I did not use the online counter, instead i looked at all the comments and posts and counted the author of them as active for the next 14 days
Cool! Second question: When a comment/post is edited or deleted, the date visible through the UI becomes the date of the latest action, not when it was originally written... does the script account for that as well? Not sure of the API's behaviour tbh.
Data returned through API contains both the publish date and edit date, i only used the publish date so the final data was not influenced by edits to comments/posts
It was people coming over here from Discord, then going back to discord because they like the instant format better
Small discords with like 30 or fewer active posters are great. Big ones not so much.
I'd like to see this compared to the amount of new users over time. There must have been a lot of alts created in the early days to reach 20k by now. So many abandoned and troll accounts too.
It is unlikely that the roughly constant safe baseline of users is from the same users.
It's more likely that user churn occurs and that new users is simply keeping up with the user churn. There is no community without user churn.
In the beginning it makes sense that there would be a lot of turnover. We had the discord drama stuff so a lot of alts were likely created then, which pumped the user numbers. Then there was growth of new users as word of the site spread. I don't have data to back it up but I assume regulars do have alts, or should, because of what we went through with doxxing users in the past. I agree that new users are balancing out people who leave, I don't think that the balance is caused by the same users creating lots of alts.
That's why I'd like to see how the user count changed along with the change in current users, to see how those correlate. If the current users was steady around 1300 but there was a sudden spike in new accounts, that means either a lot of people left and we got a sudden influx of new people. Or it means people rotated their accounts to avoid doxxing. I'd like to see the effect of ban waves too.
