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.
It turns out we don't need any data we don't already get everyday from Jotter. I'm just going to present it a little differently. I'm focused on commenters as opposed to rec's or connections. I understand the value of the other measures but for the purpose of this diary I want to chose one and I think it's one everyone can easily understand and relate to.
If we take Jotter's table summarizing the Nov. 30 to December 6 week that looks like this:
posts with > |
0 |
1 |
10 |
30 |
100 |
recommendations |
1118 |
1078 |
730 |
397 |
134 |
commenters |
1118 |
1118 |
632 |
271 |
38 |
connections |
1118 |
1078 |
906 |
506 |
169 |
... and discard the rec's and connections rows and reformat the data into discrete ranges and add percentages, it comes out like this:
posts with |
1 - 10 |
11 - 30 |
31 - 100 |
100 + |
total |
commenters |
486 |
361 |
233 |
38 |
1118 |
% commenters |
44% |
32% |
21% |
3% |
100% |
And here's an aggregation of the last four weeks:
posts with |
1 - 10 |
11 - 30 |
31 - 100 |
100 + |
total |
commenters |
1954 |
1501 |
906 |
130 |
4491 |
% commenters |
44% |
33% |
20% |
3% |
100% |
Notice how similar the percentages are! Yes, the single week above is included in the four week total. But the results are so similar that it means the other three weeks had to have a very similar pattern. What is stunning is that
three-quarters of posts have
thirty or less commenters. Roughly
two out of five have
ten or less commenters.
Before anyone jumps to the conclusion that this one set of data is an anomaly, I'll point you to several other of Jotter's week summary diaries chosen at random, going back in time. The pattern is very similar in all of them.
Again, I'm focused exclusively on commenters as our metric however fair that might be. Given that, what should be considered
low impact? Certainly less than ten commenters is low impact. And in my humble opinion below 100 is low impact. That would make 95% of the posts here low impact. But I can't reconcile that with the fact that we are
having an impact. So, I guess, IDK!!
Is Impact Inequality a problem? Maybe we needn't worry about the huge number of posts that rightly or wrongly go down the diary hole. Like many ecosystems, it has a few big players and many small players. Lurkers and Kogs always have more content than they need which gives them plenty of options. Any diarist can get vaulted to the top of the rec list at any time even on their first post. If not the rec list, the Rescue Rangers are always scavenging for diaries to put in the Community Spotlight list. If not picked up at either of these two places, small threads can give a diarist the kind of feedback they might need without having to be overwhelmed by a quickly moving and ever expanding discussion.
All that is fine but my gut is still telling me that a more equal impact distribution would be of benefit to everyone. Until that happens we may want to steer clear of such a reality based sales pitch.