this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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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

  1. Quality over Quantity: MAU counts lurkers equally with active participants. PCM focuses on actual engagement.

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

  3. 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.

  4. Encourages Participation: Displaying PCM could motivate users to contribute more actively.

  5. 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] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Alternatively, I think both metrics are helpful in different ways

  1. Quality over Quantity: MAU counts lurkers equally with active participants. PCM focuses on actual engagement.
  1. 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.

I'd say votes are also an important part of engagement. It helps differentiate between good and bad content. I'm more likely to join a community with a few good posts a day (or even a week) than a bot community with many posts a day. Going by how the subscribers counts change over time, I'd say this is a common experience.

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

While any abuse is bad, spam posts and comments are a bigger concern right now. AI generated spam / link spam is obnoxious and we deal with it often (as admins/mods). While someone could make lots of accounts to inflate MAU, it only really affects the community ranking against other communities and not day to day usage. Lemmy is already considering removing the trending section, and admins usually step in if a bunch of similar accounts are created at once.

  1. Easier to Track: No need for complex user tracking. Just count posts and comments.

I'm not sure I understand this point. Are the vote/comment/post calculations very resource intensive?

All that being said

  • I don't see any downside to listing the info in the places you mentioned
  • If people want such a sorting option, then sure why not. Give people options
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Taking a look at the current sidebar, it might be nice to reorganize the stats section completely

What I'm thinking is:

By default it will only show some stats, where users can select what stats they want displayed in the settings. This way I can hide the stuff I don't care about, instead of having to look through the already busy list.

**Statistics:**                       [✏️edit]

- Monthly Active Users: 4,000
- Total Subscribers: 30,000

[ v see all v ]

Then expanding the box will give the full list of stats:

[ ^ collapse ^ ]


**Statistics:**

Active Users: 

- By day: 800
- By week: 1,200
- By month: 4,000
- By year: 24,100

Subscribers:

- Total: 30,000
- Local: 12,000

Comments: 
- Total: 81,000
- Today: 510
- This week: 1,315

[... etc]

It opens up the possibility of including more items in that list. We could also replace the expand option with a link to a full statistics dashboard page.