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.
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.