I was playing around with Lemmy statistics the other day, and I decided to take the number of comments per post. Essentially a measure of engagement – the higher the number the more engaging the post is. Or in other words how many people were pissed off enough to comment, or had something they felt like sharing. The average for every single Lemmy instance was 8.208262964 comments per post.
So I modeled that with a Poisson distribution, in stats terms X~Po(8.20826), then found the critical regions assuming that anything that had a less than 5% chance of happening, is important. In other words 5% is the significance level. The critical regions are the region either side of the distribution where the probability of ending up in those regions is less than 5%. These critical regions on the lower tail are, 4 comments and on the upper tail is 13 comments, what this means is that if you get less than 4 comments or more than 13 comments, that’s a meaningful value. So I chose to interpret those results as meaning that if you get 5 or less comments than your post is “a bad post”, or if you get 13 or more than your post is “a good post”. A good post here is litterally just “got a lot of comments than expected of a typical post”, vice versa for “a bad post”.
You will notice that this is quite rudimentary, like what about when the Americans are asleep, most posts do worse then. That’s not accounted for here, because it increases the complexity beyond what I can really handle in a post.
To give you an idea of a more sweeping internet trend, the adage 1% 9% 90%, where 1% do the posting, 9% do the commenting, and 90% are lurkers – assuming each person does an average of 1 thing a day, suggests that c/p should be about 9 for all sites regardless of size.
Now what is more interesting is that comments per post varies by instance, lemmy.world for example has an engagement of 9.5 c/p and lemmy.ml has 4.8 c/p, this means that a “good post” on .ml is a post that gets 9 comments, whilst a “good post” on .world has to get 15 comments. On hexbear.net, you need 20 comments, to be a “good post”. I got the numbers for instance level comments and posts from here
This is a little bit silly, since a “good post”, by this metric, is really just a post that baits lots and lots of engagement, specifically in the form of comments – so if you are reading this you should comment, otherwise you are an awful person. No matter how meaningless the comment.
Anyway I thought that was cool.
EDIT: I’ve cleared up a lot of the wording and tried to make it clearer as to what I am actually doing.
Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
Not entirely sure how this applies to the discussion, it just came to mind lol
Post in a obscure sub
I follow instructions, I think. Good post
I disagree that commenting for the sake of commenting is a good idea. Quality over quantity, a single meaningful discussion is superior to a sea of low effort garbage. I also want the fediverse to take off, but not at the cost of adopting modern Reddit culture.
a “good post”, by this metric, is really just a post that baits lots and lots of engagement
Baiting anything is bad.
Well exactly, that was kind of the point of this post. Hence “good post” being in air quotes. It being a silly idea as well.
Completely agree with you on that last point.
I think the community matters a lot more than the instance. Hexbear has a bunch of coping bubble communities but they keep posting the same low-quality comments, so that’s probably why the threshold of 20 comments is so high. Another example, I make posts to my own blog community !dginovker_blog@lemmy.ml, but there’s no subscribers so there’s never gonna be any comments.
Basically I’m saying you should do this same analysis across a sample of random communities ^^
This comment will be sad if you don’t engage with it.
This comment is part of a tree-datastructure that represents the branches of discussion.
Ohhh poor thing here have an upvote and a comment.
The comment is very happy to be a good comment with 8 updoots and two replies.
10/9.5 🥳
Okay. Look. We both said a lot of things that you’re going to regret. But I think we can put our differences behind us. For science. You monster.
Any details you could share about how you obtained and processed the data? It seems like there’s a lot of interesting things that could be done with this but I’m not sure where the best place to start would be
It makes sense that it would be highly dependent on comments because for one, Lemmy’s default filter is activity based so the more activity a new post has, the higher it will rank, until displaced by a newer post. The second part is that if there aren’t any comments there people might be less likely to leave comments and the post is more likely to do poorly as it’ll get bumped down by posts with higher activity. Obviously not everyone uses the activity sort feature, some sort by new, top, or scaled, but since activity is the default most will use that. Especially since it shows posts with the most discussion and activity, the ones most likely to find other people interacting on.
Ah nice, I encountered a Poisson-distribution in the wild today. I shall recount this encounter to my children.
A post by fediversechick
I comment very seldom and only if i think that I can contribute. I see no need to write anything if I got nothing of significance to add.
Maybe I should. Add comments that is uplifting and kind more often.
I try to be positive, but my way of life are very different from other people’s; and i end up doing more harm than good, if i’m forcing myself to be friendly and nice.
I comment a shit ton and often with absolute banalities. Especially on posts with 0 comments.
My reasoning is twofold: first of all I want to encourage posters by engaging with their content so they don’t stop posting. Second I want to invite others to comment and it’s much more inviting to do so if a post has at least one comment. People tend to think it’s dead otherwise and not bother.
I think at the current level of MAUs there is no comment too small, and every little bit helps just by virtue of breaking the silence.
Well said
My meagre contributions pale in comparison to your efforts, but I do what I can.
I feel guilty now. Yes, everything you just said is true.
I shall become a better… Lemming(?) and comment a few times every day.
You know, I’m really just waiting for the day voyager supports gif insertion.
I’m a bit confused but I think I liked this post
I think one needs to include parameters like how soon after the topic was created the comment was made and how deep is it in the comment tree. If you for instance consistently comment on 1 month old topics or reply on comments ten levels deep you will get very few interactions.
Well exactly, I’ve said this elsewhere in this thread, this was mostly something that I thought was cool. That said I might try and figure out how to include that data, if I can find it.
