1. Introduction:The Merit System has been going now for six months, and I wondered how that correlated to posting and its evolution during those six months. The official forum stats (
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=stats) indicate that the average posts per day is 8.272, which always struck me as a smallish figure for all the posts we see day to day, and the amount of those that we visually classify as spam. The figure itself seems manageable easily from the merit awarding point of view, even more so considering that spam is likely to be the majority and can therefore be dismissed in a second whilst revising posts to merit.
It turns out (at least from what I can gather), that the number given as average posts per day is really quite off from what other data suggests.
Instead of being 8.272 post per day, the last six month give me somewhere around
58.733 posts per day, with around
41.782 post per day during the last month. That is way more than the average states. I figure that the average shown on the official stats shows an average over a longer period of time (perhaps all history of Bitcointalk). Of course I may be wrong, but I’m basing the above on other data available through stats on the forum (using the post counts shown on
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php for a specific date, and comparing that to the same data a month ago, extracted from WayBackMachine
https://archive.org/web/).
The data per subsection I believe adds up the Child Boards too.
2. Post Distribution per subsectionThe overall historical accumulative distribution of posts per subsection is as follows (derived from
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php):
We can see that Ann Altcoins accumulates 19,68% of the posts, followed by Marketplace 17,69% and Marketplace (Altcoins) with 12,76% of all historical posts.
One thing to bear in mind is that deleted posts are not considered here (there is no stat on deleted posts), so they are not cannot be accounted for on this analysis. They do create some strange situations, as we’ll see in the following sections.
3. Number of posts and distribution per subsection – 6 month evolutionUsing the information derived from
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php for yesterday and retrieving the same statistic from the WayBackMachine at approximately one month intervals (there is no snapshot of the statistic for every single day, so I chose the best suited to aprox. 1 month intervals), we get the following table of data:
The above table is used to derive all the remaining charts and information. The T.Posts shows us the Total number of Post accumulated until that day. I’m not going to focus on this table as it is, but a derived one which is easier to follow. I’ll leave the above as a reference to the data origins.
The above table is much easier to follow. It shows the number of average posts per day per subsection, which is a good indicator to the activity going on in the subsection.
The interpretation is as follows:
Month 1: period of time between 23/01/2018 .. 23/02/2018. The number shows the number of posts per day for that period (calculated substracting the number of posts on the two dates of the interval and dividing by the number of days in the interval).
For example, Bitcoin Discussion Month 1 has an average of 1.806 posts per day. That is calculated by substracting the read on the 23/01/2018 (1.614.537) to that on the 23/02/2018 (1.670.511), and dividing by 31 days between the two dates.
And so on ..
I’ve marked some of the number in yellow, since they are inconsistent for being negative. What it really means I guess is that, for the given subsection and month, there must have been a purge of posts leading to mass deletion or movement to archival. At least that is my guess. This can also affect drops in the numbers, and we cannot know exactly to what degree, but it is a rather good approximation to what is going on.
Nevertheless, since the average posts per day is provided for 6 reads for each subsection, I think we can get a pretty good idea of how it is evolving:
3.1 Bitcoin – Posts per day
Mining is very odd, and it looks like a lot of posts have been deleted or moved to another section. All other sections seem to have a descending posts per day trend.
3.2 Economy – Posts per day
Here again Marketplace is very odd, and looks like it has been purged over the last couple of months. Economics and Trading Discussion are on the rise.
3.3 Other – Posts per day
All sections are on a downward trend. Meta has dropped by half what it was six months ago (the first month of the Merit System I guess). Off-topic’s downfall is very abrupt between the first month and the second, and second to third. Politics & Society takes a dep fall too. Looks like a clean-up too.
3.4 Alternate Cryptocurrencies – Posts per day
Post per day are massive on Marketplace (Altcoins), Altcoin Discussion and Ann, with Speculation (Altcoins) being the only one with an upward trend.
3.5 Local Boards – Posts per day
Most local boards also have a downward trend in terms of posts per day. This trend is rather steep in the Indonesian local board, and the fall on the Chinese seems too large to be real. These are probably affected by many posts/threads being deleted.
All these downwards trends could be due to:
- More activity on the reporting and deleting front of posts/threads.
- Less user activity per-se.
- Less active users (?).
- Summertime effect (recent month).
All in all, it looks like there are less posts created per day, since the overall average has gone down from 63K to 42K posts per day last month. This really depends on how much deleting has been taken place though.
That is still miles away from the average posts per day on the official stat which is 8,3K posts per day.
4. Merit per Post RatioWith the previous data, we can derive the average merit per post for all forum Subsections. This may be useful to compare how easy/difficult it is to get merited in one section vs another.
The ratio is constructed simply by dividing the total number of posts by the total sMerits awarded to posts in the section for a given period of time (6 month; last month).
Now obviously this is not the probability of getting merit on a given post or section (as it mixed all sorts of posts with no filter), but from a macro perspective, it could allow us to compare sections based on this indicator.
For example, the Spanish Local ratio is now of 0,033, while the Italian is 0,065 and the Portuguese 0,036. This means that both the Spanish board and the Portuguese board have the same ratio of merit per post, while the Italian is nearly double. Looking further at the data on the table, the Spanish board made nearly twice as many posts as the Italian last month, and got nearly the same amount of merit (thus the ratio is half of the Italian board). Italian Posting and Portuguese are alike though in volume, but ratio is quite different between them.
This has to be taken with care, since it does not account for quality of the posts, how many are spam, etc. It is at least a curious exercise to do.
