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.

  • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comEnglish
    12·
    9 days ago

    You need a factor for niche communities. A post with 4 comments in a backpacking community with 20 subscribers is way “gooder” than 40 comments in a 5k subscriber news community.

    I.E. add a community size factor.

  • Minnels@lemm.eeEnglish
    10·
    9 days ago

    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.

    • Coelacanth@feddit.nuEnglish
      13·
      9 days ago

      I comment a shit ton and often with absolute banalities. Especially on posts with 0 comments.

      My reasoning is twofold: first of all I want to encourage posters by engaging with their content so they don’t stop posting. Second I want to invite others to comment and it’s much more inviting to do so if a post has at least one comment. People tend to think it’s dead otherwise and not bother.

      I think at the current level of MAUs there is no comment too small, and every little bit helps just by virtue of breaking the silence.

    • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      1·
      7 days ago

      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.

  • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    9 days ago

    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.

    • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
      9·
      9 days ago

      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

  • ArtificialHoldings@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    8 days ago

    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

  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    3·
    9 days ago

    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.

    • cron@feddit.orgEnglish
      3·
      9 days ago

      I think meaningful commenting only works in trees, for example the old mailing lists.

      With classic linear forums, I quickly loose track of different discussions. Good luck finding replys to a comment on page #3 when the post has 300 comments.

      • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        1·
        9 days ago

        True, that structure does also have its own peculiar problems.

        It’s just what I grew up with (from when I was a preteen, only first became active on reddit ~10 years later), so I’m kinda nostalgic for it. :D One aspect of linear forums is that you gradually got to know the people regularly commenting, much more so than on reddit or Lemmy.

    • pgetsos@fedia.io
      2·
      9 days ago

      While I love traditional forum structure, I don’t think it would be great to transition later from one structure to another completely different. In my mind, the only thing that needs a bit of tuning is the “Hot” algorithm of the front page

    • anotherandrew@lemmy.mixdown.caEnglish
      2·
      9 days ago

      Between (old) reddit, phpbb and smf… the old reddit model wins by a landslide in my opinion. I’ve used all of these over the years and absofuckinglutely HATE phpBB and SMF, with SMF earning slightly less hatred than phpBB.

      I’m also old enough to have downloaded .QWK files for offline BBS forum reading/replying and even connecting to the internet over a FidoNet-internet bridge. Lemmy did the exact right thing in copying reddit’s format.

    • Pamasich@kbin.earth
      2·
      8 days ago

      by thread bumping

      Thread bumping is still possible on Reddit-like social media too. Just use a sort that responds to activity, like the Active sort on Mbin or Piefed.

    • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      9 days ago

      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.

  • Pamasich@kbin.earth
    41·
    8 days ago

    I disagree that commenting for the sake of commenting is a good idea. Quality over quantity, a single meaningful discussion is superior to a sea of low effort garbage. I also want the fediverse to take off, but not at the cost of adopting modern Reddit culture.

    a “good post”, by this metric, is really just a post that baits lots and lots of engagement

    Baiting anything is bad.

    • Agosagror@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      6·
      8 days ago

      Well exactly, that was kind of the point of this post. Hence “good post” being in air quotes. It being a silly idea as well.

      Completely agree with you on that last point.

  • OutlierBlue@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    9 days ago

    Determining the reason no one replied to your Lemmy post.

    This should be a picture of Nicole, the Fediverse chick.

  • iAvicenna@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    9 days ago

    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.