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Rethinking Community Vitality: Why Posts + Comments per Month Trumps MAU (programming.dev)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hey fellow Lemmings,

I've been thinking about how we measure the liveliness of our communities, and I believe we're missing the mark with Monthly Active Users (MAU). Here's why I think Posts + Comments per Month (PCM) would be a superior metric:

Why PCM is Better Than MAU

Quality over Quantity: MAU counts lurkers equally with active participants. PCM focuses on actual engagement.
Spam Resistance: Creating multiple accounts to inflate MAU is easy. Generating meaningful posts and comments is harder.
True Reflection of Activity: A community with 1000 MAU but only 10 posts/comments is less vibrant than one with 100 MAU and 500 posts/comments.
Encourages Participation: Displaying PCM could motivate users to contribute more actively.
Easier to Track: No need for complex user tracking. Just count posts and comments.

Implementation Ideas

Show PCM in the community list alongside subscriber count
Display PCM in each community's sidebar
Use PCM for sorting "hot" communities

What do you think? Should we petition the Lemmy devs to consider implementing this? Let's discuss!

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Spam Resistance: Creating multiple accounts to inflate MAU is easy. Generating meaningful posts and comments is harder.

Isn't this actually just spam encouragement? A community with a bot that posts 50 low-value posts every day will have a much higher PCM as a result, and that behavior is more obnoxious to users and moderators who have to see it and deal with it, vs. someone creating a bunch of accounts, which is largely invisible to everyone else.

[+] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

if you have a more effective metric in mind, I’d love to hear it instead of just pointing out flaws

I mean, isn't the whole point of this comment section to discuss the merits and flaws of the proposal you've made? If we're not discussing the downsides, too, what's even the point?

That said, an ideal system would be a measure of the quality of content, not the quantity of content so, as another user has suggested, some measure involving net upvotes might be more effective. Yes, obviously a user can create multiple accounts to upvote everything and fuck with that metric, but I kind of doubt many folks would go to the trouble.

Maybe some combination of PCM and the average number of votes divided by the number of active users could generate some sort of quality metric. At the very least it might be a measure of engagement.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Creating a bunch of accounts possibly to manipulate votes

Looking from the admin level, doesn't happen that often. Vote manipulation is already something we keep an eye out for, and usually it's done to highlight certain content (ex. pushing some political angle) rather than boosting one community over another.

you can stop seeing by adjusting your "Show Bot Accounts" setting

I like some bots, but I only subscribe to a bot-only community if the volume of posts is reasonable.