Just sort by top of the month, all our top posts range from 1 week to 1 month old, with very few being from the past few days of record "online" numbers.

Anyone who knows how Reddit communities work in the same sense know that when community member numbers go up along with concurrent online users, the post vote counts go up proportionally.

It doesn't seem to make sense that with nearly 1900 users online at once the top post of the day has 214 points while posts from many weeks ago were getting more.

Did we change how "online user" is determined or is there a glitch?

edit:

Tested what people were saying about how "online users" is really just "open tabs"

https://hexbear.net/post/38707

  • 90u9y8gb9t86vytv97g [they/them]
    1·
    4 years ago

    Counting separate tabs as users would be hilariously dumb, I'd count as like 14 people right now.

    spoiler

    Yes I have a tab problem, no I will not seek help.

    • diode [none/use name]
      ·
      4 years ago

      It counts websocket connections, so that's exactly how it's counted.

        • 90u9y8gb9t86vytv97g [they/them]
          ·
          4 years ago

          Which means we really have "1867 tabs open" not "online users".

          And for an average of maybe 6 tabs open, that's ~310 people online.

          Oof

      • 90u9y8gb9t86vytv97g [they/them]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Wait actually? Has it done that the entire existence of the site?

        That means we likely have at most 30% the users reported as online, if not far less.

        Even at that overestimate it puts us at ~622 online...

        • diode [none/use name]
          ·
          4 years ago

          From what I have seen in these user surge threads, that's the way it has always been.

          • 90u9y8gb9t86vytv97g [they/them]
            ·
            4 years ago

            Yikes

            So when we were consistently celebrating 800 people online we might have barely had 200 or so.

            Why why why would you not just count IP addresses as individuals.

            • emizeko [they/them]
              ·
              4 years ago

              just count IP addresses as individuals

              that would undercount, but probably better than overcounting

              • 90u9y8gb9t86vytv97g [they/them]
                ·
                4 years ago

                Yes, but it would undercount by a far smaller amount than we're currently overcounting apparently.

                I regularly visit and open like 10 tabs of interesting threads I don't want to lose when the site auto-updates, but an IP address might have what, four people on it max, disregarding universities (which are currently closed anyway).

            • Ryaina [she/her]
              ·
              4 years ago

              until a recent merge, I had a patch in place that did exactly this, for the vast majority of the site's existence the online count has been IP based.