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.
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!
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
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
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 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.
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
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.
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
Ah nice, I encountered a Poisson-distribution in the wild today. I shall recount this encounter to my children.
I’ve happily found that there is much more interaction here than on Mastodon :)
It’s a different model.
Mastodon, like Twitter, is a person-centered setup. You can use hashtags, but most people don’t. You follow people not communities. As a result it’s basically microblogs, where most people are just posting into the void. Celebrities are followed more, so they get more replies, so there are more conversations. But, fundamentally it’s not really inviting interactions.
Lemmy, like Reddit, is a topic-centered setup. It has a bunch of communities and people post something because they think it might be interesting for people who are also interested in that community. Every post is basically an invitation to have a discussion about something.
I think the friction to posting something on Lemmy is slightly higher, but when you do, it’s more likely to generate comments.
Mastodon mainly only looks like there is no interaction happening because of their federating logic. Which is being worked on to be fixed sometimes this year
When I post here I get replies. On mastodon I don’t.
I see that you have a very good quota of comments that you get on every lemmy post you make. I dont think that’s true for every poster, especially when posting to niche lemmy communities.
But yes: of course the lemmy format invites comments way more than the microblogging format of mastodon
Does that mean we would see more posts / accounts being recommended?
It means that if you see a post, you will finally see all replies and interactions to that post. Currently this is not working.
Oh holy shit is that when I tried mastodon it felt like a ghost town with people only posting and no one engaging in discussions?
I mean, in microblogging a lot of posts will have no discussions simply because thats the nature of microblogging. But if you saw no interaction and discussion under posts of people who have lots of followers, then certainly yes.
I was pretty much only seeing people from my instance in comments. Or people that they followed. Joind an explicitly leftist instance because it had more charecterst to play with and it felt empty.
Got it, thanks for clarifying.
No, you did your math wrong
Also, something about politics.
(Just kidding. This is neat 😎)
Thanks. That was the toxicity I was expecting. Even if it’s not sincere, I appreciate it. I’ve been kinda withdrawing after switching to Lemmy, and I really needed a dose of Reddit hostility.
goes back to lurking in the shadows
You are doing a terrible job of lurking. Thank you.
Similarly a “good post”, one that gets lots of comments, would be any post that gets more than 13 comments.
By my count, this comment will take your post from one with 12 comments to one with 13 comments, therefore I’m conferring on you the title of “good post”. Congratulations!!
However, I’m assuming that you’re including your own comments in the comment tally. If you’re not, then your 2 comments so far to this post don’t count, and you’ll only be at 11, and therefore “not good”.
If you are counting your own comments on your own post, can you juice the numbers by adding lots of comments? In other words, can you make a post good by interacting with the people who are interacting with the post? Like some kind of um… conversation? Sounds like cheating to me.
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.
The other chance that you got no comments on your post for is that you are banned from the remote instance/community, or federation is broken (still happens intermittently).
Lemmy will still allow you to post from your home instance since you are not banned there, but your content will simply get black-holed by the remote instance if you’re banned there. Sometimes you have to check the remote instance directly to see if your post was federated or not.
Is there a way to check without manually going through each instance individually?
You can just check the modlog of your local instance and search for your own username. Most of the time the ban action will federate (but again, sometimes not, never really sure why). If nothing shows up locally check the modlog of the remote instance you’re trying to post to.
