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
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.
Add a TLDR or this post won’t get a lot of traction either
Confirmed. I see “Poisson distribution” I start skimming lol
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 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.
Average Fediverse Experience:
Post comment
Waits 24 hours
zero replies
zero votes
not even a downvote
check post viewed from other instances
can’t find the comment
realizes that the comment never federated
now too much time has passed since the original time of the post, and the joke you commented is no longer funny anymore
😭
Or other people created the same joke without ever seeing your post
This comment will be sad if you don’t engage with it.
Ohhh poor thing here have an upvote and a comment.
We had the chance to upvote this heavily without leaving any comments, but we blew it
post is too [good] unfortunately
post is too unfortunately
they don’t think it be like it is but it do
accidentally a word
What the hell is this?
A dying gasp collected from the old internet.
I accidentally the whole thing! I miss that one.
Considering the upvotes, you guys seem to have filled in just fine
I upvoted you, because it was funny and made me laugh :D
Why would you make a comment while knowing how this works. Everybody stop commenting! Don’t even do it as a meta-comment joke!
Right! Sorry.
Shhhhhhhhhhhhh!
https://pawb.social/u/LemUrun ruined it!
You need a factor for niche communities. A post with 4 comments in a backpacking community with 20 subscribers is way “gooder” than 40 comments in a 5k subscriber news community.
I.E. add a community size factor.
that could be because it is an AMAZING post – it covered all the points and no one has anything left to say
Finally, I know why.
This does happen with comments sometimes. I go into a post and someone has already eloquently said what I would have said (often better than I would have). So I upvote it and move along
Fun break down! More comments is more interesting than more posts for me
Well then, here, have a comment.
A post by fediversechick
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.
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.
Doing my part to make this a good post, cause it was.
I support your support.
In my mind, that shows that “copying reddit” was not the best idea and people should really have copied things like phpBB or SMF for the flagship “community-based” fediverse platform, at least to start out.
On traditional forums, even relatively small communities cause interesting content to appear all the time, by thread bumping and back-and-forth discussion that can go over many pages. However it is obvious that this structure doesn’t scale well to communities with thousands of active users writing thousands of comments in one thread. The reddit structure works better for such communities, but most communities we have here on the threadiverse just aren’t that big yet.
I grew up with traditional forums and discovered other structures for “social media” much later; I still consider traditional forums way superior to any “social media” structure that is nowadays popular.
by thread bumping
Thread bumping is still possible on Reddit-like social media too. Just use a sort that responds to activity, like the Active sort on Mbin or Piefed.
I think meaningful commenting only works in trees, for example the old mailing lists.
With classic linear forums, I quickly loose track of different discussions. Good luck finding replys to a comment on page #3 when the post has 300 comments.
True, that structure does also have its own peculiar problems.
It’s just what I grew up with (from when I was a preteen, only first became active on reddit ~10 years later), so I’m kinda nostalgic for it. :D One aspect of linear forums is that you gradually got to know the people regularly commenting, much more so than on reddit or Lemmy.
much more so than on reddit or Lemmy.
I still see you quite often 😄
Yes, you’re also one of the few usernames I keep seeing repeatedly.
There are definitely around 50 usernames I see in a lot of communities, or sometimes just in one. Feels nice to feel like talking to real humans compared to bots.
I was also a very active user of traditional forums but, in my experience, small niche subreddits (when I was on Reddit) were a decent substitute in terms of content, since posts could stay on their front page for several days. Lemmy isn’t big enough to have those yet but I hope it will be. The thing I miss most about forums isn’t the format but rather the community. The forum I posted on the most had only a few dozen regulars and I knew them.
There was the guy with a kind, insightful take on controversial issues and a fetish for women with more than two arms. The active duty marine who reliably posted harsh truths. The feminist I didn’t get along with at all despite agreeing with her about most things. The dedicated father who bought real razor wire for his daughter when she wanted a UN-peacekeeper-base themed birthday party. The very determined conservative who defended his position no matter how outnumbered he was and once bragged that he had given his wife several dozen orgasms in a row…
I suppose I was the young man with strange views about what was or wasn’t fair and a great deal of anger over any perceived unfairness. (I don’t think I was particularly well-liked.) The internet is so much less personal now.
“New Comments” helps with that
Between (old) reddit, phpbb and smf… the old reddit model wins by a landslide in my opinion. I’ve used all of these over the years and absofuckinglutely HATE phpBB and SMF, with SMF earning slightly less hatred than phpBB.
I’m also old enough to have downloaded
.QWKfiles for offline BBS forum reading/replying and even connecting to the internet over a FidoNet-internet bridge. Lemmy did the exact right thing in copying reddit’s format.While I love traditional forum structure, I don’t think it would be great to transition later from one structure to another completely different. In my mind, the only thing that needs a bit of tuning is the “Hot” algorithm of the front page
ActivityPub is flexible enough that we don’t have to choose. Someone could implement a piece of compatible software that displays threadiverse communities as “boards” and everyone could join whatever they liked best. NodeBB is already doing something similar to that.
PieFed is trying a bunch of new stuff that even Reddit does not have, enabling the democratization of moderation by putting more power into the hands of individual users (e.g. mods don’t have to be as aggressive as removing many posts with keywords when users who want such can set their own preferences via the built-in keyword filtering, which enables All, Some, and None).
Lemmy to me looks more like a straight attempt to copy, although the modlog is a great addition - unfortunately in the absence of notifications of a moderation event, lack of modmail, and presence of an obscured moderator name, Lemmy has somehow become even more authoritian than Reddit.🤷😳
Though with a MUCH more friendly userbase, and most admins, and ofc lack of profit incentive which all by its lonesome helps a ton.
