April started quietly, as it behooves any month that starts with April 1 to do.
And, of course, with
7.1 million ACA signups to cheer about.
Much enjoyment accompanied the discovery of the Daily Kos logo precursor attached to an OpEd by Charles Koch in the Wall Street Journal.
HoundDog brought up a problem(?) with the number of people who actually recommend diaries, and did, and sparked, a couple of followups. Even if the problem isn't quite as bad as it sounded, kudos for trying to push recognition for good writing.
A very right hand thread in this RKBA diary sparked a response from rexymeteorite.
On April 12 the Cliven Bundy story blew up. Including the referenced diary, search counted 78 diaries referencing Bundy in the next five days. With a bit of heavy meta from Bob after some of the shouting died.
There was a short reprise of the Snowden/NSA kerfluffle, kicked off by news about the HeartBleed glitch, and a Putin interview. Okay, not so short - 36 diaries referencing Snowden as of 4/19.
I solved the problem I was having with doing searches on Diaries by asking Search to show me every diary containing "the". Amazing what a difference it makes. What I was looking for was a way to find the median number of comments and recs, to get some idea of just what kind of response most diaries get.
For 2013:
Total # of diaries: 63,641, or 174/day, 7.25/hr, a diary every 8.25 minutes.
Median # of recs per diary: 16
Median # of comments per diary: 20
It's still a matter of "the higher, the fewer", but it's good to know that half of all diaries published (not counting spam) manage to pull in at least 16 recs.
For the period of 4/1/14 through 4/30/14
Quantcast unique users:6,340,411 (3/31-4/29)
Number of signups: 9,482
108 of these new users are already bojo from spambot or community action. I've given up trying to count how many are caught before commenting, because there's no simple way to search for them.
Diaries (does not count spam deletes)
By Diary search: 4,915
Diaries by tip jar count: 4,286 (old measure - for comparison and percentages)
Avg diaries per day: 163; 1 diary every 9 minutes
Diarists: 1,386
Diaries with one or more HRs in the Tip Jar: 52 1.1%
Diaries with 5 or more HRs in the Tip Jar: 15
Diaries with 5 or more of both Tips and HRs: 5
Users who published diaries during that period and are now bojo: 65
Comments (includes tip jars, spam, etc., but not necessarily tip jars from deleted diaries) 245,394
Commenters: 8,633
Number of those commenters now bojo:118
Comments with HRs: 508 .21%
1 HR: 211 .086%
2-4 HRs: 149 .059%
5 or more HRs: 148 .060%
5 or more of both HRs and Recs: 26 .0106%
Note: every few days there are a dozen comments or so bemoaning the "fact" that community moderation is broken, traducing the Help Desk, and wishing Meteor Blades was back on the job of moderating the site. Why anyone would hate Meteor Blades that much is beyond me.
From my comment here:
At least half and possibly up to 3/4 of all HRs are effectively uncontested - for bald sexism or racism, attempts at spam, calls for violence, screamingly RW attempts to derail, etc. That would mean that the "problem" amounts to something like one tenth of one percent of the interactions going on.
This is not a broken system.