A user counted as active in each day if they had created a post or comment in the past 14 days

  • bananon [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    I wonder what the ratio of active users to lurkers are. There have definitely been times when I’ve been here but haven’t commented for 2 weeks.

    EDIT: ok so I did some tangential math. If we have ~1375 active users out of 20,000 accounts, then ~7% of the site actively produces content. In reality, the % is even higher if you factor in alts/dead accounts, but I don’t know if that’s possible :shrug-outta-hecks:. It also can get lower if you factor in the density of posting (I post once and someone else posts 100 times, so technically we’re both “active” but the site depends much more on this smaller minority of super posters.) Overall though, if we look at the 1% rule, which I admittedly don’t know the validity of, then Hexbear :hexbear-retro: is actually overachieving!

  • kristina [she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    infinite growth is the ideology of cancer :zizek-joy:

    • mittens [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      certainly any venture capitalist would have thrown us out the window with these numbers

    • blobjim [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I mean it would still be good to have some finite growth...

  • Lerios [hy/hym]
    ·
    3 years ago

    theres more of us here than i'd have guessed! we're a healthy little community :Care-Comrade:

  • Philosoraptor [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    This is a great size in my opinion: big enough for a diversity of personality, knowledge, and opinion, but small enough to feel like a fairly intimate community where the regulars actually get to know most of the other people.

    I'm almost 40. Being here reminds me of being on early BBS communities in the 1990s, and I love it. The death of that kind of thing after around 2012ish because of :reddit-logo: and Facebook was a real tragedy, and the internet was a better place when more things like :sicko-hexbear: existed.

  • Ideology [she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    That's fuckin wild. Usually activity spikes on brand new services are much higher than the number of retained users. The stability of the population is crazy.

      • Ideology [she/her]
        ·
        3 years ago

        It helps that comrades are great to be around. :stalin-approval:

    • BeamBrain [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      I don't think we really have anywhere else to go that's friendly to both Stalinposting and trans rights

  • happybadger [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    If I've learned anything from 13 years of moderating subreddits, it's that there is zero if not an inverse correlation between subscribers and quality. A community reaches a point where there's a healthy amount of content from a userbase that understands its culture and concept. That's its plateau. It can be a thousand people, ten thousand, even a hundred thousand. The number is arbitrary to a point and then the way people interact with content takes over. If people can digest one post faster than another, they'll upvote it faster and that will start to dilute the quality of the community. Images take precedence over text, templates over original content, popular over innovative.

    • Koa_lala [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      Yeah. All in all solid base of users. with almost no outreach.

  • layla
    ·
    edit-2
    17 days ago

    deleted by creator

    • bottech [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      3 years ago

      I did not use the online counter, instead i looked at all the comments and posts and counted the author of them as active for the next 14 days

      • layla
        ·
        edit-2
        17 days ago

        deleted by creator

        • bottech [he/him]
          hexagon
          ·
          3 years ago

          Data returned through API contains both the publish date and edit date, i only used the publish date so the final data was not influenced by edits to comments/posts

          • layla
            ·
            edit-2
            17 days ago

            deleted by creator

  • mr_world [they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I'd like to see this compared to the amount of new users over time. There must have been a lot of alts created in the early days to reach 20k by now. So many abandoned and troll accounts too.

    • Awoo [she/her]
      ·
      3 years ago

      It is unlikely that the roughly constant safe baseline of users is from the same users.

      It's more likely that user churn occurs and that new users is simply keeping up with the user churn. There is no community without user churn.

      • mr_world [they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        In the beginning it makes sense that there would be a lot of turnover. We had the discord drama stuff so a lot of alts were likely created then, which pumped the user numbers. Then there was growth of new users as word of the site spread. I don't have data to back it up but I assume regulars do have alts, or should, because of what we went through with doxxing users in the past. I agree that new users are balancing out people who leave, I don't think that the balance is caused by the same users creating lots of alts.

        That's why I'd like to see how the user count changed along with the change in current users, to see how those correlate. If the current users was steady around 1300 but there was a sudden spike in new accounts, that means either a lot of people left and we got a sudden influx of new people. Or it means people rotated their accounts to avoid doxxing. I'd like to see the effect of ban waves too.

    • bottech [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      3 years ago

      I can do it, it would be much easier than this one

  • buh [she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I wonder how much of that early activity was kerryposters

    • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      It was people coming over here from Discord, then going back to discord because they like the instant format better

        • StuporTrooper [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Small discords with like 30 or fewer active posters are great. Big ones not so much.