If you had to explain why you are an active member at Daily Kos to a new friend who seemed interested to join, do you think you would use this as the sales pitch?
"Well, hardly anyone bothers with three quarters of the stuff that gets posted there. But there's about five percent of the posts that really get people engaged and I'm sure those would keep you going too."
That doesn't sound like a heckuva sales pitch but below the orange fleur de kos I'll demonstrate the data behind it.
For those who write posts (or diaries as they will someday not be called), we've all had it happen. You pour some thought, energy and hours into crafting a diary, press publish, and poof! It falls down the diary hole. Hardly any tips, rec's or comments. You don't know if anyone agrees or disagrees just that they were interested in other posts at the time.
Is this common? How common is it? I visually scan the "Recent" column almost every time I'm on the site. It seems like in terms of impact (recs and comments) there are a few haves and many have-nots. Instead of looking for data on High Impact Posts, I sought out data on Low Impact Posts.
I really appreciate the job that Jotter does. Read his High Impact Posts posts each day and see what and who are getting the most readers' engagement here at Daily Kos. I actually work in what is called business intelligence for a living. So I see first hand how important data is.
But we don't often turn to data until we have a new question or maybe a hunch that we want to prove or disprove. I wanted to see what the data had to say about my hunch.
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